ral sequel of the campaign carried out four years earlier on the
same territory, had been ended by a mockery. In France, reduced almost to
imbecility by the absence of a guiding brain during a long minority,
fallen under the distaff of a dowager both weak and wicked, distracted by
the intrigues and quarrels of a swarm of self-seeking grandees, and with
all its offices, from highest to lowest, of court, state, jurisprudence,
and magistracy, sold as openly and as cynically as the commonest wares,
there were few to comprehend or to grapple with the danger. It should
have seemed obvious to the meanest capacity in the kingdom that the great
house of Austria, reigning supreme in Spain and in Germany, could not be
allowed to crush the Duke of Savoy on the one side, and Bohemia, Moravia,
and the Netherlands on the other without danger of subjection for France.
Yet the aim of the Queen-Regent was to cultivate an impossible alliance
with her inevitable foe.

And in England, ruled as it then was with no master mind to enforce
against its sovereign the great lessons of policy, internal and external,
on which its welfare and almost its imperial existence depended, the only
ambition of those who could make their opinions felt was to pursue the
same impossibility, intimate alliance with the universal foe.

Any man with slightest pretensions to statesmanship knew that the liberty
for Protestant worship in Imperial Germany, extorted by force, had been
given reluctantly, and would be valid only as long as that force could
still be exerted or should remain obviously in reserve. The
"Majesty-Letter" and the "Convention" of the two religions would prove as
flimsy as the parchment on which they were engrossed, the Protestant
churches built under that sanction would be shattered like glass, if once
the Catholic rulers could feel their hands as clear as their consciences
would be for violating their sworn faith to heretics. Men knew, even if
the easy-going and uxorious emperor, into which character the once busy
and turbulent Archduke Matthias had subsided, might be willing to keep
his pledges, that Ferdinand of Styria, who would soon succeed him, and
Maximilian of Bavaria were men who knew their own minds, and had mentally
never resigned one inch of the ground which Protestantism imagined itself
to have conquered.

These things seem plain as daylight to all who look back upon them
through the long vista of the past; but the sovereign of Engl