Chapter IV: , VII (32)

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.
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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.
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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.