the cause of Protestantism, and
with it the existence of the Republic, seemed in greater danger than at
any moment since the truce. It appeared certain that the alliance between
France and Spain had been arranged, and that the Pope, Spain, the
Grand-duke of Tuscany, and their various adherents had organized a strong
combination, and were enrolling large armies to take the field in the
spring, against the Protestant League of the princes and electors in
Germany. The great king was dead. The Queen-Regent was in the hand of
Spain, or dreamed at least of an impossible neutrality, while the priest
who was one day to resume the part of Henry, and to hang upon the sword
of France the scales in which the opposing weights of Protestantism and
Catholicism in Europe were through so many awful years to be balanced,
was still an obscure bishop.

The premonitory signs of the great religious war in Germany were not to
be mistaken. In truth, the great conflict had already opened in the
duchies, although few men as yet comprehended the full extent of that
movement. The superficial imagined that questions of hereditary
succession, like those involved in the dispute, were easily to be settled
by statutes of descent, expounded by doctors of law, and sustained, if
needful, by a couple of comparatively bloodless campaigns. Those who
looked more deeply into causes felt that the limitations of Imperial
authority, the ambition of a great republic, suddenly starting into
existence out of nothing, and the great issues of the religious
reformation, were matters not so easily arranged. When the scene shifted,
as it was so soon to do, to the heart of Bohemia, when Protestantism had
taken the Holy Roman Empire by the beard in its ancient palace, and
thrown Imperial stadholders out of window, it would be evident to the
blindest that something serious was taking place.

Meantime Barneveld, ever watchful of passing events, knew that great
forces of Catholicism were marshalling in the south. Three armies were to
take the field against Protestantism at the orders of Spain and the Pope.
One at the door of the Republic, and directed especially against the
Netherlands, was to resume the campaign in the duchies, and to prevent
any aid going to Protestant Germany from Great Britain or from Holland.
Another in the Upper Palatinate was to make the chief movement against
the Evangelical hosts. A third in Austria was to keep down the Protestant
party in Bohemia,