Part 1

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[Illustration: The Imperial Austrian Councillors are thrown out of the window of the castle of the Hradschin, at Prague, by the enraged Bohemian Deputies, thus precipitating the Thirty Years' War

Painting by Vacslav Brozik]

THE GREAT EVENTS

BY

FAMOUS HISTORIANS

A COMPREHENSIVE AND READABLE ACCOUNT OF THE WORLD'S HISTORY, EMPHASIZING THE MORE IMPORTANT EVENTS, AND PRESENTING THESE AS COMPLETE NARRATIVES IN THE MASTER-WORDS OF THE MOST EMINENT HISTORIANS

NON-SECTARIAN NON-PARTISAN NON-SECTIONAL

ON THE PLAN EVOLVED FROM A CONSENSUS OF OPINIONS GATHERED FROM THE MOST DISTINGUISHED SCHOLARS OF AMERICA AND EUROPE, INCLUDING BRIEF INTRODUCTIONS BY SPECIALISTS TO CONNECT AND EXPLAIN THE CELEBRATED NARRATIVES, ARRANGED CHRONOLOGICALLY. WITH THOROUGH INDICES, BIBLIOGRAPHIES, CHRONOLOGIES, AND COURSES OF READING

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

ROSSITER JOHNSON, LL.D.

ASSOCIATE EDITORS

CHARLES F. HORNE, Ph.D.

JOHN RUDD, LL.D.

_With a staff of specialists_

_VOLUME XI_

[Illustration: Decorative]

The National Alumni

COPYRIGHT, 1905,

BY THE NATIONAL ALUMNI

CONTENTS

VOLUME XI PAGE

_An Outline Narrative of the Great Events_, xiii CHARLES F. HORNE

_Henry Hudson Explores the Hudson River (A.D. 1609)_, 1 HENRY R. CLEVELAND

_Galileo Overthrows Ancient Philosophy_ _The Telescope and Its Discoveries (A.D. 1610)_, 14 SIR OLIVER LODGE

_The Beginning of British Power in India (A.D. 1612)_, 30 BECKLES WILLSON

_The Dutch Settlement of New York (A.D. 1614)_, 44 DAVID T. VALENTINE

_Harvey Discovers the Circulation of the Blood (A.D. 1616)_, 50 THOMAS H. HUXLEY

_The "Defenestration" at Prague (A.D. 1618)_ _The Thirty Years War_, 62 SAMUEL R. GARDINER CHARLES F. HORNE

_The First American Legislature (A.D. 1619)_, 76 CHARLES CAMPBELL

_Introduction of Negroes into Virginia (A.D. 1619)_ _Spread of Slavery and Cultivation of Tobacco_, 81 CHARLES CAMPBELL JOHN M. LUDLOW

_English Pilgrims Settle at Plymouth (A.D. 1620)_, 93 JOHN S. BARRY

_The Birth of Modern Scientific Methods (A.D. 1620)_ _Bacon and Descartes_, 116 GEORGE HENRY LEWES

_Siege of La Rochelle (A.D. 1627)_ _Richelieu Rules France_, 129 ANDREW D. WHITE

_The Great Puritan Exodus to New England_ _The Founding of Boston (A.D. 1630)_, 153 JOHN G. PALFREY

_Triumph and Death of Gustavus Adolphus at Luetzen (A.D. 1632)_, 174 BENJAMIN CHAPMAN

_Recantation of Galileo (A.D. 1633)_, 184 SIR OLIVER LODGE

_The Educational Reform of Comenius (A.D. 1638)_, 192 SIMON SOMERVILLE LAURIE

_The First Written Free Constitution in the World (A.D. 1639)_ _Earliest Union among American Colonies (A.D. 1643)_, 205 GIDEON H. HOLLISTER JOHN MARSHALL

_Abolition of the Court of Star-chamber (A.D. 1641)_ _The Popular Revolt against Charles I_, 215 HENRY HALLAM LORD MACAULAY

_The Founding of Montreal (A.D. 1642)_, 232 ALFRED SANDHAM

_Presbyterianism Established_ _Meeting of the Westminster Assembly (A.D. 1643)_, 238 DAVID MASSON

_Masaniello's Revolt at Naples (A.D. 1647)_, 253 ALFRED VON REUMONT

_The Peace of Westphalia (A.D. 1648)_ _The War of the Fronde_, 285 ARTHUR HASSALL

_Religious Toleration Proclaimed in Maryland (A.D. 1649)_, 303 G. L. DAVIS

_The Great Civil War in England_ _The Execution of Charles I (A.D. 1649)_, 311 LORD MACAULAY CHARLES KNIGHT

_Cromwell's Campaign in Ireland (A.D. 1649)_, 335 FREDERIC HARRISON

_Molière Creates Modern Comedy (A.D. 1659)_, 347 HENRI VAN LAUN

_Cromwell's Rule in England_ _The Restoration (A.D. 1660)_, 357 THOMAS CARLYLE JOHN RICHARD GREEN SAMUEL PEPYS

_Universal Chronology (A.D. 1609-1660)_, 387 JOHN RUDD

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

VOLUME XI PAGE

_The imperial Austrian Councillors are thrown out of the window of the castle of Hradschin by the enraged Bohemian Deputies, thus precipitating the Thirty Years' War (page 65)_, Frontispiece Painting by Vacslaw Brezik.

_Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers at Plymouth Rock_, 106 Painting by A. Gisbert.

AN OUTLINE NARRATIVE

TRACING BRIEFLY THE CAUSES, CONNECTIONS, AND CONSEQUENCES OF

THE GREAT EVENTS

(ERA OF POLITICAL-RELIGIOUS WARS)

CHARLES F. HORNE

Gazing across the broader field of universal history, one comes more and more to overlook the merely temporary, constantly shifting border lines of states, and to see Western Europe as a whole, to watch its nations as a single people guided by similar developments of the mind, impelled by similar stirrings of the heart, taking part in but a single story, the marvellous tale of man's advance.

This sense of an all-enfolding unity, an ever-advancing common destiny, sinks weakest perhaps in the period we now approach. The nations seem sharply separated in their careers. In the preceding age the power of Spain and the fanaticism of its monarch, Philip II, had made the reëstablishment of Catholicism the dominant question throughout Europe. But in 1609 Philip III of Spain abandoned his father's attempt to conquer Holland and again enforce a universal religion. In 1610 Henry IV of France, who had brought peace and amity out of the savage religious wars within his own realm, fell under an assassin's knife. These two events may be accepted as marking a turn in the current of the world, a change in the thoughts of men. The next half-century saw wars indeed, bloody and bitter wars, but they were no longer primarily religious. The strife was more than half political, and men of opposite faiths found themselves at times allied upon the battle-field. The feeling of religious brotherhood grew weaker, that of political allegiance stronger.

GROWTH OF NATIONAL SPIRIT

The triumph of Holland had much to do with this. During almost a generation the Catholics of the Southern Netherlands had been united with the Protestants of the Northern Provinces in desperate war against the tyranny of Spain; and though only Holland finally achieved independence, her people could scarce forget their long brotherhood with the Catholic South. And now Holland was a republic, her people were self-governing! Looking with prophetic vision into the future, we may assert that this was only the first step toward a broader union of all the nations when every man shall be self-governing, and hence all shall be equal and united and progressive. But for its own time at least the freedom of Holland was a sharp influence toward division among the people of Europe, toward the establishment of differences, the growth of national as opposed to universal brotherhood.

There was, to be sure, an earlier republic in Europe, Switzerland. But the Swiss maintained themselves by their isolation, their remoteness from other nations and from one another in their bleak mountain valleys. The Dutch, on the contrary, inhabited a flat sea-coast; they were traders; their very existence depended on intercourse with other lands. Hence they had to be ever alert in defence of their hard-won freedom. The spirit of nationality, of patriotism grew strong within them. At one time they had been members of the German empire; at another, subjects of France, of Burgundy, of Spain. Now they were Hollanders, a distinct nation by themselves, and an example to all others of what a united land of men might do.

France also had learned a stronger sense of nationality from her hero-king, Henry IV. Always, through all his religious wars, he had insisted that he was king of all Frenchmen, both Catholic and Protestant, and would be a father to them all. He withdrew his Protestant army from besieging Paris when the surrender of the city seemed certain, abandoned his triumph "lest Frenchmen starve." Englishmen, too, in the age of Elizabeth, had learned to regard themselves not only as different from but as far superior to men of other races. Spain both by her victories and by her sufferings had opened a gap between her people and others. Only Germany, through her very importance and vague imperial predominance over the surrounding lands, failed to find within herself that necessity for union which made other kingdoms strong.

By this internal division Germany was now plunged into the awful tragedy of the Thirty Years' War, a partly political, partly religious contest in which all the nations of Europe by degrees took some part. Thus the war forms to a certain extent a centre around which the movements of the age are grouped. England also had her great religious strife, her Puritan revolution, which collapsed in 1660. Yet on the whole the age is political even more than religious, and the ablest statesman of the day, Richelieu, the most successful guardian France has ever known, reaped for his own land all the benefits of the world-wide turmoil. France, which had so often seemed on the point of assuming the foremost place in Europe and had been so often checked, now advanced definitely to the front. The Bourbons, descendants of Henry IV, took the rank of the decaying Hapsburg family as the chief rulers of Europe. Historians often call this the age of Richelieu.

DECAY OF THE HAPSBURG POWER

Spain and Austria, the two great Hapsburg states, both decayed in power. Italy, the Hapsburg dependent, lost the last vestiges of her ancient intellectual supremacy. Everywhere the South of Europe gave place to the North.

The blight of the Inquisition was upon Spain. The Moors were banished, the Jews were banished; and it had been the industry of these two races which had largely supported the pride and laziness of the hidalgos. In Italy, too, the Inquisition held sway. Galileo with his telescope revealed facts which proved the theories of Copernicus, and made impossible the ancient idea that our earth was the centre of the universe.[1] All Europe rang with his discoveries; but the Church refused to understand, forbade him to teach doctrines which it declared heretical. For a time the astronomer's mouth was closed, but not so the minds of those who had listened to him. In England, where thought was free, Harvey founded medical science by his proof of the circulation of the blood;[2] the Lord Chancellor Bacon wrote his celebrated _Novum Organum_, pointing out to modern investigators the methods they must follow. In Germany Comenius revitalized the dead world of education.[3] In France Descartes created within his own mind a revolution scarce less important than that of Luther. He freed philosophy from its thraldom to religion. He bade the mind of man to stand by itself, lone in the midst of an unmeasured universe, and discover of what one thing it could feel assured by its own unbiassed thought. His famous first conclusion, "I think, therefore I exist," stands as the corner-stone of modern philosophy.[4]

Meanwhile Galileo, roused by the encouragement of scientific friends, began a second time with infinite wit and sarcasm to expound and defend his doctrines. The Church took him more sternly in hand. He was imprisoned by the Inquisition and emerged from its dark chambers a broken and silent man. Philosophy, terrified, fled from Italy, not to return until over two centuries of the world's advance had prepared for her a less barbaric greeting.[5]

Southern Italy was ruled by viceroys from Spain, but so feeble had the Hapsburg grip become that Masaniello, a fisherman of Naples, was able to rouse his city against its tyrants, and for over a year Spain was unable to reëstablish her authority. When she did, it was only by the treachery of the peasant leaders who had succeeded the murdered Masaniello.[6]

The internal decay of Spain and the lassitude of her two feeble sovereigns, Philip III (1598-1621) and Philip IV (1621-1665), prevented her from rendering any material assistance to Austria, where the other branch of the Hapsburgs, descendants of Charles V's brother Ferdinand, were reduced to struggle for their very existence. Ferdinand and his immediate successor as Emperor of Germany had kept the religious peace carefully, and Germany had prospered. But then came new emperors who repudiated their methods--Ferdinand had been deemed by the Church little better than a Protestant. In 1608 the Protestant princes, becoming suspicious, formed a league for mutual defence. The Catholics under Maximilian of Bavaria formed an answering league in 1609. They almost came to open war that year over a disputed succession in one of the smaller duchies, the Protestants appealing to Holland for help and the Catholics to Spain. Fortunately the terrible example of the civil wars they had seen in France, held them back for a time. But always there were arising new grounds for quarrel.

THE THIRTY YEARS' WAR

In 1618 the actual war began. A new leader, Ferdinand II, young and intensely Catholic, had risen to guide the Hapsburg fortunes in Austria, had successfully forced that land to resume the old religion, and now aimed to do the same in Bohemia. The Bohemians, famed fanatics of the unforgotten Hussite wars, broke into open rebellion, threw Ferdinand's ministers through a window, and so roused the war that ruined Germany.[7]

Ferdinand became Emperor of Germany the next year (1619), and called the Catholic league to his aid in Bohemia. The rebels elected as king one of the German electors, a son-in-law of the King of England, and head of the Protestant league. Slowly, unwillingly, the various German states, and the surrounding countries also, found themselves dragged into the struggle. At first Emperor Ferdinand was successful, Bohemia was completely subdued and made Catholic, as Austria had been. A great general and shrewd contriver, Wallenstein, rose to the Emperor's aid and laid Germany prostrate at his feet. For a moment the Hapsburgs seemed as all-powerful as in the proudest days of Charles V. But his own coreligionists turned against Ferdinand. The princes of the Catholic league grew frightened; he was indeed crushing Protestantism, but he was trampling on their rights as well. They fell away from his alliance. Richelieu, also dreading the Hapsburg aggrandizement, brought France to take part in the war. Sweden's hero-king Gustavus Adolphus invaded Germany to defend the Protestant faith. He won splendid victories, but at last fell in his supreme battle at Luetzen, from which Wallenstein's troops fled defeated (1632).[8]

The war had now lasted fourteen years. The Emperor could raise no more armies. His one able general, Wallenstein, was slain as a traitor. Germany was exhausted. Yet because no one power would consent to the others' proposed terms of peace, the war dragged on and on, in such feeble fashion as it could. Its misery fell almost wholly upon the unhappy peasantry. The armies of both sides lived upon the country; what they could not devour they destroyed, lest it be of use to the enemy. Germany became a desert, and its people starved amid their desolated homes. The troops, brutalized by long familiarity with suffering, tortured their captives to extort money or sometimes, it would seem, for the mere pleasure of the sport.

The Emperor Ferdinand died in the midst of the hideous ruin he had wrought. The Swedes, who had long abandoned the high principles of Gustavus, demanded territory as the price of peace. So did France. At last in 1648 the Peace of Westphalia was arranged. By it France became the foremost state of Europe; Sweden became one of the great powers; England, engrossed in her own civil war, could pull no chestnuts from the fire; but the German empire fell practically to pieces. Switzerland and Holland were formally declared outside of it. Each little prince got what increase of power he wanted, and the authority of the empire disappeared. The Hapsburgs still retained their title as its heads, but their real authority was confined entirely to their personal domains, Austria, Bohemia, and such part of Hungary as they could hold against the Turks.[9]

Historians tell us that in those terrible thirty years the population of Germany had dwindled from thirty million to only twelve million; nearly two-thirds of its common people had perished, mostly of starvation. The stored-up wealth of ages had been destroyed. The very character of the race had changed, broken from its old hardihood to temporary feebleness and fawning. The land had been set back an entire century, perhaps two, in its advance toward civilization. That is what war means. That is glory!

RULE OF RICHELIEU

Meanwhile France, profiting by the feebleness of her neighbors, had made great strides. At first the death of Henry IV had threatened her with the old anarchy. Louis XIII, Henry's son, was but a child; the Queen-mother, who became regent, was an Italian, Marie de' Medici, and devoted to the Spanish interests. The Huguenots feared renewed persecution. The nobles of the court grasped after renewed power.

In such turmoil was the land that it seemed necessary to summon the "States-General," the assembly of all the notables of France, the last one to be called until that eventful year of 1789. The States-General talked and dissolved, having done nothing but reveal that there was one capable man among its members, a young bishop who was to be a cardinal, Richelieu. His plans for reform and pacification were not adopted, but he drew the attention of the Queen Regent and became her chief adviser, later the chief adviser of the King.

Richelieu did four things for France. He broke the power of the Huguenots, who had become a political party, and a very troublesome one, a state within a state, independent and defiant, with their impenetrable capital at La Rochelle. After one of the most remarkable sieges of history Richelieu captured La Rochelle, crushed the resistance of the Huguenots by repeated defeats elsewhere, and then--granted them complete religious freedom![10]

It is one of the epochs of the world, the beginning of toleration not through force, but through free-will. A Catholic and a cardinal, having complete power to force these Protestants to his will, bids them worship as they choose, asking only that they become patriotic Frenchmen.

Next Richelieu humbled the great nobles of France, hanging them when they disobeyed his laws. Next by his part in the Thirty Years' War he won territory from both Germany and Spain. He was by no means the first Catholic ruler thus to seek Protestant allies; Francis I and Henry II had both done so in France; in Germany Charles V had sent a Lutheran army against the Pope. But it was Richelieu's successful adherence to this plan that positively and finally relegated religion to a minor place in statecraft, and made nationality, political supremacy, what some have called "vainglory," the foremost impulse.

Last, not least, in Richelieu's brilliant career, is to be noted that he revived literature in France. He created the "French Academy," the "forty immortals" in whose successors Paris still takes pride to-day. The French drama was born. Corneille wrote _The Cid_, and the Cardinal himself took his pen and attempted to produce a better tragedy. Comedy, too, arose. Molière began the marvellous career which a little later was to make him the undying idol of the stage in France.[11]

Nor did Richelieu's death (1642) turn his country from the triumphant course toward which he had led the way. His King died with him, and his power passed to another cardinal, Mazarin, ruling for another baby-king, who was to be Louis XIV. Mazarin found himself confronting an almost similar situation to that which had followed the death of Henry IV. There was a child upon the throne; an incapable queen-mother as regent, foreign, and friendly to the Spaniards; the nobles grasped after power; Paris grumbled under taxation. Mazarin had even to face a feeble, frivolous civil war against himself, the Fronde.[12] But he soon established his supremacy, secured for France in 1648 all she had earned out of the war with Germany, and then ruled with firm hand, bringing wealth and peace and prosperity to the state until his death in 1661. Richelieu and Mazarin made possible that most spectacular period of all French history which immediately followed under Louis XIV.

THE PURITAN REVOLUTION

Turn now to England, to see why she had held so apart from the continental struggles of the period. James I, her Scotch king of 1603, had indeed interfered a bit in the Thirty Years' War, seeking to aid his unlucky son-in-law, the King of Bohemia. But James had soon found difficulties enough at home. The Elizabethan age had made Englishmen feel very highly their individual importance. Each man, through the entire social scale down even to the peasantry, had felt a personal interest, a personal pride in the repulse of the Spaniards and the upholding of the Queen. She tyrannized over them as a woman; they defended her as men. But when this foreigner, this Scotch king, came to rule them, they saw no need to yield him such exact obedience. Freedom of thought had brought with it new political ideas, and men talked much of the authority of Parliament and their right to tax themselves. James, on the contrary, had a large conception of the "divine right" of kings, not to be restricted by any law whatever, and a still larger opinion of his own personal ability and unfailing wisdom. Gradually there grew up a distinct opposition between King and Parliament, centring always on that one question--who should lay the taxes, that is, who provide the income of the King? The English revolution, like the American one to follow, gave to principles far more noble in themselves the air of a mere money dispute.

James, dying in 1625, left a very pretty quarrel to his son. Charles I, more able and kingly than his father, but equally obstinate, equally devoted to the Stuart doctrine of a king's divinity, finally endeavored to rule without summoning any of these arguing parliaments. To accomplish this he had to gather money by other methods, declared illegal by his people. Always appealing to the law, they grew more and more bitter as Charles turned it against them, putting in office judges who would do his will, reëstablishing the ancient Court of Star-Chamber, with its power to torture witnesses.

Moreover, there was growing up in England a type of more extreme Protestantism. The English Church had retained many of the forms of Rome, including its hierarchal system of priests and bishops. These were dear to the hearts of the Stuart kings, whose Protestantism had never been very radical. The Scotch Church, on the other hand, had swung far from Rome indeed, and many Protestants everywhere refused to have any priestly interpreter intervene between them and their own consciences, their own beliefs. In England these men came to be called Puritans. They were deeply earnest; religion was ever in their thoughts; they had protested even against the wickedness of the theatre in Shakespeare's time; and now as they watched the light frivolity of the court they became imbittered. They called Charles the "man of sin." Round these stern fanatics began to centre the general opposition to the King.

At length the Scotch Protestants broke into open revolt, and the King found he must have help, must summon a parliament at last. That was the beginning of the end. The Englishmen who gathered at his call were in no pleasant mood. They at once took steps to secure other parliaments to follow immediately on their own. All Charles' encroachments on the law were overturned; his courts, Star-Chamber and others, were abolished; his chief minister was declared a traitor and beheaded.[13] The King, helpless, infuriated, raised the standard of civil war (1642).

The strife was thus in its inception political; but it soon became religious as well. Since the King was the head of the English Church, most of its members rallied round him. The Puritans in Parliament secured the calling of a convention to settle the various religious questions before the nation. This "Westminster Assembly" established the Presbyterian Church.[14]

The less extreme members of the opposition to the King grew doubtful; they saw whither the Puritans would lead them. The war became one of stern religious fanaticism against gallant reckless Cavalier loyalty--of the middle classes against the aristocracy and their servitors. Cromwell rose as the type and model of the Puritans. Under his lead they defeated the Cavaliers and executed their King. Charles perished on the scaffold, and England, following Holland's lead, was declared a republic. This was in 1649, the year after the Peace of Westphalia.[15]