mmander of Breysach,
and the other officers, who soon placed that fortress, with the whole
army, in their hands.

The young Palatine, Prince Charles Louis, who had already made an
unsuccessful campaign against the Emperor, saw his hopes again deceived.
Although intending to do France so ill a service, as to compete with her
for Bernard's army, he had the imprudence to travel through that
kingdom. The cardinal, who dreaded the justice of the Palatine's cause,
was glad to seize any opportunity to frustrate his views. He
accordingly caused him to be seized at Moulin, in violation of the law
of nations, and did not set him at liberty, until he learned that the
army of the Duke of Weimar had been secured. France was now in
possession of a numerous and well disciplined army in Germany, and from
this moment began to make open war upon the Emperor.

But it was no longer against Ferdinand II. that its hostilities were to
be conducted; for that prince had died in February, 1637, in the 59th
year of his age. The war which his ambition had kindled, however,
survived him. During a reign of eighteen years he had never once laid
aside the sword, nor tasted the blessings of peace as long as his hand
swayed the imperial sceptre. Endowed with the qualities of a good
sovereign, adorned with many of those virtues which ensure the happiness
of a people, and by nature gentle and humane, we see him, from erroneous
ideas of the monarch's duty, become at once the instrument and the
victim of the evil passions of others; his benevolent intentions
frustrated, and the friend of justice converted into the oppressor of
mankind, the enemy of peace, and the scourge of his people. Amiable in
domestic life, and respectable as a sovereign, but in his policy ill
advised, while he gained the love of his Roman Catholic subjects, he
incurred the execration of the Protestants. History exhibits many and
greater despots than Ferdinand II., yet he alone has had the unfortunate
celebrity of kindling a thirty years' war; but to produce its lamentable
consequences, his ambition must have been seconded by a kindred spirit
of the age, a congenial state of previous circumstances, and existing
seeds of discord. At a less turbulent period, the spark would have
found no fuel; and the peacefulness of the age would have choked the
voice of individual ambition; but now the flash fell upon a pile of
accumulated combustibles, and Europe was in flames.

His son, Ferdinand I