Viewing the course of events in the sixteenth century in France, we find it a prey to the great religious wars between the Protestants and Catholics, which became the means and the occasion of a new attempt on the part of the great lords to regain the power which was slipping from them, and to control royalty. This was the political meaning of our religious wars, of the league, of the struggle of the Guises against the Valois, which was terminated by the accession of Henry IV.
In Spain, during the reign of Philip II., the rebellion of the United Provinces exploded. The Inquisition, under the name of the Duke of Alva, waged war against civil and religious liberty, under that of the Prince of Orange. Whilst liberty triumphed in Holland, through the perseverance and prudent measures of the Netherlander, it utterly perished in Spain itself, where absolute power, both lay and ecclesiastical, reigned supreme.
In England occurred the reigns of Mary and Elizabeth; the war between Elizabeth, the head of Protestantism, and Philip II.; the advent of James Stuart to the throne of England; and the beginning of the great quarrel of royalty and the people.
About the same period, new powers arose in the north. Sweden was reintegrated by Gustavus Vasa in 1523. Prussia was created by the secularising of the Teutonic order. [Footnote 17] The northern powers then took a place in European politics which they had not previously occupied, the importance of which was shortly to be evinced in the thirty years' war.
[Footnote 17: Perhaps M. Guizot would have been a little more accurate if he had stated that the House of Brandenburg gained a large accession of territory, as Prussia was not, in fact, created until the second year of the eighteenth century, nor was that designation used in history until that period.]
I return to France. There we have the reign of Louis XIII.; Cardinal Richelieu changing the internal administration of the country, entering into relations with Germany, and affording support to the Protestant party. In Germany occurred the struggle against the Turks during the latter part of the sixteenth century, and at the commencement of the seventeenth the thirty years' war, the greatest event in modern eastern Europe: then flourished Gustavus Adolphus, Wallenstein, Tilly, the Duke of Brunswick, and the Duke of Weimar, the greatest names that Germany has yet to boast of.
At the same epoch, Louis XIV. ascended the throne of France, and the Fronde commenced. In England, the revolution which dethroned Charles I. exploded.
Thus I take only the greatest events in history, events which every one knows by name, and we see how great are their number, variety, and importance. If we inquire into events of another nature, events less palpable, and which are less indicated by general allusions or names, we shall find the era in question equally replete with them. It was at this time that the greatest changes in the political institutions of almost all nations took place, that pure monarchy prevailed in the majority of the great states, whilst in Holland the most powerful republic in Europe was formed, and in England the constitutional monarchy definitively, or nearly so, triumphed. In the church, it was the era in which the ancient monastic orders lost almost all political power, and were replaced by a new order of another character, whose importance, wrongly perhaps, is held as far superior to theirs—the Jesuits. In the same epoch, the Council of Trent eradicated what might yet remain of the influence of the Councils of Constance and Basle, and secured the final triumph of the court of Rome in ecclesiastical affairs. If we leave the church, and cast an eye upon philosophy, upon the unshackled career of the human mind, we see two men arise, Bacon and Descartes, the authors of the greatest philosophical revolution which the modern world has undergone, and the chiefs of two schools disputing with each other for mastery. It was also the brilliant period of the Italian literature, and the era in which French and English literature commenced. Finally, it was the time during which the great colonies were planted, and the most active developments of the commercial system were stimulated.
Thus, whether we regard the political, ecclesiastical, philosophical, or literary events of that epoch, we find them more numerous, varied, and important, than in all the ages that had preceded it. The activity of the human mind was manifested in all directions, in the relations of men amongst themselves, in their relations with the public power, in the relationships of states, and in purely intellectual operations; in a word, it was an era of great men and great things. And during this very age, the religious revolution which engages our attention was the greatest of all its events, its predominant fact, that which gives to it its name, and determines its character. Amongst so many operative causes playing so important a part, the Reformation was the most powerfully operative, that to which all the others tended, and which modified them all, or was by them itself modified. So much so, that our present task is to characterise with truthfulness, to sum up with precision, the event which controlled all the others in an age of the most important events, the cause which effected more than all the others in an age of the most weighty causes.