Persecution did not stop with the expulsion of the missionaries, nor at the death of Iyeyasu was any respite given to the native Christians. And this brings us to the closing scene of this history—the tragedy of Shimabara. In the autumn of 1637 the peasantry of a convert district in Hizen, driven past endurance by the fierce ferocity of the persecution, assembled to the number of thirty thousand, and, fortifying the castle of Shimabara, declared open defiance to the Government; their opposition was soon overborne; troops were sent against them, and after a short but desperate resistance all the Christians were put to the sword. With the rising of Shimabara, and its sanguinary suppression by the Government, the curtain falls on the early history of Christianity in Japan.
COLLAPSE OF THE POWER OF CHARLES V
FRANCE SEIZES GERMAN BISHOPRICS
A.D. 1552
LADY C. C. JACKSON
Henry II, son of Francis I, ascended the throne of France in 1547. It had been the ambition of the French to establish the eastern boundary of their country on the Rhine, and thence along the summit of the Alps to the Mediterranean Sea. Jealousy of the growing power of his father's old enemy, the emperor Charles V, probably added to the French King's eagerness to fulfil the desire of his people for extension of their borders.
Charles was now occupied with the religious wars in Germany, and Henry prepared to improve his opportunity by taking full advantage of the Emperor's situation. The fact that the Protestants among his own subjects were cruelly persecuted did not deter the French monarch from furthering his ambition by consenting to assist the German Protestants against their own sovereign.
In 1551, when for six years there had been no actual war between France and the empire, Henry entered into an alliance with German princes against the Emperor. Several of those princes, headed by Maurice of Saxony, had secretly formed a league to resist by force of arms the "measures employed by Charles to reduce Germany to insupportable and perpetual servitude."