A people with an experience such as that of the Germans in the seventeenth century was thenceforth easily drawn away from home. One generation of continuous warfare throughout all Germany, followed by another generation of intermittent invasion from France, and closed by a crisis of rapine and devastation, made hundreds of thousands of the German people homeless, despairing, and eager for escape. It was this situation of the people, combined with the religious condition before described, that made Germany the best recruiting-ground for American colonists to be found in Europe. Before the close of the seventeenth century a stream of emigration set from Germany towards America which furnished to Pennsylvania one-third of her pre-Revolutionary inhabitants, and made a considerable part of the population of several of the other colonies.
A second effect of the Thirty Years' War was the practical dissolution of the empire and the loss by the emperor of all centralized control over its policy. This was a cumulative result of the war rather than a definite provision of the peace. The princes, nobles, and cities had so frequently allied themselves with foreign states against the emperor and against one another, their policy had been so constantly regulated by their own interests alone, in entire disregard of those of the nation at large, and the religious divisions had been settled on such a sectional basis, that there was now no thought of derogating from their independence for the sake of the central power of Germany. By Article VIII. of the treaty of peace all German states were definitely permitted to form independent alliances among themselves and with foreign states, so long as these were not directed against either the emperor or the empire. [Footnote: Lamprecht, Deutsche Geschtchte, V., Section 2, pp 765, 766.] As a matter of fact, the bond of union among the states of Germany had become so weak as to be almost non-existent. The emperor was the actual ruler of the Hapsburg dominions and the nominal head of the empire; but Germany was a geographical rather than a national expression, and its head could play no part as a national ruler outside of his immediate hereditary dominions. Germany had many interests in America. Martin Behaim, Regiomontanus, and other German scientists contributed largely to the development of the science of navigation during the period of discovery; Waldseemuller suggested the name that has been universally accepted for the New World; the numerous printing-presses of Germany did much to make known to Europe the history of the exploration and early conquests and the wonders of the Indies; under Charles V. the empire was brought closely into connection with Spain, the greatest colonizing power of the seventeenth century; her Fuggers, Welsers, and other capitalists provided much of the means for the early Spanish voyages, and for a time held extensive grants in Venezuela under the Spanish crown; and her teeming emigrants furnished a large part of the colonial population. Yet Germany as a nation has, of all the nations of Europe, exercised the least influence on the fortunes of America. Neither the emperor nor any German prince has ever exercised any direct or indirect power over any American territory. Many causes may have contributed to this failure, but the most effective was doubtless the Thirty Years' War. The religious disunion, the material impoverishment, and the political insignificance which this war caused, during the most important colonizing century, excluded Germany as a nation from a role among the European powers which have held control over parts of the New World.
CHAPTER XI
THE ENGLISH CHURCH AND THE CATHOLICS
(1534-1660)
England passed through the crisis of the Reformation without a civil war, yet no country of Europe found greater difficulty in coming to a religious equilibrium after that change. Though actual rebellion was nipped in the bud wherever it appeared, as in the Pilgrimage of Grace of 1536 and in the Rising of the North of 1569, yet between those years, and long after the second rising, religious passions were embittered to the very verge of outbreak. In the early period of the Reformation changes were rapid and violent, and during more than a century and a half after Protestantism was established hostile legislation imposed heavy burdens upon all those who differed from the dominant party in religious faith.
When England became a colonizing country at the opening of the seventeenth century, the effect of the religious changes up to that time had been to produce four well-marked religious parties among her people—Churchmen, Catholics, Puritans, and Independents. First in order came the adherents of the established church, a church which was in a very real sense the creation of Queen Elizabeth and of her times— for all that had gone before was unstable and tentative, and might readily have been altered by a ruler of different character or policy. When Elizabeth ascended the throne in 1558 the great body of the people of England, from a religious point of view, was still a fluid mass, a sea accustomed to be drawn, like the tide, by the planet that ruled the sky, whether an Erastian Henry VIII., a Catholic Mary, or a Protestant Protector Somerset.
Elizabeth declared at her accession that she would not allow her people to swerve to the right hand or the left from the religion established by law; and in the main she succeeded in carrying out this policy. The prayer-book, the articles of religion, the supremacy of the queen, the uniformity of service, the practices and doctrines of the official English church during the long reign of Elizabeth, meant something very definite and made the established church an objective reality. Of course she learned, as other sovereigns have learned, that even the will of a king may break against the rock of religious conviction, and large numbers of the people of England during her reign remained, or became, dissatisfied with the established church.
Nevertheless, when Elizabeth died Anglicanism was the national church in a sense in which it had not been before, and in exactly the same sense as that in which the Roman Catholic church was the church of Spain. A generation had grown up which had seen no other religious system in authority, whose beliefs and duties were taught them by its clergy, and whose sentiments and devotion naturally gathered around it as their object. This religious system, therefore, was strongly intrenched: it had all the authoritativeness of law, all the sanction of patriotic feeling in a period of intense patriotism, and the support of much sound learning; besides, the church was fast becoming hallowed by tradition and beautified to the imagination by sentiment. Yet for various reasons the Anglican church failed to obtain the allegiance of the whole English nation.
The second of the four great religious classes, the Catholics, held allegiance to a still older and more imposing organization. However clear the argument of English churchmen that the Anglican body was the church founded by the apostles and enduring continuously in England through all the intervening centuries, the "old church" was still to many the church of which the pope was the earthly head. From the time that Henry VIII. attacked the supremacy of the pope and many of the characteristic doctrines and practices of the mediaeval church, a party separate from the national church came into being, which clung faithfully to that system.