In the last two years of the preceding century the course of maritime discovery had been accelerated by fresh success. To balance the glories of Columbus in the West, the “regions of the rising sun” had been explored by Vasco da Gama, a Portuguese. This great navigator sailed back into the harbour of Lisbon on the 16th of September, 1499, with the astonishing news that he had doubled the Cape of Storms, which had so alarmed Bartholomew Diaz, and established relations of amity and commerce with the vast continent of India, having traded with a civilized and industrious people at Calicut, a great city on the coast of Malabar. Under these reiterated widenings of men’s knowledge of the globe, the human mind itself expanded. Familiar names meet us from henceforth in the most distant quarters of the world. All national or domestic history becomes mixed up with elements hitherto unknown. The balance of power, which is the new constitution of the European States, depends on circumstances and places of the most heterogeneous character. A treaty between France and Spain, or between England and either, is regulated by events occurring on the Amazon or Ganges. The whole world gets more closely connected than ever it was before, and we can look back on the proceedings of previous ages as filling a very narrow theatre, and regulated by very contracted interests, when compared with the universal policies on which public affairs have now to rest. At first, however, the great results of these stupendous discoveries were naturally not observed. Contemporaries are justly accused of magnifying the small affairs of life of which they are witnesses; but this observation does not hold good with respect to the really momentous incidents of human history. A man who saw Columbus return from his voyage, or Guttenberg pulling at his press, could not rise to the contemplation of the prodigious consequences of these two events. He thought, perhaps, a quarrel between two neighbouring potentates, or a battle between France and Spain, the greatest incident of his time. His son forgot all about the quarrel; his grandson had no recollection of the battle; but widening in a still increasing circle, expanding into still more wonderful proportions, were the Discovery of America and the Art of Printing,—showing themselves in combinations of events and changes of circumstances where they were never expected to appear,—the one threatening to overthrow the freedom of every State in Europe by the supremacy of the Spanish crown, the other in reality preventing the chance of that consummation by raising up the indomitable spirit of spiritual liberty. For there now came to the aid of national independence the far more elevating feelings of religious emancipation. Protestantism was not limited in this century to denial of the spiritual authority of popes, but embodied itself also in resistance to the political ambition of kings. America might have enabled Charles the Fifth to conquer all Europe, if the Reformation had not strengthened men’s minds with a determination to stand up against oppression.

But the commencement of this century gave no intimation of its tempestuous course. The first few years saw the peaceable accession to the thrones of Spain and France and England of the three sovereigns whose contemporaneous reigns, and also whose personal characters, had the most preponderating influence on the succeeding current of events. We have left Spain for a long time out of these general views of a century’s condition and special notices of individual incidents which affected the condition of the world; for Spain for a long time lay obscurely between the ocean and the Pyrenees and carried on wars and policies which were limited by its territorial bounds. But, if we take a hurried retrospect of the last few years, we shall see that the different nations contained in the Peninsula had amalgamated into one mighty and strongly-cemented State. "A.D. 1497."Ferdinand of Aragon, by marriage with Isabella of Castile, united the various nationalities under one homogeneous government, and by wisdom and magnanimity—the wisdom being the man’s and the magnanimity the woman’s—had rendered forever famous the joint reign of husband and wife, had reconciled the jarring factions of their respective subjects, and seen with the triumphant faith of believers and the satisfaction of sagacious rulers the reunion of the last Mohammedan State to the dominion of the Cross and of the crown. They watched the long, slow march of the Moorish king and his cavaliers as they took their way in poverty and despair from the towers and meadows of Granada, which a possession of seven hundred years had failed to make their own. This—the conquest of Granada—took place in 1491; and 1516 saw the supreme power over all united Spain descend on the head of the grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella,—inheriting, along with their royal dignity, the cautious wisdom of the one and the wider intelligence of the other. In three years from that time—it will be easy to remember that Charles’s age is the same as the century’s—he was elected to the Imperial crown, so that the greatest dominion ever held by one man since the days of Charlemagne now fell to the rule of a youth of nineteen years of age. Germany, the Netherlands, Naples, Sicily, and Spain, more than equalled the extent and power of Charlemagne’s empire. "A.D. 1520."But ere Charles was a year older, vaster dominions than Charlemagne had ever dreamt of acknowledged his royal sway; for Montezuma, the Emperor of Mexico, whose realm was without appreciable limit either in size or wealth, professed himself the subject and servant of the Spanish king.

Henry the Eighth of England had also succeeded at an early age, being but eighteen in 1509, when the death of his father, the politic and successful founder of the Tudor dynasty, left him with a people silent if not quite satisfied, and an exchequer overflowing with what would now amount to ten or twelve millions of gold. This treasure had been accumulated by the infamous exactions of the late sovereign, who was aided in the ignoble service by two men of the names of Empson and Dudley. These were spies and informers, not, as in other climes and countries, about the religious or political sentiments of the people, but about their titles to their estates, the fines they were disposed to pay, or the bribes they would advance to the royal extortioner to avoid litigation and injustice. Henry had an admirable opportunity of showing his hatred of these practices, and availed himself of it at once. Before he had been four months on the throne, Empson and Dudley were ignominiously hanged; and with safe conscience, after this sacrifice at the shrine of legality, he entered into possession of the pilfered store. The people applauded the rapid decision of his character in both these instances, and scarcely grudged him the money when the subordinates were given up to their revenge. They could not, indeed, grudge their young king any thing; his manners were so open and sincere, his laugh so ready, and his teeth so white; for we are not to forget, in compliment to what is facetiously called the dignity of history, the immense advantages a ruler gains by the fact of being good-looking. Nobody feels inclined to find fault with a lad of eighteen, if moderately endowed with health and features; but when that lad is eminently handsome, rioting in strength and spirits, open in disposition, and, above all, a king, you need not wonder at the universal inclination to overlook his faults, to exaggerate his virtues, and even, after an interval of two hundred and fifty years, to hear the greatest tyrant of our history, and the worst man perhaps of his time, talked of by the ordinary title of Bluff King Hal. If he had been as ugly and hump-backed as his grand-uncle Richard the Third, he would have been detested from the first.

But in the neighbouring land of France there reigned at the same time a prince almost as handsome as Henry, and nearly as popular with his people, with as little real cause. In 1515, Francis the First was twenty years of age, a perfect specimen of manly strength,—accomplished in all knightly exercises,—generous and magnificent in his intercourse with his nobility,—and the greatest rouÉ and debauchee in all the kingdom of France. Here, then, at the beginning of the age we have now to examine, were the three mightiest sovereigns of Europe, all arriving at their crowns before attaining their majority; and with so many years before them, and such powerful nations obeying their commands, great prospects for good or evil were opening on the world. But in the early years of the century no human eye perceived in what direction the future was going to pursue its course. People were all watching for the first indication of what was to come, and kept their eyes on the courts of Paris and London and Madrid; but nobody suspected that the real champions of the time were already marshalling their forces in far different situations. There was a thoughtful monk in a convent in Germany, and a Spanish soldier before the walls of Pampeluna. These were the true movers of men’s minds, of the great thoughts by which events are created; and their names were soon to sound louder than those of Henry or Charles or Francis; for one was Martin Luther, the hero of the Reformation, and the other was Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits. Take note of them here as mere accessories to the march of general history: we shall return to them again as characteristics of the century on which they placed their indelible mark. At this time, in the gay young days of the three crowned striplings, these future combatants are totally unknown. Brother Martin is singing charming hymns to the Virgin, in a voice which it was delightful to hear; and Don Ignacio is also singing to his guitar the praises of one of the beautiful maidens of his native land. Public opinion was still stagnant with regard to home-affairs, in spite of the efforts of the infant press. People, bowed down by the claims of implicit obedience exacted from them by the Church, accepted with wondering submission the pontificate of such an atrocious murderer as Alexander the Sixth; and some even ingeniously founded an argument of the divine institution of the Papacy upon its having survived the eleven years’ desecration of that monster of cruelty and unbelief. Yet now it happened by a strange coincidence that the chair of St. Peter was to be filled by a gayer and more accomplished ruler than any of the earthly thrones we have mentioned. In 1513, Leo the Tenth, the most celebrated of the family of the Medicis of Florence, put on the tiara at the age of thirty-six, a period of life which was considered as youthful for the father of Christendom as even the boyish years of the temporal kings. And Leo did not belie the promise of his juvenility. None of the dulness of age, or even the caution of maturity, was perceived in his public or private conduct. He was a patron of arts and sciences, and buffoonery, and infidelity; and it is curious to observe how the pretensions of Rome were more shaken by the frivolous magnificence of a good-hearted, graceful voluptuary than they had been by the crimes of his two immediate predecessors, the truculent Borgia and the warlike Julius the Second.

This latter pontiff was intended by nature for a leader of Free Lances, to live forever in “the joy of battle,” and must have felt a little out of his element as the head of the Christian Church. However, he rapidly discovered that he was a secular prince as well as a spiritual teacher, and cast his eyes in the former capacity with ominous ill will on the industrious Republic of Venice. The fishermen and fugitives of many centuries before, who had settled among the Adriatic lagoons, had risen into the position of princes and treasurers of Europe. By their possessions in the East, and their trading-factories established along the whole route from India to the Mediterranean, they had made themselves the intermediaries between the barbaric pearls and gold, the silks and spices, of the Oriental regions, and the requirements of the West. Their galleys were daily bringing them the commodities of the Levant, which they distributed at an exorbitant profit among the nations beyond the Straits of Gibraltar. Mercantile wealth and maritime enterprise elevated the taste and confidence of those Venetian traffickers, till their whole territory, amid the lifeless waters of their canals, was covered with stately palaces, and their fleets assumed the dominion of the inland seas. On the mainland they had stretched their power over Dalmatia and Trieste, and in their own peninsula over Rimini and Ferrara and a great part of the Romagna. Two ruling passions agitated the soul of Julius the Second: one was to recover whatever territory or influence had once belonged to the Holy See; the other was to expel the hated barbarian, whether Frenchman, or Swiss, or Austrian, from the soil of Italy. To achieve this last object he would sacrifice any thing except the first; and to unite the two was difficult. He made his approaches to Venice in a gentle manner at first. He asked her to restore the lands she had lately won, which he claimed as appendages of his chair, because they had been torn unjustly from the original holders by CÆsar Borgia, the son of Alexander the Infamous; and if she had agreed to this he would no doubt have proceeded with his further scheme of banishing all ultramontane invaders. But as the commercial council of the great emporium hesitated at giving up what they had entered in their books as fairly their own, he altered his note in a moment, put on the insignia of his holy office, and, denouncing the astonished republic as rebellious and ungrateful to Mother Church, he called in the aid of the very French whom he was so anxious to get quit of, to execute his judgment upon the offending State. Venice was rich, and France at that time was poor and at all times is greedy. So preparations were made for an assault with the readiness and glee with which a party of freebooters would make a descent on the Bank of England. The temptation also was too great to be resisted by other kings and princes, who were as hungry for spoil and as attached to religion as the French. So in an incredibly short space of time the league of Cambrai was joined by Maximilian, the Emperor of Germany, and Ferdinand of Spain, and dukes and marquesses of less note. There were few of the Southern potentates, indeed, who had not some cause of complaint against the haughty Venetians. "A.D. 1508."Some (as the German Maximilian) they had humbled by defeat; others they had insulted by their purse-proud insolence; others, again, by superiority in commercial skill; and all, by the fact of being wealthy and, as they fancied, weak.

Louis the Twelfth of France was first in the field. He conquered at Agnadello, and, forcing his way to the shore, alarmed the marble halls of the Venetians with the sound of his harmless cannonade. The Pope was next, and took possession of the towns he wanted. The Duke of Ferrara laid hold of some loose articles in the confusion, and the Marquis of Mantua got back some villages which his grandfather had lost. Maximilian was disconsolate at not being in time for the general pillage, and had to content himself with Padua and Vicenza and Verona. Maximilian was a gentleman in difficulties, who has the misfortune to be known in history as Max the Penniless. The Venetians sent to tell him they were ready to acknowledge his suzerainty as emperor, and to pay him a tribute of fifty thousand ducats. The man would have forgiven them a hundred times their offences for half the money, and was anxious to close with their offer. But they had made no similar proposition to the French king, nor to Ferdinand, nor even of a ten-pound note to the Mantuan Marquis or the Magnifico of Ferrara. Wherefore they all began to hate the emperor. Louis declined to give him any more assistance. Julius sent a secret message to the Venetians that Holy Church was not inexorable; and Venice, relying on the placability of Rome, hung out her flag against her secular foes in prouder defiance than ever. She knelt at the feet of the Pope, and allowed him to retain his acquisitions in Romagna and elsewhere; and as his first object, the enrichment of his domain, was accomplished, he lost no time in carrying out the second. "A.D. 1510."By the fortunate possession of an unlimited power of loosing mankind from unpleasant oaths and obligations, he astonished his late confederates by publishing a sentence releasing the Venetians from the censures of the Church and the Allies from the covenants of the Treaty of Cambrai. He then joined the pontifical forces to the troops of Venice, and in hot haste made a rush upon the French. He bought over Ferdinand of Spain to the cause by giving him the investiture of Naples, hired a multitude of Swiss mercenaries, and, drawing the sword like a stout man-at-arms as he was, he laid siege to Mirandola. In spite of his great age,—he was now past seventy,—he performed all the offices of an active general, visited the trenches, encouraged his army, and after a two months’ bombardment disdained to enter the city by the opened gate, but was triumphantly carried in military pomp through a breach in the shattered wall. His perfidy as a statesman and audacity as a soldier were too much for the Emperor and the King of France. "A.D. 1511."They collected as many troops as they could, and threatened to summon a general council; for what excommunication as an instrument of offence was to the popes, a general council was to the civil power. The French clergy met at Tours, and supported the Crown against Julius. The German emperor was still more indignant. He published a paper of accusations, in which the bitterness of his penniless condition is not concealed. “The enormous sums daily extracted from Germany,” he says, “are perverted to the purposes of luxury or worldly views, instead of being employed for the service of God or against the Infidels. So extensive a territory has been alienated for the benefit of the Pope that scarcely a florin of revenue remains to the Emperor in Italy.” Louis and the French appeared triumphant in the field; but their triumphs threw them into dismay, for their protean adversary, when defeated as temporal prince, thundered against them as successor of St. Peter, and taught them that their victories were impiety and their acquisitions sacrilege. A hard case for Louis, where if he retreated his territories were seized, and if he advanced his soul was in danger. The war, which had begun as a combination against Venice, was now converted into a holy league in defence of Rome. Spaniards came to the rescue; and Henry, the youthful champion of England, and all who either thought they loved religion or who really hated France, were inspired as if for a crusade. "A.D. 1512."And Maximilian himself, poor and friendless,—how was it possible for him to continue obstinately to reject the overtures of the Pope, the purse of the Venetians, or the far more tempting whisperings of Ferdinand of Aragon, who said to him, “Julius is very old. Would it not be possible to win over the cardinals to make your majesty his successor?” Such a golden dream had never suggested itself to the pauperized emperor before. He swallowed the bait at once. He determined to bribe the Sacred College, and, to raise the necessary funds, pawned the archducal mantle of Austria to the rich merchants, the Fuggers of Antwerp, for a large sum, and wrote to his daughter Margaret, “To-morrow I shall send a bishop to the Pope, to conclude an agreement with him that I may be appointed his coadjutor and on his death succeed to the Papacy, that you may be bound to worship me,—of which I shall be very proud.” This may appear a rather jocular announcement of so serious a design; but there is no doubt that the project was entertained. Matters, however, advanced at too rapid a pace for the slow calculations of politicians. The French, by a noble victory at Ravenna, established their fame as warriors, and roused the fear of all the other powers. Maximilian grasped at last the Venetian ducats which had been offered him so long before, and turned suddenly against his ally. Ferdinand and Henry pressed forward on France itself on the side of the Pyrenees. Foot by foot the land of Italy was set free from the French invaders, and Julius the Second, dying before the emperor’s plans were matured, left the tangled web of European politics to be unravelled by a younger hand.

We have dwelt on this strange contest, where many sovereign states combined to overthrow a colony of traders, and failed in all their attempts, because it is the last great appearance that Venice has made in the general history of the world. From this time her power rapidly decayed. Her galleys lay rotting at their wharves, and the marriage of her Doge to the Sea was a symbol without a meaning. The discovery of a passage to India by the Cape, which we saw announced to Europe by Vasco da Gama in the last year of the late century, was a sentence of death to the carriers of the Adriatic. Commerce sought other channels and enriched other lands. Wherever the merchant-vessels crowded the harbour, whether with the commodities of the East or West, the war-ship was sure to follow, and the treasures gained in traffic to be guarded by a navy. All the ports of Spain became rallying-places of wealth and power in this century. Portugal covered every sea with her guns and galleons; Holland rose to dignity and freedom by her heavy-armed marine; and England began the career of enterprise and liberty which is still typified and assured by the preponderance of her commercial and royal fleets. Questions are asked—which the younger among us, who may live to see the answer, may amuse themselves by considering—as to the chance of Venice recovering her ancient commerce if the pathway of Eastern trade be again traced down the Mediterranean, when the Isthmus of Suez shall be cut through by a canal or curtailed by a railway. In former times the whole civilized world lay like a golden fringe round the shores of that one sea, and the nation which predominated there, either in wealth or arms, was mistress of the globe. But the case is altered now. If the Gates of Hercules were permanently closed, the commerce of the world would still go on; and, so far from a Mediterranean supremacy indicating a universal pre-eminence, it is perhaps worthy of remark that the only Mediterranean nations which have in later times been recognised as of first-rate rank in Europe have had their principal ports upon the Atlantic and in the Channel.

There is a circumstance which we may observe as characteristic of many of the European states at this time,—the desire of combination and consolidation at home even more than of foreign conquest. In Spain the cessation of the oligarchy of kingships had established a national crown. The hopes of recasting the separated and mutilated limbs of ancient Latium into a gigantic Italy were rife in that sunny land of high resolves and futile acts. In Germany, the official supremacy of the emperor was insufficient to prevent the strong definement of the corporate nationalities. Holland secured its individuality by unheard-of efforts; and in England the great thought took possession of the political mind of a union of the whole island. Visions already floated before the statesmen on both sides of the Tweed of a Great Britain freed from intestine disturbance and guarded by undisputed seas. But the general intelligence was not yet sufficiently far advanced. "A.D. 1502."The Scotch were too Scotch and the English too English to sink their national differences; and we can only pay homage to the wisdom which by a marriage between the royal houses—James the Fourth, and Margaret of England—planted the promise which came afterwards to maturity in the junction of the crowns in 1603, and the indissoluble union of the countries in 1707.

Meantime, the wooing was of the harshest. The last great battle, Flodden, that marked the enmity of the kingdoms, was decided in this century, and has left a deep and sorrowful impression even to our own times. There is not a cottage in Scotland where “The Fight of Flodden” is not remembered yet. And its effects were so desolating and dispiriting that it may be considered the death-bed to the feeling of equality which had hitherto ennobled the weaker nation. From this time England held the position of a virtual superior, regulating her conduct without much regard to the dignity or self-respect of her neighbour, and employing the arts of diplomacy, and the meaner tricks of bribery and corruption, only because they were more easy and less expensive than the open method of invasion and conquest. “Scotland’s shield” was indeed broken at Flodden, but her character for courage and honour remained. It was the treachery of Solway Moss, and the venality of most of the surviving nobility, that were the real causes of her weakness, and of the subordinate place which at this time she held in Europe.

Thus the object which in other nations had been gained by a union of crowns was attained also in our island by the absence of opposition between the peoples. Flodden and Pinkie may therefore be looked upon with kindlier eyes if they are regarded as steps to the formation of so great a realm. No nation retained its feudal organization so long as Scotland, or so completely departed from the original spirit of feudalism. Instead of being leaders and protectors of their dependants, and attached vassals of the kings, the barons of the North were an oligarchy of armed conspirators both against the crown and the people. Few of the earlier Stuarts died in peaceful bed; for even those of them who escaped the dagger of the assassin were hunted to death by the opposition and falsehood of the chiefs. Perpetually engaged in plots against the throne or forays against each other, the Scottish nobility weakened their country both at home and abroad. Law could have no authority where mailed warriors settled everything by the sword, and no resistance could be offered to a foreign enemy by men so divided among themselves. Down to a period when the other nations of Europe were under the rule of legal tribunals, the High Street of Edinburgh was the scene of violence and bloodshed between rival lords who were too powerful for control by the civil authority. A succession of foolishly rash or unwisely lenient sovereigns left this ferocity and independence unchecked; and though poetry and patriotism now combine to cast a melancholy grace on the defeat at Flodden, from the Roman spirit with which the intelligence was received by the population of the capital, the unbiassed inquirer must confess that, with the exception of the single virtue of personal courage, the Scottish array was ennobled by no quality which would have justified its success. It was ill commanded, ill disciplined, and ill combined. The nobility, as usual, were disaffected to the king and averse to the War. But the crown-tenants and commonalty of the Lowlands were always ready for an affray with England; and James the Fourth, the most chivalrous of that line of chivalrous and unfortunate princes, merrily crossed the Border and prepared for feats of arms as if at a tournament. "A.D. 1513."The cautious Earl of Surrey, the leader of the English army, availed himself of the knightly prepossessions of his enemy, and sent a herald, in all the frippery of tabard and cross, to challenge him to battle on a set day, when Lord Thomas Howard would run a tilt with him at the head of the English van. James fell into the snare, and regulated his movements, in fact, by the direction of his opponent. When, in a momentary glimpse of common sense, he established his quarters on the side of a hill, from which it would have been impossible to dislodge him, Surrey relied on the absurd generosity of his character, and sent a message to complain that he had placed himself on ground “more like a fortress or a camp than an ordinary battle-field.” James pretended to despise the taunt, and even to refuse admission to the herald; but it worked on his susceptible and fearless nature; for we find that he allowed the English to pass through difficult and narrow ways, which were commanded by his guns, and when they were fairly marshalled on level ground he set fire to his tents and actually descended the hill to place himself on equal terms with the foe. Such a beginning had the only possible close. Strong arms and sharp swords are excellent supports of generalship, but cannot always be a substitute for it. Never did the love of fight so inherent in the Scottish character display itself more gallantly than on this day. Again and again the Scottish earls dashed forward against the English squares. These were composed of the steadiest of the pikemen flanked by the wondrous archers who had turned so many a tide of battle. Fain would the veteran warriors have kept their men in check; fain would the commanders of the French auxiliaries have restrained the Scottish advance. But the Northern blood was up. Onward they went, in spite of generalship and all the rules of discipline, and with a great crash burst upon the wall of steel. It was magnificent, as the Frenchmen said at Balaklava, but it was not war. Repelled by the recoil of their own impetuous charge, they fell into fragments and encumbered the gory plain. Very few fled, very few had the opportunity of flying; for the cloth-yard shaft never missed its aim. There was no crying for quarter or sparing of the flashing blade. Both sides were irritated to madness. James pushed on, shouting and waving his bloody sword, and was wounded by an arrow and gashed with a ponderous battle-axe when he had forced himself within a few paces of Surrey. Darkness was now closing in. The king’s death was rapidly known, but still the struggle went on. At length the wearied armies ceased to kill. The Scotch retreated, and in the dawn of the next morning a compact body of them was seen still threatening on the side of a distant hill. But the day was lost and won. The chivalry of Scotland received a blow from which it never recovered. What Courtrai had been to the French, and Granson and Nanci to the Burgundians, and Towton and Tewkesbury to the English, the 9th of September, 1513, was to the peerage of the North. Thirteen earls were killed, fifteen barons, and chiefs and members of all the gentle houses in the land. Some were stripped utterly desolate by this appalling slaughter; and from many a hall, as well as from humble shieling, rose the burden of the tearful ballad, “The flowers o’ the forest are a’ wedd awa’.” There were ten thousand slain in the field, the gallant James cut off in the prime of strength and manhood, and the sceptre which required the grasp of an Edward the First left to be the prize of an unprincipled queen-mother, or any ambitious cabal which could conspire to seize it. James the Fifth was but a year or two old, and the country discouraged and demoralized.

But Henry the Eighth was destined to some other triumphs in this fortunate year. First there was the victory which his forces won at Guinegate, near Calais, where the French chivalry fled in the most ignominious manner, and struck their rowels into their horses’ flanks, without remembering that they carried swords in their hands. This is known in history as the second Battle of the Spurs,—not, as at Courtrai, for the number of those knightly emblems taken off the heels of the dead, but for the amazing activity they displayed on the heels of the living. And, secondly, he could boast that the foremost man in Christendom wore his livery and pocketed his pay; for Maximilian the Penniless, successor of Charlemagne and Constantine and Augustus, enlisted and did good service as an English trooper at a hundred crowns a day. Let Henry rejoice in these achievements while he may; for the time is drawing near when the old sovereigns of Europe are to be moved out of the way and France and Spain are to be governed by younger men and more ambitious politicians than himself. Evil times indeed were at hand, when it required the strength of youth and wisdom of policy to guide the bark not only of separate states, but of settled law and Christian civilization. For, however pleasant it may be to trace Henry through his home-career and Francis and Charles in their national rivalries, we are not to forget that the real interest of this century is that it is the century of the Reformation,—a movement before whose overwhelming importance the efforts of the greatest individuals sink into insignificance,—an upheaving of hidden powers and principles, which in truth so altered all former relations between man and man that it found the most influential personage in Europe, not in the Apostolic Emperor, or the Christian King, or the Defender of the Faith, but in a burly friar at Wittenberg, whose name had never been heard before.

Let us see what was the general condition of the Romish Chair before the outburst of its enemies at this time. One thing is very observable: that its claims to supremacy and obedience were, ostensibly at least, almost universally acquiesced in. From Norway to Calabria the theory of a Universal Church, divinely founded and divinely sustained, in possession of superhuman power and uncommunicated knowledge, governed by an infallible chief, and administered by an uninterrupted line of priests and bishops, who had given up the vanities of the world, satisfier of doubts, and sole instrument of salvation,—this seemed so perfect and so natural an organization that it had been accepted from time immemorial as incapable of denial. If a voice was heard here and there in an Alpine valley or in a scholastic debating-room impugning these arrangements or asking proof from history or revelation, the civil power was let loose upon the gainsayer, with the general consent of orthodox men, and the Vaudois were murdered with sword and spear and the inquiring student chained in his monkish cell. The theory and organization of the Universal Church were, in fact, never so well defined as at the moment when its reign was drawing to a close. Nobody doubted that a general Father, clothed in infallible wisdom, and armed with powers directly committed to him for the guidance or punishment of mankind, was the Heaven-sent arbiter of differences, the rewarder of faithful kings, the corrector of unruly nations; and yet the spectacle was presented, to the believers in this ideal, of a series of wicked and abandoned rulers sitting in Peter’s chair, and only imitating the apostle in his furiousness and his denial; cardinals depraved and worldly beyond the example of temporal princes; a priesthood steeped, for the most part, in ignorance and vice, and monks and nuns the opprobria of all nations where they were found. Never were claims and performances brought into such startling contrast before. The Pope was the representative upon earth of the Saviour of men; and he poisoned his guests, like Borgia, slew his opponents, like Julius, or led the life of an intellectual epicure, like Leo the Tenth. In former times the contrariety between doctrine and practice would have been slightly known or easily reconciled. Few comparatively visited Rome; cardinals were seldom seen; priests were not more ignorant than their parishioners, and monks not more wicked than their admirers. All believed in the miraculous efficacy of the wares in which even the lower order of the clergy dealt, and their rule in country places was so lax, their penances so easily performed or commuted, their relations with their people so friendly and on such equal terms, that in the rural districts the voice of complaint was either unheard or neglected. In Italy, the head-quarters of the faith, the excesses of priestly rule were the most glaring and wide-spread. Rome itself was always the seat of turbulence and disaffection. The lives of professedly holy men were known, and the vices of popes and prelates pressed heavily on the people, who were the first victims of their avarice or cruelty. But the utmost extent of their indignation never reached to a questioning of the foundation of the power from which they suffered. An Italian crushed to the earth by the extortion of his Church, irritated perhaps by the personal wickedness of his director, sought no escape from such inflictions in disbelieving either the temporal or spiritual authority of his oppressor. Rather he would have looked with savage satisfaction on the fagot-fire of any one who hinted that the principles of his Church required the slightest amendment; that the absolution of his sensual confessor was not altogether indispensable; that the image he bowed down to was common wood, or that the relics he worshipped were merely dead men’s bones. Perhaps, indeed, in those luxurious regions, a bare and unadorned worship would not seem to be worship at all. With his impassioned mind and glowing fancy, the Spaniard or Italian must pour out his whole being on the object of his adoration. He loves his patron saint with the warmth of an earthly affection, and thinks he undervalues her virtues or her claims if he does not heap her shrine with his offerings and address her image with rapture. He must make external demonstration of his inward feelings, or nobody will believe in their existence. The crouchings and kneelings, therefore, which our colder natures stigmatize as idolatry, are to him nothing more than the outward manifestation of affection and thankfulness. He does the same to his master or his benefactor without degradation in the eyes of his countrymen. Without these bowings and genuflections his conduct would be thought ungrateful and disrespectful. That this amount of warm-hearted sincerity is wasted upon such unworthy objects as his saints and relics is greatly to be deplored; but wide allowances must be made for peculiarities of situation and disposition; and we should remember that whereas in the North a religion of forms and ceremonies would be a body without a soul, because there would be no inward exaltation answering to the outward manifestation, the Southern heart sees a meaning where there is none to us, is conscious of a sense of trust and reverence where we only see slavishness and imposture, and a feeling of divine consolation and hope in services which to us are histrionic and absurd. Religious belief, in the sense of a true and undivided faith in the doctrines of Christianity, had no recognised existence at the period we have reached. But this absence of religious belief was combined, however strange the statement may appear, with a most implicit trust in the directions and authority of the Church. Sunny skies might have shone forever over the political abasement and slightly Christianized paganism of the inhabitants of the two peninsulas and the Southeast of Europe, but a cloud was about to rise in the North which dimmed them for a time, but which, after it burst in purifying thunder, has refreshed and cleared the atmosphere of the whole world.

The first book that Guttenberg published in 1451 was the Holy Bible,—in the Latin language, to be sure, and after the Vulgate edition, but still containing, to those who could gather it, the manna of the Word. Two years after that, in 1453, the capture of Constantinople by the Turks had scattered the learning of the Greeks among all the nations of the West. The universities were soon supplied with professors, who displayed the hitherto-unexplored treasures of the language of Pericles and Demosthenes. Everywhere a spirit of inquiry began to reawaken, but limited as yet to subjects of philosophy and antiquity. Christianity, indeed, had so lost its hold on the minds of scholars that it was not considered worth inquiring into. It was looked on as a fable, and only profitable as an instrument of policy. Erasmus was alarmed at the state of feeling in 1516, and expressed his belief that, if those Grecian studies were pursued, the ancient deities would resume their sway. But the Bible was already reaping its appointed harvest. Its voice, lost in the din of speculative philosophies and the dissipation of courts, was heard in obscure places, where it never had penetrated before. In 1505, Luther was twenty-two years of age. He had made himself a scholar by attendance at schools where his poverty almost debarred him from appearing. At Eisenach he gained his bread by singing at the richer inhabitants’ doors. Afterwards he had gone to Erfurt, and, tired or afraid of the world, anxious for opportunities of self-examination, and dissatisfied with his spiritual state, he entered the convent of the Augustines, and in two years more, in 1507, became priest and monk. There was an amazing amount of goodness and simplicity of life among the brotherhood of this community. Learning and devout meditation were encouraged, holy ascetic lives were led, the body was kept under with fastings and stripes. A Bible was open to them all, but chained to its place in the chapel, and only to be studied by standing before the desk on which it lay. All these things were insufficient, and Brother Martin was miserable. His companions pitied and respected him. Staupitz, a man of great rank in the Church, a sort of inspector-general of a large district, visited the convent, and in a moment was attracted by the youthful monk. He conversed with him, soothed his agitated mind, not with anodynes from the pharmacopoeia of the Church, but from the fountain-head of the faith. He painted God as the forgiver of sinners, the Father of all men; and Luther took some comfort. But, on going away, the kind-hearted Staupitz gave the young man a Bible,—a Bible all to himself, his own property, to carry in his bosom, to study in his cell. His vocation was at once fixed. The Reformer felt his future all before him, like Achilles when he grasped the sword and rejected the feminine toys. The books he had taken with him into the monastery were Plautus and Virgil; but he studied plays and epics no more. Augustin and the Bible supplied their place. Hungering for better things than the works of the law,—abstinence, prayer-repetitions, scourgings, and all the wearisome routine of mechanical devotion,—he dashed boldly into the other extreme, and preached free grace,—grace without merit, the great doctrine which is called, theologically, “justification by faith alone.” This had been the main theme of his master Augustin, and Luther now gave it practical shape. In 1510 he was sent on some business of his convent to Rome,—to Rome, the head-quarters of the Church, the earthly residence of the infallible! How holy will be its dwellings, how gracious the words of its inhabitants! The German monk saw nothing but sin and infidelity. In high places as in low, the taint of corruption was polluting all the air. In terror and dismay, he left the city of iniquity within a fortnight of his arrival, and hurried back to the peacefulness of his convent. “I would not for a hundred thousand florins have missed seeing Rome,” he said, long afterwards. “I should always have felt an uneasy doubt whether I was not, after all, doing injustice to the Pope. As it is, I am quite satisfied on the point.” The Pope was Julius the Second, whose career we followed in the League of Cambrai; and we may enter into the surprise of Luther at seeing the Father of the Faithful breathing blood and ruin to his rival neighbours. But the force of early education was still unimpaired. The Pope was Pope, and the devout German thought of him on his knees. But in the year 1517 a man of the name of Tetzel, a Dominican of the rudest manners and most brazen audacity, appeared in the market-place of Wittenberg, ringing a bell, and hawking indulgences from the Holy See to be sold to all the faithful. A new Pope was on the throne,—the voluptuous Leo the Tenth. He had resolved to carry on the building of the great Church of St. Peter, and, having exhausted his funds in riotous living, he sent round his emissaries to collect fresh treasures by the sale of these pardons for human sin. “Pour in your money,” cried Tetzel, “and whatever crimes you have committed, or may commit, are forgiven! Pour in your coin, and the souls of your friends and relations will fly out of purgatory the moment they hear the chink of your dollars at the bottom of the box.” Luther was Doctor of Divinity, Professor in the University, and pastoral visitor of two provinces of the empire. He felt it was his duty to interfere. He learned for the first time himself how far indulgences were supposed to go, and shuddered at the profanity of the notion of their being of any value whatever. On the festival of All Saints, in November, 1517, he read a series of propositions against them in the great church, and startled all Germany like a thunderbolt with a printed sermon on the same subject. The press began its work, and people no longer fought in darkness. Nationalities were at an end when so wide-embracing a subject was treated by so universal an agent. The monk’s voice was heard in all lands, even in the walls of Rome, and crossed the sea, and came in due time to England. “Tush, tush! ’tis a quarrel of monks,” said Leo the Tenth; and, with an affectation of candour, he remarked, “This Luther writes well: he is a man of fine genius.”

Gallant young Henry the Eighth thought it a good opportunity to show his talent, and meditated an assault on the heretic,—a curious duel between a pale recluse and the gayest prince in Christendom. But the recluse was none the worse when the book was published, and the prince earned from the gratitude of the Pope the name “Defender of the Faith,” which is still one of the titles of the English crown. Penniless Maximilian looked on well pleased, and wrote to a Saxon counsellor, “All the popes I have had any thing to do with have been rogues and cheats. The game with the priests is beginning. What your monk is doing is not to be despised: take care of him. It may happen that we shall have need of him.” Luther’s own prince, the Elector of Saxony, was his firm friend, and on one side or other all Europe was on the gaze. Leo at last perceived the danger, and summoned the monk to Rome. He might as well have yielded in the struggle at once, for from Rome he never could have returned alive. He consented, however, to appear before the Legate at Augsburg, attended by a strong body-guard furnished by the Elector, and held his ground against the threats and promises of the Cardinal of Cajeta. But Maximilian carried his poverty and disappointment to the grave in 1519; and when Leo saw the safe accession of his successor Charles the Fifth, the faithful servant of St. Peter, he pushed matters with a higher hand against the daring innovator. Brother Martin, however, was unmoved. He would not retreat; he even advanced in his course, and wrote to the Pope himself an account of the iniquities of Rome. “You have three or four cardinals,” he says, “of learning and faith; but what are these three or four in so vast a crowd of infidels and reprobates? The days of Rome are numbered, and the anger of God has been breathed forth upon her. She hates councils, she dreads reforms, and will not hear of a check being placed on her desperate impiety.” This was a dangerous man to meet with such devices as bulls and interdicts. Charles determined to try harsher measures, and summoned him to appear at a Diet of the States held in Worms. The emperor was now twenty-one years old. His sceptre stretched over the half of Europe, and across the great sea to the golden realm of Mexico. Martin begged a new gown from the not very lavish Elector, and went in a sort of chariot to the appointed city,—serene and confident, for he had a safe-conduct from the emperor and various princes, and trusted in the goodness of his cause. "A.D. 1521."Such a scene never occurred in any age of the world as was presented when the assemblage met. All the peers and potentates of the German Empire, presided over by the most powerful ruler that ever had been known in Europe, were gathered to hear the trial and condemnation of a thin, wan-visaged young man, dressed in a monk’s gown and hood and worn with the fatigues and hazards of his recent life. “Yet prophet-like that lone one stood, with dauntless words and high,” and answered all questions with force and modesty. But answers were not what the Diet required, and retractation was far from Luther’s mind. So the Chancellor of TrÈves came to him and said, “Martin, thou art disobedient to his Imperial Majesty: wherefore depart hence under the safe-conduct he has given thee.” And the monk departed. As he was nearing his destination, and was passing through a wood alone, some horsemen seized his person, dressed him in military garb, and put on him a false beard. They then mounted him on a led horse and rode rapidly away. His friends were anxious about his fate, for a dreadful sentence had been uttered against him by the emperor on the day when his safe-conduct expired, forbidding any one to sustain or shelter him, and ordering all persons to arrest and bring him into prison to await the judgment he deserved. People thought he had been waylaid and killed, or at all events sent into a dungeon. Meantime he was living peaceably and comfortably in the castle of Wartburg, to which he had been conveyed in this mysterious manner by his friend the Elector,—safe from the machinations of his enemies, and busily engaged in his immortal translation of the Bible.

The movement thus communicated by Luther knew no pause nor end. It soon ceased to be a merely national excitement caused by local circumstances, and became the one great overwhelming question of the time. Every thing was brought into its vortex: however distant might be its starting-point, to this great central idea it was sure to attach itself at last. Involuntarily, unconsciously, unwillingly, every government found that the Reformation formed part of its scheme and policy. One nation, and one only, had the clear eye and firm hand to make it ostensibly, and of its deliberate choice, the guide and landmark in its dangerous and finally triumphant career. This was England,—not when under the degrading domination of its Henry or the heavy hand of its Mary, but under the skilful piloting of the great Elizabeth, the first of rulers who seems to have perceived that submission to a foreign priest is a political error on the part both of kings and subjects, and that occupation by a foreign army is not more subversive of freedom and independence than the supremacy of a foreign Church. Hitherto England had been nearly divided from the whole world, and was merely one of the distant satellites that revolved on the outside of the European system, the centre of which was Rome. She was now to burn with light of her own. The Continent, indeed, at the commencement of the Reformation, seemed almost in a state of dissolution. In 1529 disunion had attained such a pitch in the Empire that the different princes were ranged on hostile sides. At the Diet of Spires, in this year, the name of Protestant had been assumed by the opponents of the excesses and errors of the Church of Rome. At the same time that the religious unity was thus finally thrown off, the Turks were thundering at the Eastern gates of Europe, and Solyman of Constantinople laid siege to Vienna. France was exhausted with her internal troubles. Spain came to the rescue of the outraged faith, and made heresy punishable with death throughout all her dominions. While the Netherlands, against which this was directed, was groaning under this new infliction, disorder seemed to extend over the solid earth itself. There were earthquakes and great storms in many lands. Lisbon was shaken into ruins, with a loss of thirty thousand inhabitants; and the dykes of Holland were overwhelmed by a prodigious rising of the sea, and four hundred thousand people were drowned.

Preparations were made in all quarters for a great and momentous struggle: nobody could tell where it would break forth or where it would end. And ever and anon Luther’s rallying-cry was heard in answer to the furious denunciations of cardinals and popes. Interests get parcelled out in so many separate portions that it is impossible to unravel the state of affairs with any clearness. We shall only notice that, in 1531, the famous league of Smalcalde first embodied Protestantism in its national and lay constitution by the banding together of nine of the sovereign princes of Germany, and eleven free cities, in armed defence, if needed, of their religious belief. Where is the fiery Henry of England, with his pen or sword? A very changed man from what we saw him only thirteen years ago. He has no pen now, and his sword is kept for his discontented subjects at home. In 1534, King and Lords and Commons, in Parliament assembled, threw off the supremacy of Rome, and Henry is at last a king, for his courts hold cognizance of all causes within the realm, whether ecclesiastical or civil. Everybody knows the steps by which this embodied selfishness achieved his emancipation from a dominant Church. It little concerns us now, except as a question of historic curiosity, what his motives were. Judging from the analogy of all his other actions, we should say they were bad; but by some means or other the evil deeds of this man were generally productive of benefit to his country. He cast off the Pope that he might be freed from a disagreeable wife; but as the Pope whom he rejected was the servant of Charles, (the nephew of the repudiated queen,) he found that he had freed his kingdom at the same time from its degrading vassalage to the puppet of a rival monarch. He dissolved the monasteries in England for the purpose of grasping their wealth; but the country found he had at the same time delivered it from a swarm of idle and mischievous corporations, which in no long time would have swallowed up the land. Their revenues were immense, and the extent of their domains almost incredible. Before people had recovered from their disgust at the hateful motives of their tyrant’s behaviour, the results of it became apparent in the elevation of the finest class of the English population; for the “bold peasantry, their country’s pride,” began to establish their independent holdings on the parcelled-out territories of the monks and nuns. Vast tracts of ground were thrown open to the competition of lay proprietors. Even the poorest was not without hope of becoming an owner of the soil; nay, the released estates were so plentiful that in Elizabeth’s reign an act was passed making it illegal for a man to build a cottage “unless he laid four acres of land thereto.” The cottager, therefore, became a small farmer; and small farmers were the defence of England; and the defence of England was the safety of freedom and religion throughout the world. There were some hundred thousands of those landed cottagers and smaller gentry and great proprietors established by this most respectable sacrilege of Henry the Eighth, and for the sake of these excellent consequences we forgive him his pride and cruelty and all his faults. But Henry’s work was done, and in January, 1547, he died. The rivals with whom he started on the race of life were still alive; but life was getting dark and dreary with both of them. Francis was no longer the hero of “The Field of the Cloth-of-Gold,” conqueror of Marignano, the gallant captive of Pavia, or the winner of all hearts. He was worn out with a life of great vicissitudes, and heard with ominous foreboding the news of Henry’s death. "March 11, 1547."A fate seemed to unite them in all those years of revelry and hate and friendship, and in a few weeks the most chivalrous and generous of the Valois followed the most tyrannical of the Tudors to the tomb. A year before this, the Monk of Wittenberg, now the renowned and married Dr. Martin Luther, had left a place vacant which no man could fill; and now of all those combatants Charles was the sole survivor. Selfish as Henry, dissolute as Francis, obstinate as Martin, his race also was drawing to a close. But the play was played out before these chief performers withdrew. All Europe had changed its aspect. The England, the France, the Empire, of five-and-twenty years before had utterly passed away. New objects were filling men’s minds, new principles of policy were regulating states. Protestantism was an established fact, and the Treaty of Passau in 1552 gave liberty and equality to the professors of the new faith. Charles was sagacious though heartless as a ruler, but an unredeemed bigot as an individual man. The necessities of his condition, by which he was forced to give toleration to the enemies of the Church, weighed upon his heart. A younger hand and bloodier disposition, he thought, were needed to regain the ground he had been obliged to yield; and in Philip his son he perceived all these requirements fulfilled. When he looked round, he saw nothing to give him comfort in his declining years. War was going on in Hungary against the still advancing Turks; war was raging in Lorraine between his forces and the French; Italy, the land of volcanoes, was on the eve of outbreak and anarchy; and, thundering out defiance of the Imperial power and the Christian Cross, the guns of the Ottoman fleet were heard around the shores of Sicily and up to the Bay of Naples. The emperor was faint and weary: his armies were scattered and dispirited; his fleets were unequal to their enemy: so in 1556 he resigned his pompous title of monarch of Spain and the Indies, with all their dependencies, to his son, and the empire to his brother Ferdinand, who was already King of Hungary and Bohemia and hereditary Duke of Austria; and then, with the appearance of resignation, but his soul embittered by anger and disappointment, he retired to the Convent of St. Just, where he gorged himself into insanity with gluttonies which would have disgraced Vitellius, and amused himself by interfering in state affairs which he had forsworn, and making watches which he could not regulate, and going through the revolting farce of a rehearsal of his funeral, with his body in the coffin and the monks of the monastery for mourners. Those theatrical lamentations were probably as sincere as those which followed his real demise in 1558; for when he surrendered the power which made him respected he gave evidence only of the qualities which made him disliked.

The Reformation, you remember, is the characteristic of this century. We have traced it in Germany to its recognition as a separate and liberated faith. In England we are going to see Protestantism established and triumphant. But not yet; for we have first to notice a period when Protestantism seems at its last hour, when Mary, wife of the bigot Philip, and true and honourable daughter of the Church, is determined to restore her nation to the Romish chair, or die in the holy attempt. We are not going into the minutiÆ of this dreadful time, or to excite your feelings with the accounts of the burnings and torturings of the dissenters from the queen’s belief. None of us are ignorant of the cruelty of those proceedings, or have read unmoved the sad recital of the martyrdom of the bishops and of such men as the joyous and innocent Rowland Taylor of Hadleigh. Men’s hearts did not become hardened by these sights. Rather they melted with compassion towards the dauntless sufferers; and, though the hush of terror kept the masses of the people silent, great thoughts were rising in the general mind, and toleration ripened even under the heat of the Smithfield fires. Attempts have been made to blacken Mary beyond her demerits and to whiten her beyond her deservings. Protestants have denied her the virtues she unquestionably possessed,—truthfulness, firmness, conscientiousness, and unimpeachable morals. Her panegyrists take higher ground, and claim for her the noblest qualifications both as queen and woman,—patriotism, love of her people, fulfilment of all her duties, and exquisite tenderness of disposition. It will be sufficient for us to look at her actions, and we will leave her secret sentiments alone. We shall only say that it is very doubtful whether the plea of conscientiousness is admissible in such a case. If perverted reasoning or previous education has made a Thug feel it a point of conscience to put his throttling instrument under a quiet traveller’s throat, the conscientious belief of the performer that his act is for the good of the sufferer’s soul will scarcely save him from the gallows. On the contrary, a conscientious persistence in what is manifestly wrong should be an aggravation of the crime, for it gives an appearance of respectability to atrocity, and, when punishment overtakes the wrong-doers, makes the Thug an honoured martyr to his opinions, instead of a convicted felon for his misdeeds. Let us hope that the rights of conscience will never be pleaded in defence of cruelty or persecution.

The restoration of England to the obedience of the Church, the marriage of Mary, the warmest partisan of Popery, with Philip, the fanatical oppressor of the reformed,—these must have raised the hopes of Rome to an extraordinary pitch. But greater as a support, and more reliable than queens or kings, was the Society of the Jesuits, which at this time demonstrated its attachment to the Holy See, and devoted itself blindly, remorselessly, unquestioning, to the defence of the old faith. Having sketched the rise of Luther, a companion-picture is required of the fortunes of Ignatius Loyola. We hinted that a Biscayan soldier, wounded at the siege of Pampeluna in Spain, divided the notice of Europe with the poor Austin Friar of Wittenberg. Enthusiasm, rising almost into madness, was no bar, in the case of this wonderful Spaniard, to the possession of faculties for government and organization which have never been surpassed. Shut out by the lameness resulting from his wound from the struggles of worldly and soldierly ambition, he gave full way to the mystic exaltation of his Southern disposition. He devoted himself as knight and champion to the Virgin, heard with contempt and horror of the efforts made to deny the omnipotence of the Chair of Rome, and swore to be its defender. Others of similar sentiments joined him in his crusade against innovation. "A.D. 1540."A company of self-denying, self-sacrificing men began, and, adding to the previous laws of their order a vow of unqualified submission to the Pope, they were recognised by a bull, and the Society of Jesus became the strongest and most remarkable institution of modern times. Through all varieties of fortune, in exile and imprisonment, and even in dissolution, their oath of uninquiring, unhesitating obedience to the papal command has never been broken. With Protean variety of appearance, but unvarying identity of intention, these soldiers of St. Peter are as relentless to others, and as regardless of themselves, as the body-guard of the old Assassins. No degradation is too servile, no place too distant, no action too revolting, for these unreasoning instruments of power. Wilfully surrendering the right of judgment and the feelings of conscience into the hands of their superior, there is no method by law or argument of regulating their conduct. The one principle of submission has swallowed up all the rest, and fulfilment of that duty ennobles the iniquitous deeds by which it is shown. Other societies put a clause, either by words or implication, in their promise of obedience, limiting it to things which are just and proper. This limit is ostentatiously abrogated by the followers of Loyola. The merit of obeying an order to slay an enemy of the Church more than compensates for the guilt of the murder. In other orders a homicide is looked upon with horror; in this, a Jesuit who kills a heretical king by command of his chiefs is venerated as a saint. Against practices and feelings like these you can neither reason nor be on your guard. In all kingdoms, accordingly, at some time or other, the existence of the order has been found inconsistent with the safety of the State, and it has been dissolved by the civil power. The moment, however, the Church regains its hold, the Jesuits are sure to be restored. The alliance, indeed, is indispensable, and the mutual aid of the Order and of the Papacy a necessity of their existence. Incorporated in 1540, the brothers of the Company of Jesus considered the defections of the Reformation in a fair way of being compensated when the death of our little, cold-hearted, self-willed Edward the Sixth—a Henry the Eighth in the bud—left the throne in 1553 to Mary, a Henry the Eighth full blown. "A.D. 1558."When nearly five years of conscientious truculence had shown the earnestness of this unhappy woman’s belief, the accession of Elizabeth inaugurated a new system in this country, from which it has never departed since without a perceptible loss both of happiness and power. A strictly home and national policy was immediately established by this most remarkable of our sovereigns, and pursued through good report and evil report, sometimes at the expense of her feelings—if she was so little of a Tudor as to have any—of tenderness and compassion, sometimes at the expense—and here she was Tudor enough to have very acute sensations indeed—of her personal and official dignity, but always with the one object of establishing a great united and irresistible bulwark against foreign oppression and domestic disunion. It shows how powerful was her impression upon the course of European history, that her character is as fiercely canvassed at this day as in the speech of her contemporaries. Nobody feels as if Elizabeth was a personage removed from us by three hundred years. We discuss her actions, and even argue about her looks and manners, as if she had lived in our own time. And this is the reason why such divergent judgments are pronounced on a person who, more than any other ruler, united the opinions of her subjects during the whole of her long and agitated life. Her acts remain, but her judges are different. If we could throw ourselves with the reality of circumstance as well as the vividness of feeling into the period in which she moved and governed, we should come to truer decisions on the points submitted to our view. But if we look with the refinements of the present time, and the speculative niceties permissible in questions which have no direct bearing on our prosperity and safety, we shall see much to disapprove of, which escaped the notice, or even excited the admiration, of the people who saw what tremendous arbitraments were on the scale. If we were told that a cold-blooded individual had placed on one occasion some murderous weapons on a height, and then requested a number of his friends to stand before them, while some unsuspecting persons came up in that direction, and then, suddenly telling his companions to stand on one side, had sent bullets hissing and crashing through the gentlemen advancing to him, you would shudder with disgust at such atrocious cruelty, till you were told that the cold-blooded individual was the Duke of Wellington, and the advancing gentlemen the French Old Guard at Waterloo. And in the same way, if we read of Elizabeth interfering in Scotland, domineering at home, and bellicose abroad, let us inquire, before we condemn, whether she was in her duty during those operations,—whether, in fact, she was resisting an assault, or capriciously and unjustifiably opening her batteries on the innocent and unprepared. Fiery-hearted, strong-handed Scotchmen are ready to fight at this time for the immaculate purity and sinless martyrdom of their beautiful Mary, and sturdy Englishmen start up with as bold a countenance in defence of good Queen Bess. It is not to be doubted that a roll-call as numerous as that of Bannockburn or Flodden could be mustered on this quarrel of three centuries ago; but the fight is needless. The points of view are so different that a verdict can never be given on the merits of the two personages principally engaged; but we think an unprejudiced examination of the course of Elizabeth’s policy in Scotland, and her treatment of her rival, will establish certain facts which neither party can gainsay.

1st. From this it will result, that, to keep reformed England secure, it was indispensable to have reformed Scotland on her side.

2d. That, in order to have Scotland either reformed or on her side, it was indispensable to render powerless a popish queen,—a queen who was supported as legitimate inheritor of England by the Pope and Philip of Spain, and the King and princes of France.

3d. That Elizabeth had a right, by all the laws of self-preservation, to sustain by every legal and peaceable means that party in Scotland which was de facto the government of the country, and which promised to be most useful to the objects she had in view. Those objects have already been named,—peace and security for the Protestant religion, and the honour and independence of the whole British realm.

To gain these ends, who denies that she bribed and bullied and deceived?—that she degraded the Scottish nobles by alternate promises and threats, and weakened the Scottish crown by encouraging its enemies, both ecclesiastical and civil? In prudishly finding fault with these proceedings, we forget the Scotch, French, Spanish, popish, emissaries who were let loose upon England; the plots at home, the scowling messages from abroad; the excommunications uttered from Rome; the massacre of the Protestants gloried in in France, and the vast navies and immense armies gathering against the devoted Isle from all the coasts and provinces of Spain.

In 1568, after the defeat of the queen’s party at Langside, Mary threw herself on the pity and protection of Elizabeth, and was kept in honourable safety for many years. She did not allow her to collect partisans for the recovery of her kingdom, nor to cabal against the government which had expelled her. To do so would not have been to shelter a fugitive, but to declare war on Scotland. In 1848, Louis Philippe, chased by the revolutionists of Paris, came over to England. He was kept in honourable retirement. He was not allowed to cabal against his former subjects, nor to threaten their policy. To do so would not have been to shelter a fugitive, but to declare war on France. Even in the case of the earlier Bourbons, we permitted no gatherings of forces on their behalf, and did not encourage their followers to molest the settled government,—no, not when the throne of France was filled by an enemy and we were at deadly war with Napoleon. But Mary was put to death. A sad story, and very melancholy to read in quiet drawing-rooms with Britannia ruling the waves and keeping all danger from our coasts. But in 1804, if Louis the Eighteenth or Charles the Tenth, instead of eating the bread of charity in peace, had been detected in conspiracy with our enemies, in corresponding with foreign emissaries, when a thousand flat-bottomed boats were marshalling for our invasion at Boulogne, and Brest and Cherbourg and Toulon were crowded with ships and sailors to protect the flotilla, it needs no great knowledge of character to pronounce that English William Pitt and Scottish Harry Dundas would have had the royal Bourbon’s head on a block, or his body on Tyburn-tree, in spite of all the romance and eloquence in the world.

Mary’s guilt or innocence of the charges brought against her in her relations with Darnley and Bothwell has nothing to do with the treatment she received from Elizabeth. She was not amenable to English law for any thing she did in Scotland, nor was she condemned for any thing but treasonable practices which it was impossible to deny. She certainly owed submission and allegiance to the English crown while she lived under its protection. Let us indulge our chivalrous generosity, and enjoy delightful poems in defence of an unfortunate and beautiful sovereign, by believing that the blots upon her fame were the aspersions of malignity and political baseness: the great fact remains, that it was an indispensable incident to the security of both the kingdoms that she should be deprived of authority, and finally, as the storm darkened, and derived all its perils from her conspiracies against the State and breaches of the law, that she should be deprived of life. Far more sweeping measures were pursued and defended by the enemies of Elizabeth abroad. Present forever, like a skeleton at a feast, must have been the massacre of St. Bartholomew in the thoughts of every Protestant in Europe, and most vividly of all in those of the English queen. That great blow was meant to be a warning to heretics wherever they were found, and in olden times and more revengeful dispositions might have been an excuse for similar atrocity on the other side. The Bartholomew massacre and the Armada are the two great features of the latter part of this century; and they are both so well known that it will be sufficient to recall them in a very few words.

This massacre was no chance-sprung event, like an ordinary popular rising, but had been matured for many years. The Council of Trent, which met in 1545 and continued its sittings till 1563, had devoted those eighteen years to codifying the laws of the Catholic Church. A definite, clear, consistent system was established, and acknowledged as the religious and ecclesiastical faith of Christendom. Men were not now left to a painful gathering of the sentiments and rescripts of popes and doctors out of varying and scattered writings. Here were the statutes at large, minutely indexed and easy of reference. From these many texts could be gathered which justified any method of diffusing the true belief or exterminating the false. And accordingly, a short time after the close of the Council, an interview took place between two personages, of very sinister augury for the Protestant cause. Catherine de Medicis and the Duke of Alva met at Bayonne in 1565. In this consultation great things were discussed; and it was decided by the wickedest woman and harshest man in Europe that government could not be safe nor religion honoured unless by the introduction of the Inquisition and a general massacre of heretics in every land. A few months later saw the ferocious Alva beginning his bloodthirsty career in the Netherlands, in which he boasted he had put eighteen thousand Hollanders to death on the scaffold in five years. Catherine also pondered his lessons in her heart, and when seven years had passed, and the Huguenots were still unsubdued, she persuaded her son Charles the Ninth that the time was come to establish his kingdom in righteousness by the indiscriminate murder of all the Protestants. An occasion was found in 1572, when the marriage of Henry of Navarre, afterwards the best-loved king of France, with the Princess Margaret de Valois, held out a prospect of soothing the religious troubles, and also (which suited her designs better) of attracting all the heads of the Huguenot cause to Paris. Every thing turned out as she hoped. There had been feasts and gayeties, and suspicion had been thoroughly disarmed. Suddenly the tocsin was sounded, and the murderers let loose over all the town. No plea was received in extenuation of the deadly crime of favouring the new opinions. Hospitality, friendship, relationship, youth, sex, all were disregarded. The streets were red with blood, and the river choked with mutilated bodies. Upwards of seventy thousand were butchered in Paris alone, and the metropolitan example was followed in other places. The deed was so awful that for a while it silenced the whole of Europe. Some doubted, some shuddered; but Rome sprang up with a shout of joy when the news was confirmed, and uttered prayers of thanksgiving for so great a victory. If it could have been possible to put every gainsayer to death everywhere, the triumph would have been complete; but there were countries where Catherine’s dagger could not reach; and whenever her name was heard, and the terrible details of the massacre were known, undying hatred of the Church which encouraged such iniquity mingled with the feelings of pity and alarm. For no one henceforth could feel safe. The Huguenots were under the highest protection known to the heart of man. They were guests, and they were taken unawares in the midst of the rejoicings of a marriage. Rome lost more by the massacre than the Protestants. People looked round and saw the butcheries in the Netherlands, the slaughters in Paris, the tortures in the Inquisition, and over all, rioting in hopes of recovered dominion, supported by his priests and Dominicans, a Pope who plainly threatened a repetition of such scenes wherever his power was acknowledged. Germany, the Netherlands, England, Scotland, and the Northern nations, were lost to the Church of Rome more surely by the scaffold and crimes which professed to bring her aid, than by any other cause. Elizabeth was now the accepted champion and leader of the Protestants, and on her all the malice of the baffled Romanists was turned. To weaken, to dethrone or murder the English heretic was the praiseworthiest of deeds.

But one great means of distracting England from her onward course was now removed. In former days Scotland would have been let loose upon her unguarded flanks; but by this time the genius of Knox, running parallel with the efforts of the Southern reformers, had raised a religious feeling which responded to the English call. Scotland, freed from an oppressive priesthood, did manful battle at the side of her former enemy. Elizabeth was kept safe by the joint hatred the nations entertained to Rome, and, as regarded foreigners, the Union had already taken place. On one sure ground, however, those foreigners could still build their hopes. Mary, conscientious in her religion, and embittered in her dislike, was still alive, to be the rallying-point for every discontented cry and to represent the old causes,—the legitimate descent and the true faith. The greatest circumspection would have been required to keep her conduct from suspicion in these embarrassing circumstances. But she was still as thoughtless as in her happier days, and exposed herself to legal inquiries by the unguardedness of her behaviour. The wise counsellors of Elizabeth saw but one way to put an end to all those fears and expectations; and Mary, after due trial, was condemned and executed. "A.D. 1587."Hope was now at an end; but revenge remained, and the great Colossus of the Papacy bestirred himself to punish the sacrilegious usurper. Philip the Second was still the most Catholic of kings. More stern and bigoted than when he had tried to restrain the burning zeal of Mary of England, he was resolved to restore by force a revolted people to the Chair of St. Peter and exact vengeance for the slights and scorns which had rankled in his heart from the date of his ill-omened visit. He prepared all his forces for the glorious attempt. Nothing could have been devised more calculated to bring all English hearts more closely to their queen. Every report of a fresh squadron joining the fleets already assembled for the invasion called forth more zeal in behalf of the reformed Church and the undaunted Elizabeth. Scotland also held some vessels ready to assist her sister in this great extremity, and lined her shores with Presbyterian spearmen. Community of danger showed more clearly than ever that safety lay in combination. Chains, we know, were brought over in those missionary galleys, and all the apparatus of torture, with smiths to set them to work. But the smiths and the chains never made good their landing on British ground. The ships covered all the narrow sea; but the wind blew, and they were scattered. It was perhaps better, as a warning and a lesson, that the principal cause of the Spaniard’s disaster was a storm. If it had been fairly inflicted on them in open battle, the superior seamanship or numbers or discipline of the enemy might have been pleaded. But there must have mingled something more depressing than the mere sorrow of defeat when Philip received his discomfited admiral with the words, “We cannot blame you for what has happened: we cannot struggle against the will of God.”