THE WARS OF RELIGION
Elizabeth died in 1603, and there was no descendant of Henry VIII. to
inherit the throne. But Henry VII.'s daughter had married the King
of Scotland, and a grandson of Henry VII. now held the Scottish Crown
with the title of James VI. On the death of Elizabeth he became
rightful hereditary King of England also, with the title of James I.
And now it might indeed seem as if the United Kingdom was about to
enter upon years of peace and glory. Elizabeth's prudence and the
valour of her seamen had won her military fame. Her alliance was
sought by princes as far off as the Tsar of Russia and the Sophy, as
the ruler was called, of Persia. She had possessions in India, far
away in the East, in America far in the West. For the first time in
her story she had Scotland as a second self, instead of a constant
enemy on her very border. Ireland appeared to be subjugated. And
she had no possessions on the Continent to draw her into troubles
with France.
This hopeful prospect was soon clouded over owing, in large measure,
to the folly of the Stuart kings, as that dynasty was called of which
the Scottish James was the first. And yet, if it had not been for
their folly, and also for their weakness, it is possible that England
might have had to suffer even greater trials than did befall her, by
reason of the despotic power which had been won for the Crown by
Henry VIII, {70} and his great ministers Wolsey and Cromwell. But
before that power could be broken, and the people could regain the
rights that legally were theirs under the provisions of Magna Carta,
the country had to suffer miserably through civil war and one of the
kings had to lose his head on the executioner's block.
James I. tried to govern as Henry VIII. had governed before him, that
is to say, he tried to govern without summoning a Parliament.
Legally it was Parliament only that could vote the money that the
king required to carry on the government. James tried to extort this
money by what were politely called "loans." If those from whom they
were demanded paid the required contributions, well and good. If
they refused to pay, the Crown had sufficient power to misuse the
processes of the law so as to punish them for their refusal.
[Sidenote: The "middle class"]
Henry had been able to govern despotically because the power of the
nobles had been so reduced by the Wars of the Roses, and because he
did not hesitate to reduce their power still further by executing all
who withstood him. But by the time we come to the seventeenth
century and the Stuart kings we find a change in the composition of
the nation. It is a change which had been in progress elsewhere in
Europe. It was that change by which what was soon to be called the
"middle class" came into existence.
We saw it beginning first, where all modern culture had its first
beginning and rebirth (renaissance) in the cities of Italy. It was
the change occasioned by the growing habit of men to live in towns
and cities, in larger collections, no longer so scattered. After the
cities of Italy, we saw that the cities of the Netherlands came to be
strong and to acquire much independence. In our own land London was,
from a very early day, the chief city. Its power was the greater
because it had, like the Continental cities, its trained bands, {71}
its citizens who were more or less trained as soldiers, ready to
fight for the city liberties under the lead of the Lord Mayor as the
chief citizen. Our country never produced quite such important
citizens of this class as the Doges, as the rulers of Venice were
called, or the Medici, the great bankers, the merchant princes, of
Florence, and others. We may class our Lord Mayor more nearly with
the Burgomasters of the semi-independent cities of the Netherlands.
True, he never either had or claimed an independence equal to theirs
at the time of their greatest power: but that was a power which
became much diminished during the struggles of the Reformation period.
It is worth notice that many words in our language indicate how the
dwellers in cities and towns seem to have been considered as
necessarily superior in culture and civilisation to the countrymen.
The very word "civilisation" itself is from "civis," a citizen, one
who lives in a city. The man of "urbane" or "polite" manners is the
man who lives in an "urbs," which is Latin for "town," or πόλις,
which is Greek for "city."
Thus there grew everywhere a force of this kind, a force of burghers
or townsfolk, a middle class, which increased in power as the numbers
of townsmen and their riches increased. In England the people, as
against the king, had an advantage which the people of Continental
countries had not, in their legal right to send representatives to
Parliament before contributing to the expense of government. The
right existed, even while they were not able to enforce it. And with
the growth of this new power of the middle class they began to have
greater power for its enforcement, or, at least, greater power to
resist the punishments which the king had tried to impose on those
who refused to supply him with money which had not been legally voted
for his use.
The Tudors, for all their masterfulness, had been {72} more prudent
than the Stuarts proved themselves. Even Henry VIII., in Wolsey's
time, had consented to take only one-half of the sum which he had
demanded as a contribution from the people. And we may often see
that these Tudors, although they dealt so despotically with their
nobility, appear to have kept a finger, as it were, on the pulse of
the nation, and to have known how to give way when that pulse beat
too forcibly in opposition. Perhaps it takes a strong character to
yield, on occasion. Certainly the Tudors had what we should call
strong characters, and they knew how to yield. The Stuarts had less
strength, and they brought the country into cruel trouble by their
inability to yield. Rather, perhaps, we should say, they yielded
when they should have stood firm, and stood firm when they should
have yielded. Had they yielded more discreetly the people would have
had to wait longer for their freedom, though it is possible they
might have won it by less painful means.
And although James's prospects looked so fair when he came to the
throne of England, he yet came to a troubled inheritance. There was
all that trouble between the State Church and the Puritans, a trouble
which grew greater and which perhaps the Scottish element that James
brought down to England with him increased. The Scottish element, if
it were not Roman Catholic in religion, was mainly of the extreme
Puritan type.
There was this double source of trouble, therefore--the king's
illegal endeavour to govern and to extort supplies of money without a
Parliament, and the increasing tension between the persecuted Puritan
party and the party of the State Church. Both Puritans and Catholics
had already suffered some persecution under Elizabeth, and under
James these persecutions became more severe. It was only a year or
two after his accession that the Gunpowder Plot was {73}
discovered--a plot contrived by the Catholics to blow up the Houses
of Parliament and all the legislators therein. After this discovery,
the persecution of the Catholics became more severe than ever.
[Sidenote: The Stuart Kings]
The Puritans did not attempt any desperate measures of the kind, but
we have seen that the very spirit of the whole Protestant movement
was a critical spirit, a spirit of judging, of forming an opinion and
not merely accepting the opinion of some one else, even if that some
one were the Pope himself. We have seen how difficult it was for
those English Protestants who had been abroad to accept the
conditions which they found when they returned to England--the king
occupying a position in the Church not very different from that which
the Pope claimed. They were very apt, then, to be critical in
matters of government as well as in matters of religion. And the
actions of James, and of all the Stuart kings, were of a kind to
provoke a great deal of criticism. The feeling throughout England
began to be very strong against the Crown. It was tension, strained
feeling, between a large section of the nation--a section that began
to be more powerful with that growing power, which we have noticed,
of the middle class--and the king who was the head of the State
Church.
On the Continent there was tension quite as acute between the people
and the princes, but there it was tension not so much between any two
sections of the reformed Church, as between the people as members of
the reformed Church and the princes as representatives of the old
Church. Moreover in some lands the princes and rulers themselves
were of the reformed religion.
In France it is the Catholic Crown and the State forces that we see
opposed to the Protestants, there called Huguenots.
In Germany a Catholic League is made by the {74} rulers of the States
that adhered to the old faith, and, in opposition, a Protestant Union
is formed by the princes of the States that have accepted the
doctrines of the Reformation. But also in Germany, we see that, in
one of the States at least, a Catholic prince is set against a large
Protestant section of his people. This was in Bohemia.
It was in France that the first violent outbreak, due to this
tension, occurred--a rising of the Huguenots under the great Prince
Condé. It was quickly suppressed, and Condé was taken and
imprisoned. That was a rising of very small and unimportant
character compared to one which happened three years later, in 1618,
as a consequence of the opposition which we have just noted, between
the king and people in Bohemia.
Bohemia was the land of Huss, one of the fore-runners of Luther's
Reformation. The spirit of Protestantism was strong there. By
attempting to persecute the Bohemians for their religious opinions
and practices the king at once made that spirit stronger still, and
the people appealed for support to the German princes of the
Protestant Union. It was support, energetically given.
[Sidenote: Gustavus Adolphus]
The Bohemian king, on his side, had the help of the German rulers of
States in the Catholic League and also the promised help of France
and of Spain. James of England was appealed to, but declined. He
was very fully occupied at home. But we see a new figure appearing
on the stage, a figure of most attractive and romantic interest--that
of Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden.
Sweden, and all Scandinavia, by which I mean Norway and Denmark also,
have not come very prominently on the stage of the Great Story. Nor
will they be there now for a very long period at a time. But at
least twice we shall see a Swedish king appearing {75} in a dramatic
fashion. Little Denmark is also the occasional scene of a great
event. One of these occasions arrived very soon after the date which
we have now reached. That date is 1618, the year of the commencement
of what is known as the Thirty Years' War. The principal leader of
the Protestant forces in that war was Gustavus Adolphus coming down
from Sweden at the head of his armies at a moment when his help was
sorely needed.
It was not the first time that he had made himself known and felt in
the affairs of Central and Eastern Europe. About the year 1611, when
he came to the throne of Sweden, a design was formed of uniting
Sweden with Russia. The throne of Russia was the object of much
dispute at the moment. The year before, the Poles had invaded
Russia, had taken Moscow, and the son of the Polish king had been
crowned Tsar. In the year of Gustavus's accession as King of Sweden,
the Poles were driven out of Moscow again. We should remember that
the first rulers of Russia, those under whom she had begun to be a
nation, came from Sweden, and since there was no very apparent heir
to the throne it might have seemed to the Muscovites not unnatural
that a Swede should step into it. In the end, quite a different
solution of the question was arrived at. A Tsar of the family of
Romanoff, very distantly connected with the original sovereign
family, was put on the throne, and founded the dynasty which endured
until the last Tsar was deposed and done to death in the terrible
revolution which happened during the Great War.
It is impossible here to pursue all the ups and downs of the fighting
which went on in Germany, for Germany provided the principal
battle-fields through that war of thirty years' duration. Knowing
what we do of modern warfare, it may seem difficult for us to
understand how the people of the countries that {76} were the scene
of such prolonged fighting could survive at all. But we have to
understand that the way in which wars were fought in those days was
very different from the present manner.
[Sidenote: The Thirty Years' War]
In the first place, the numbers of the fighters on either side was
small--ridiculously small, we may think. The total population of the
countries was nothing like as dense as it is now. But even in
proportion to that lesser population, the fighting forces were small.
In the recent Great War we saw "nations in arms," as has been truly
said. Every man who could possibly be spared from the peace work
that had to be continued if people were to have food to eat and other
bare necessities of life, was pressed into the fighting. In those
older wars only a very few of the population fought. The rest might
go on with their ordinary work, for the most part of an agricultural
kind, so long as their land was lucky enough not to be the scene of
the fighting.
And the troops moved slowly, so that the campaign was restricted to
comparatively small spaces. In the winter there was little or no
fighting. The soldiers went into "winter quarters." Probably this
was largely because the roads were so bad and the country was so
undrained and marshy, that it was almost impossible for them to move
about with any artillery and baggage horses.
Generally they went into the towns for their winter quarters. And if
these towns had walls round them, as in those days many had, they
were tolerably secure within the walls, so long as they had collected
enough provisions, because there was no artillery powerful enough to
batter down a strongly built wall.
Doubtless the misery caused by the perpetual fighting, and the coming
and going of armies during so many years, was very great, even so.
It is said that in the principal areas ravaged by the war the
population {77} was reduced to one-third of what it had been before.
But a consideration of the leisurely way in which the fighting was
conducted, and the small number engaged in it, helps us to realise
how the people of the countries were able to endure it at all. It
also helps us to understand how it was that it took so long to bring
the war to a conclusion.
The Protestant King of Denmark took the lead of the Union at the
beginning of the long struggle, and at first the Protestants suffered
many defeats. The great leader of the Catholics, Wallenstein,
overran Denmark itself. The outlook for the Protestant cause was as
black as it well could be. At this darkest moment Gustavus Adolphus
came with his Swedes from the north, and the Catholics were driven
back. Within a few years he was invading Germany, and in 1632 he
fought the very important battle of Lutzen, in which the Protestant
forces were completely victorious. But it was a victory dearly
bought, for Gustavus himself was killed in the battle and the
Protestant cause found no other leader of equal ability.
The war dragged on. Spain and France had come in as members of the
Catholic League, against the Protestants, but now there arose in
France a new policy which set these two Catholic nations in
opposition to each other. It is an opposition that is closely
associated with the name of one man, the French king's great
minister, Richelieu.
We may note here one of the minor results of the Reformation.
Previously to the Reformation we find great ecclesiastics, that is to
say, men holding the highest positions in the Church, as great
ministers of the State also. Our Cardinal Wolsey is an instance.
Indeed you will scarcely find an instance anywhere of a great
minister who was not a high ecclesiastic. The reason is simple: they
were the men who had the {78} education, and nearly the only men.
But now many laymen were beginning to be men of learning also, and in
most of the Protestant countries the State and the Church were not
nearly so closely associated together as they still were in the Roman
Catholic countries. Therefore we now begin to see that, whereas in
the Catholic countries the chief ministers of State continue to be
cardinals and great men of the Church, in the Protestant countries it
is so no longer. The king's ministers are most often laymen.
[Sidenote: Richelieu's policy]
During part of the Thirty Years' War the great French cardinal,
Richelieu, had on his hands a heavy task in suppressing a most
formidable rising of the Huguenots, whose greatest strength was in
the west. England sent a fleet to their assistance, but it effected
little. They were compelled to yield, after very brave resistance,
and in 1629 was arranged that Peace of Alais, which is noted in
history as marking "the end of religious wars." Under that treaty
the Huguenots were given equal political rights in France with the
Catholics.
Nevertheless in Germany the Thirty Years' War, which certainly had
its rise as a war about religion, dragged on for nearly a score of
years longer, until its final settlement by the Treaty of Westphalia
in 1648.
The terms of that treaty might have been less favourable to the
Protestants than they were had the two great Catholic nations of
France and Spain been in accord. They had fallen, however, as we
have seen, into bitter opposition, which broke out into active war.
The real occasion of the war was, as before, the too masterful power
which was held in a single hand owing to the accident that the
Habsburg family, which governed in Austria, wore the Crown of Spain
also. It still possessed those Southern States of the Netherlands
which had not won their independence, {79} and it had the Duchy of
Milan in Northern Italy as well as Naples in Southern Italy. The
Habsburgs still surrounded France. Richelieu's aim was to break this
circle. He was ruthless and subtle, and he was single-minded in his
determination to make his king not only the despotic ruler of his own
country but also powerful throughout Europe. The French monarch was
served by his minister as effectively as our Henry VIII. by Wolsey
and by Thomas Cromwell. Richelieu had put down a rising of the
nobles against the Crown with severity as cruel as that of Henry's
last, and worst, minister. The people of France had never secured
the rights which the law gave them in England--though the Tudor kings
paid those rights little respect--and they gave the nobles no
support. In his first aim the great cardinal succeeded. The king
became despotic in France.
His position in Europe, with so powerful an opponent in the field as
the King of Spain, was not so easily secured. It was a curious twist
of policy which brought France to the assistance of the Protestant
Union in the later years of the Thirty Years' War--France, a Catholic
State and under the influence of a cardinal of the Catholic Church,
aiding Protestants against Catholics! And it was the aid of France
which saved them, notwithstanding that the French armies twice
suffered defeat in Germany.
Of course the motive that brought France in on the Protestant side
was the opportunity of opposing Spain.
The Treaty of Westphalia, which really marked the end of the
religious wars much more definitely than the Peace of Alais, gave
France an extension of territory on her eastern border, at the cost
of Germany. It gave Sweden compensation in money and in a fortress
or two on the Baltic for what she had done in the war. Switzerland
had borne a share in the fighting on the {80} Protestant side, and
her independence was recognised by the treaty; and Holland, which had
been practically a free country for years, was now formally declared
to owe no dependence either to Spain or to the Emperor. The
Emperor's power indeed, for a long while vague and declining, was now
diminished to almost nothing.
But though Holland stood thus finally free, we have to remember that
there still were what were called "the Spanish Netherlands," a
district, under the rule of Spain, not very different in its
boundaries from modern Belgium. In these Spanish Netherlands
fighting between France and Spain continued, in spite of the Treaty
of Westphalia. They met each other too in Italy, and the war
lingered on with changing results for more than ten years. In
Germany the Protestants had gained religious freedom under the Treaty
of Westphalia, and the German princes of both Protestant and Catholic
faiths had been freed from the rather uncertain bond of union in
which they had been held by the Emperor. Thus disunited, they had
little power, and the power of France became greater by their
weakness.
[Sidenote: Mazarin's policy]
Richelieu died in 1642 and another great churchman, Cardinal Mazarin,
became the king's chief minister in his place. But in the following
year died also that king whom Richelieu had served faithfully, ably,
and unscrupulously. He was succeeded by Louis XIV., the monarch
whose Court was so splendid, with himself as the centre of its glory,
that he is known as Le Roi Soleil--the Sun King. He was a child of
four when he came to the throne. The regent was his mother, and
since she was a daughter of Philip II. a reversal of the policy of
Richelieu was expected from her. To the grievous disappointment of a
large party in France itself and also in Spain and Austria, she put
herself into the hands of Mazarin; and he was a {81} faithful
follower of Richelieu. The war with Spain continued. But in the
very year of the signing of the Treaty of Westphalia there broke out
in France that uprising of the nobles and of the people which is
called the "Fronde." It had a remarkable success at first; though a
success which did not endure. Under the captaincy of the great
Prince Condé, who had led an earlier rising of the nobles against the
Crown and, before that, had taken a leading part on the Huguenots'
side, Mazarin was driven from Paris.
The strength of the two parties was so evenly divided, however, that
in this very same year Condé himself and a number of his adherents
were put under arrest. Within three years from the middle of the
century the Queen Mother, with Mazarin as her minister, was
re-established in power and the old lines of policy were pursued,
both at home and abroad.
Our England, as we have seen, played little direct part in the long
drawn-out war between the Protestants and Catholics on the Continent.
Neither did she directly take any large part in the European contest
between the two great Catholic powers. She did, nevertheless, come
into touch and into opposition with both France and Spain abroad.
The predominance of Portugal in the East had been finally broken.
French, Dutch, and English all had sailed round the Cape and formed
settlements in India and the Malay Archipelago, disputing with Spain
and Portugal the trade of the East. In the West, in the New World,
Spain for the most part was content to develop, in such peace as the
English seamen would grant her, her empire in Mexico and South
America. The occupation of Bermuda and of Barbadoes by the English
was accomplished without as much opposition from Spain as we should
expect to find, and Sir Walter Raleigh's settlement of Virginia,
named after the Virgin Queen, Elizabeth, was achieved without {82}
fighting except against the native Red Indians, was from this
expedition that Sir Walter has the credit of introducing into England
potatoes and tobacco.
Even before the beginning of the century we have seen the settlement
of England's first Colony, Newfoundland, and it was in the first
years of the seventeenth century that a trading port was established
on the St. Lawrence river, soon to grow into the city of Quebec.
Spaniards had settled along the coast of what now is Florida, England
had planted the colony which commemorates the Virgin Queen; and
southward of Virginia lies a state still named after Louis, King of
France--Louisiana. At that time it formed but a small part of a far
larger territory so-called and claimed as a French possession.
England and France, however, did not come to blows in this part of
the newly found great continent, but they did fall to fighting over
their settlements on the shore of the St. Lawrence. In the meantime
settlers from England had formed a colony in what was called New
England, between the St. Lawrence in the north and Virginia
southward. Among these were the colonists who received the name of
the Pilgrim Fathers--pilgrims flying from England for their
religion's sake, to become the fathers of an important part of the
great American nation.
[Sidenote: Religious differences]
We may pay a little further attention now to the reasons that induced
them to go this pilgrimage. Their principal motive was to escape
persecution on account of their religion. That desire led to several
pilgrimages and movements of people of the same kind in course of the
story. It was a similar motive, for instance, which made many of the
Huguenots come to England and other foreign lands. Some went to
Canada, where they encountered, as we have said, the English on the
St. Lawrence. To understand the violent intolerance of any
differences of religious belief {83} and practice which produced
these movements, we have to understand the way in which the men of
that date viewed those differences.
In the first place, looking at it from the Protestant side, the
Protestants felt very bitterly the evil conduct which they saw in the
establishments of the Church. They protested against these evils,
and also against the authority claimed by the Pope. The Puritans in
England, for nearly the same reasons, were in protest against what we
may call the High Church Protestants and against the authority
claimed by the Crown as head of that Church.
On the Catholic side, the Pope and all the authorities were naturally
incensed against any who protested against his authority, because it
was essentially part of his claim, as Pope, that he was infallible,
that he could do no wrong, and that therefore it was a sin to protest
against anything he might choose to do or affirm. And inevitably,
since he was spiritual ruler of the Catholic kings, he used his
immense influence to induce them to put down this defiance of his
authority by their subjects.
Then that spirit of inquiry and of protest, which was directed first
against the Pope and his commands, very easily led men into criticism
of the authority of the kings themselves and into protest against
their actions: and this was a kind of protest which was not at all
agreeable to the despotic kings of that day.
Finally, we should note this point most particularly--that men had
lately begun to read for themselves, for the first time, the Bible,
and that in the Old Testament they found that the Lord punished
Israel and Judah--whole nations at a time--because certain sections
of those nations deviated from His true service. Thence they derived
the conviction that if any section of a modern nation deviated and
went astray from the practice of the true religion, that nation as a
whole {84} was liable to divine punishment. We must get that
conviction of theirs into our minds, and see all that is implied by
it, if we would understand how it was that they were so fiercely
intolerant of these religious differences. It explains a great deal
of what is otherwise obscure and difficult about persecution done in
the name of religion. It explains why the nations were so ready to
send out of their midst any section that so differed from the
majority in their religious beliefs: and it explains also why these
sections were so very willing to go. The English Puritans who went
to America, both at the time of the Pilgrim Fathers in 1620, and
again later, must have felt that they were getting away from the
society of wicked men in whose punishment they might expect to be
included; and similarly the rest of the nation would be only too
pleased to see them go--for the same reason, that the majority feared
lest the wrath of Heaven should fall upon the whole mass of the
people, because of the wickedness (that is to say, of the difference
of religious belief and practice which they looked upon as
wickedness) of this small section.
[Sidenote: Cavaliers and Puritans]
Ten years later than the expedition of the Pilgrim Fathers, that is
to say, in 1630, there was a further large emigration of Puritans
from Old England into New England. Under Charles I. who had
succeeded James, and tried to pursue the same policy of governing and
extorting money without a Parliament, the strained feeling between
the Crown and the people grew more intense. They formed themselves
into distinct parties--Royalists or Cavaliers on the outside, and
Puritans on the other.
The smouldering hostility broke into open war. In the first battles
the Royalists had the advantage. The Puritan armies were raw and
badly organised. But in their ranks were men of ability and of stern
purpose. Under the orders of Oliver Cromwell as {85} their
commander-in-chief a rigid discipline was imposed. They went into
battle singing hymns, inspired by an intense conviction that they
were fighting in the service of the Lord. It was a union of
discipline with zeal which the light-hearted and light-headed
Cavaliers could not match.
The Royalists wore gallant and gay attire and flowing curls, and
culled all the joys of life. The Puritans dressed themselves in
sombre colours, set their faces into solemn lines and regarded even
innocent mirth and amusement as a sin. The earnestness which marked
all their behaviour they brought to the business of fighting.
After the fortunes of the war had gone variously in several
campaigns, the Royalists suffered what really was a decisive defeat
in the battle of Naseby in 1645. Their cause never recovered from it.
There was quartered in the north of England at this time a Scottish
army. Charles had endeavoured to impose on the Church of Scotland
the form of Protestantism which was the State religion in England.
But the majority of the Scottish people professed a religion much
more nearly akin to that of the English Puritans. They bound
themselves by a Covenant (whence its adherents were called
Covenanters) to oppose by all means in their power the priests and
the bishops whom the Scottish king of the United Kingdom tried to
force on them. They took arms and made their way victoriously south
until they were bribed to stop and to establish themselves in
quarters in the north of England by part payment and part promise of
payment of a yearly sum. And to the protection of that army Charles
fled, as his fortunes grew more and more desperate, after the defeat
at Naseby in 1646. The payments promised to the Scots were much in
arrears. After long negotiations they gave up their king into the
hands of the English Puritans in exchange {86} for a large sum of
money to quit the debt. Once the king escaped, but was recaptured,
and in 1649, after a trial in which the verdict was certain from the
first, was executed on the block.
The king being dead, the Parliament declared the country a
Commonwealth, under Oliver Cromwell, who had the title of Protector.
The Protector's powers were not strictly defined, and perhaps there
was no real limit to them, seeing that he had the army, which was
all-powerful, ready to do his bidding. And this was a power which he
had proved that he would not hesitate to use. He was a man typical
of the Puritan spirit--absolutely convinced of the justice of his
cause and determined to make it prevail no matter at what cost of
suffering to himself, to his friends, or to his enemies--a very
terrible man, whose value, in those distracted times, was that he not
only made himself a terror to his enemies at home, but also made
England feared and respected abroad as she had not been under the
weak Stuart kings.
So now, by the middle of the seventeenth century, we may at length
truly say that Europe had passed through that most miserable period
of wars about religion which accompanied and followed the
Reformation. We have to look on those religious wars as one of the
two great features in our story during that half-century. The other
principal feature is the continual expansion of the white Europeans
into countries which had been in the possession of men of colour.
England had sent a few ships, which effected little, to help the
Huguenots in their fight with the French Crown, and we catch a
far-off echo of that hostility in the fighting which took place
between English and French over the French settlements in the St.
Lawrence. The French were defeated, but for the time being they were
allowed to remain in possession of their Canadian settlements.
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[Illustration: GENERAL WOLFE'S STATUE AT QUEBEC, CANADA.]
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Quebec had been founded as early as 1608. It was not until 1641 that
the foundations were laid of Montreal. But in the meantime Prince
Edward's Island, Nova Scotia, and several of the West Indian islands
had been occupied by English colonists.
Portugal during most of this half-century was under the Spanish king.
She regained her complete independence, under a king of her own, in
1640. But by that time she had lost her empire in the East. Spain,
sailing west from the New World, had arrived at the Philippine
Islands, which Portugal had reached going east. Thus neither had
transgressed the famous Bull. And yet East and West did meet in
those islands. Drake, moreover, in his famous circumnavigation of
the world, had come to the neighbouring Spice Islands, going west.
Both English and Dutch had taken a hand in destroying the Portuguese
claims to any exclusive right of settlement in the East. Between
English and Dutch, a decision was not reached so easily. It was
largely on account of the excessive prices charged by the Dutch for
pepper and other spices brought from the East Indian islands that the
British East India Company was formed. It received a charter from
the Crown to found settlements and claim trading rights for England.
The Dutch so stubbornly held and defended their trade in the islands
that the British gained no headway there until after the first half
of the century. They did, however, make some trading settlements on
the mainland of India, of which the earliest was in Madras, in 1639.
But an immediate impression was made on the Dutch supremacy in the
islands the moment that the resolute policy of Cromwell took the
place of the easy indifference of the Stuarts.
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