All through this portion of our story Christian Europe was constantly in peril from the Turk on the borders, and often far over the borders, of Austria and Hungary. Never was that menace greater than in 1683 when he was besieging Vienna with a great force. He was defeated by Poles and Germans. Yet at this supreme crisis Louis, the Catholic King of France, was secretly favouring the Moslems!

The story of our own country at this time is especially humiliating. Cromwell, in the early years of the half-century which we have been considering, had set England high in the estimation of the world. But Cromwell had died, and with him had gone down much for which he had so strongly stood. Again two Stuarts succeeded one another on England's throne, and the English king, like a very Petit Monarque, became a pensionary, a paid creature, of the Grand Monarque of France. Charles II. of England, and James II. after him, with no sense of responsibility, acted both as knaves and fools, though both had good wits enough, had they used them rightly; and they brought England into the very valley of humiliation. Out of that humiliation she was rescued by the accession to the English throne—jointly with his English wife, daughter of James I.—of William of Orange, ruler of Holland. Englishmen of a later day have perhaps been less grateful than they should be for what some will call the happy accident, and others the Providential dispensation, that, at this critical moment, she found a king who had a sense of duty to his subjects, and a king who brought so valuable an alliance as that of his Dutch fellow-countrymen.

Had some such foreign source of strength not come to our country's aid, had the succession continued in the Stuart line with other kings like those Stuarts who had occupied the throne, it is not possible to say what her fortunes might have been, but it is scarcely possible to doubt that she must have fallen, for a while at least, under the sovereignty of France. As it was, she had fallen under a most despotic rule by her own kings. Partly under the pretence that he was about to make war against France, and partly by expending money that he had secretly received from the French king, Charles II. had raised a large army. He had employed it to stamp out all opposition at home. The Grand Monarque was a strict Roman Catholic, and he used all his power over his royal pensioners in England to induce them to bring England back into the fold of Rome. But if anything were needed to make the great majority of the English and Scottish people yet more determined than before that the State religion should not be that of Rome, a powerful influence towards the stiffening of that determination was supplied by a measure passed by Louis in 1685 and known in history as the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes.

Edict of Nantes revoked

That Edict of Nantes had permitted to the Huguenots, the French Protestants, freedom to practise their religion and to live under no disadvantages, as compared with their fellow-countrymen of the Roman Church. The Revocation of the Edict not only withdrew those permissions, but was accompanied and followed by a deadly persecution under which many of the Huguenots lost their lives and the survivors fled to Protestant countries, especially to England and to Holland.

It was a persecution and an expulsion very similar, in its motives and in its effects, to the flight from Spain of the converted Jews and Mahommedans, and of the Pilgrim Fathers and other Puritans from England. It is curious that in each instance it was a flight of a singularly industrious, intelligent, and valuable portion of the population of each nation, and resulted in a serious loss to those nations from which the exodus was made. And as they were a loss to those countries which they left, so were they a gain to those which received them. The Huguenots in England retain to this day those characteristics of valuable citizens. Years before, England had been similarly fortunate in receiving the Flemish weavers who had fled from Flanders before the Inquisition and the Spanish armies commanded by the Duke of Alva.

France could very ill afford such a loss. Louis XIV., who came to the throne at the age of four years old in 1643 and lived until 1715, reigning thus no less than seventy-two years, became towards the end of the seventeenth century without dispute the greatest monarch in Europe and in all the western world. It is safest to limit his greatness by that word "western," because in another part of the world-stage there was at least one other monarch, the Emperor of China, who could not conceive the possibility that there was a human being so eminent as himself; and also in India there was a very powerful sovereign of the Moguls who yielded an authority and lived in a splendour perhaps as great as either of these.

Louis's court at least was splendid beyond all that had been seen in the West, his courtiers more magnificent in their costumes and brilliancy, more sumptuous in their expenditure. Over the people on their estates, the nobles had unbounded power. Had the people been in very name slaves they could not have been more enslaved in reality. But even the most powerful of the nobles was absolutely subservient to the king. He had an army, which was immense for those days, at his command.

Consider, for a moment, what that power meant, in the hands of one who had been a king since four years old. It meant that his will had always been law to those about him. He had heard only pleasant words, because no one had dared tell him an unpleasant truth. What chance, then, had he, coming to manhood in such circumstances, of knowing anything of the real truth about the world and about his subjects?

The French peasantry