burg and the Church of Rome; as it was a conflict not only with arbitrary power in the English State, but also with semi-popery in the English Church. As Ferdinand II. delighted in Jesuits and loathed Protestants, so Charles I. loved Romanisers and detested Puritans; Laud was as potent with the Stewart as was Father Lammerlein with the Hapsburg and persecuted earnest Protestantism as heartily, if unable to persecute it as savagely. The great civil war which raged in England during the last years of the Thirty Years' War bore in some things a striking likeness to the great Continental fight. The two heroes whom the two conflicts called forth, Gustavus and Oliver, stand at the head of mighty Protestants and perhaps of heroic men. In spirit and genius, as afterwards in rank, the Huntingdonshire farmer was the fellow of the king of Sweden; the Swedish Lutheran, if not so profound a theologian as the English Calvinist, knew and loved the Word almost as well.

The Ironsides whom Oliver inspired, had their pattern and precedent in some of the warriors whom Gustavus trained to pray and conquer; and the saintly host and the prayerful camp of the English Puritans exhibited the perfection of that godly discipline which had been attempted in the Swedish army. 67 Had Oliver been supreme in England when Gustavus was doing the work in Germany, had the two mighty Protestants put forth their might together, the world could not have stood against them; Austria might have been crushed, Rome might have fallen; Christendom might have become Protestant. As it was, when Cromwell twenty-one years after the death of Gustavus and five years after the peace of Westphalia found himself sovereign of England, he made it the chief business of his foreign policy to support the Protestant cause throughout the world. He protected oppressed Protestants everywhere, sought to reconcile Protestant princes and to establish a Protestant confederacy, bestowed the favour of his alliance emulously courted by France and Spain upon the former as the less intensely papal power and earnestly cultivated the friendship of Charles Gustavus, the warlike and not unworthy nephew of Adolphus, and the successor of his unworthy daughter, that fan

67 Harte takes for the motto of his life of Gustavus the lines with which Dryden closes his not unworthy tribute to the memory of Oliver:

'His name a great example stands to show

How strangely high endeavours may be blest
Where piety and valour jointly go.'

tastical recreant Christina who descended from the throne of Sweden to indulge an æsthetic, sentimental and rationalistic popery at Rome.68 Had the reign of the Lord Protector been prolonged, his Protestant policy might have borne great and abiding fruit; but he died in 1658, and his was the last great endeavour to shape the politics of Europe for the defence or aggrandisement of a faith. Statesmen were otherwise employed. Territorial extension became the manifest object of strong and ambitious States. The balance of power became the watchword of their weaker neighbours. Spain sank into impotence and contempt; the House of Austria ceased to be formidable.. Louis XIV. kept Europe in constant alarm by his not unsuccessful endeavours for the enlargement of France and the aggrandisement of the House of Bourbon. By turns he assailed papal Spain (1667), invaded Protestant Holland (1672), drove the two States only twenty-three years after the end of their eighty years' conflict into a close alliance and saw the House of Orange in intimacy with the House of Hapsburg. Himself a persecutor of Huguenots he stirred up the Hungarian Protestants against his fellow persecutor Leopold of Austria, emperor of Germany, while in his dealings with the degraded England of the Restoration, he sought to root out liberty and Protestantism therefrom by means of her Stewart kings, his unprincipled hireling Charles II. and his clumsy fellow-labourer James II.; and Leopold, a pupil of the Jesuits and as true a Hapsburg as the times would let him be, in the midst of a ruthless warfare against the Protestant Magyars, welcomed the revolution which drove the Catholic Stewarts from the throne of England and set apart that throne for Protestant occupants.

The Church of Rome, defeated in her great attempt to reconquer Christendom, had regained much of the ground which she seemed about to lose in 1560 at the beginning of the awful combat. Secure in the possession and debasement of her undisputed dominions of Spain and Italy, she had won back her supremacy in France, was depressing Southern Germany and the Southern Netherlands by her restored rule, had reconquered and ruined Bohemia, more than divided Hungary with the

68 A French agent in a letter to Cardinal Mazarin (Guizot, République d'Angleterre, tom. ii. pp. 426-36) gives a most entertaining sketch of the Protestant policy of the Protector and ascribes to him certain grand projects for the propagation and defence of his faith. But the noblest record of Oliver's zeal for Protestantism is supplied by. the letters to foreign powers which Milton wrote in his name.

Reformed Churches, was using her recovered predominance for the weakening and bringing down of Poland, and kept her hold on the heart, though vanquished in the realm of Ireland ; while Protestantism remained in possession of England and Scotland, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, North Germany and the Northern Netherlands. Latin Christendom kept mainly Roman Catholic, Teutonic Christendom kept mainly Protestant, and Slavonic Christendom kept mainly in allegiance to the Greek Church. After the peace of Westphalia, the Roman Church ceased to be aggressive on a large scale and through the means of great powers; the spirit of reconquest died out in her as the principle of expansion had died out in Protestantism. The papacy bore witness to the shrunken ambition and impaired energy of the Roman Church. Urban VIII. survived the heretical object of his admiration till 1644, retaining to the last his dislike of the House of Austria and his restlessness as an Italian potentate, and leaving the Thirty Years' War still raging. His successor Innocent X. (1644-55) sought to play a great and lofty part in the pacification of Christendom, undertook in conjunction with the republic of Venice the task of mediating between the House of Austria and her foes, and despatched for that business an accomplished diplomatist Cardinal Chigi to the congress of Münster (1644). But offended by certain concessions, especially certain grants of ecclesiastical property obtained by the Protestants, the papal mediator withdrew his envoy, gave up his office and protested against the treaty. The famous peace of Westphalia was concluded not only without but in spite of the papacy, and included a sort of defiance of the papal power in one of the final clauses which proclaimed the validity and inviolability of the treaty, every protest of every power spiritual or temporal, any decree of pope or council notwithstanding. 69 In this great settlement of Christendom every European power appeared either as contracting party or ally thereof, except the sultan and the pontiff. But pope Innocent went beyond a protest. He annulled this masterpiece of diplomacy, abolished this most abiding of its works. This illustrious and enduring treaty, the pattern and precedent of so many others, to which so many famous successors, the treaties of Nimeguen, of Ryswick, of Utrecht, of Aix-la-Chapelle, of Vienna, have looked back with filial deference and reverent

69 Woltmann's Urkunde Westphalischen Friedens, Artikel 17.

recognition, that treaty which brought to an end the wars of Christendom strictly so called, which fixed the frontiers and the political relations of the Roman Catholic and Reformed Churches pretty much as they now stand, which has at this very hour a certain virtue and validity, has thriven under the anathema and remained a standing proclamation of the modern impotence of the Roman See. The one service to mankind which the popedom zealously attempted during the middle ages was that of mediation between contending powers with which itself was not in conflict, and it performed this honourable office of peacemaker as effectually as its own perpetual wars would allow. After the Reformation the popes still affected this benignant character, and appeared frequent mediators between their eldest and most Christian son of France and their most Catholic son of Spain. Paul III. assisted at the peace of Crespy between Francis I. and Charles V. (1544); Clement VIII. intervened at the peace of Vervins between Henry IV. and Philip II. (1598). Innocent X. sought to mediate between France and the House of Austria at Münster, and not ignobly aspired to take a leading part in the great business of the pacification of Christendom by the peace of Westphalia; the defeat of that aspiration through the predominance of Protestant powers and the prevalence of Protestant demands as well as his bootless protest against that master-work and his idle abolition of that very abiding reality, dealt a heavy blow to the power and importance of the papacy. Since that time more than one pope has offered to assist at great European peace-makings, but papal mediation has not been even accepted; and for the last 200 years the popedom has had neither part nor lot in any of the famous European treaties, unless that of Vienna may be excepted which merely restored Pius VII. to his Italian dominions without admitting him even as a contracting party.70

70 Alexander VII. sought to mediate between Spain and France, but. Cardinal Mazarin would let his papal sovereign have no part in the peace of the Pyrenees (1659). Sismondi, Histoire des Français, tom. xxv. c. 28, p. 44. Thiers, Histoire du Consulat et de l'Empire, c. 56.

BOOK IX.

THE DECREPITUDE OF THE POPEDOM.

He is by reason of age and also of the many shrewd brushes that he met with in his younger days, grown so crazy and stiff in his joints that he can do little more than sit in his cave's mouth grinning at pilgrims as they go by and biting his nails because he cannot come at them.—Pilgrim's Progress.

FROM the peace of Westphalia through the latter half of the seventeenth century, throughout the long reign of Louis XIV. (1643–1715), the popedom went on shrinking and dwindling as a spiritual and a political power. When war between Rome and the Reformation ceased to be the great business of Christendom, the head of the Roman Church lost much of his prominence. The age of Louis XIV. was an age of abounding

1 The length of his reign is very remarkable, especially when taken together with its eventfulness. He reigned seventy-two years, and he lived seventy-eight years. Few monarchs have lived longer and none have reigned longer than Louis XIV. Sapor II. king of Persia, a contemporary of Constantine and Julian, the latter of whom fell in a war with him, alone reached the seventy-two years of Louis' reign. In fact Sapor may be said to have reigned before he was born, as he received the homage of his subjects while in the womb, on which the crown was laid. The great Mogul Aurungzebe, a contemporary of Louis, lived ninety years out of which forty-nine were years of sovereignty (1658-1707). The nominal reigns of the two Byzantine Cæsars and brothers, Basil II. and Constantine IX., lasted almost as long as their lives, Basil living sixty-eight and reigning sixty-two years (963-1025) and Constantine living sixty-eight and reigning sixty-five years (963-1028). Christian IV. of Denmark reigned sixty years (1588-1648). Two Chinese emperors of the present dynasty, Kung He (1661–1722) and Kien Long (1735–1795) reigned each sixty years. Our George III. lived eighty-two and reigned sixty years. Uzziah and Manasseh kings of Judah, Augustus Cæsar, Alfonso VIII. of Castile (1158-1213), Henry III. of England (1216-1272), Andronicus Palæologus the Byzantine Cæsar (1273-1332), Edward III. of England (1327-1377), Pedro IV. of Aragon (1336-1387), Sigismund of Hungary (1385-1437), Frederick III. of Germany (1440-1493) and Louis XV. of France (1715-1774) most nearly attained a reign of sixty years. Louis XIV. was the contemporary of seven English sovereigns, four German emperors, five Russian czars, three Spanish, four Portuguese, four Swedish, four Danish and six Polish kings, six sultans and nine popes.