CHAPTER IV
THE WANING POWER OF SPAIN
Charles V. resigning the Crown of Spain, gave it over to his son Philip II., who married Mary, Queen of England. He had already ceded to him the kingdom of Naples. With the Crown of Spain went the Netherlands; and Charles would have wished his son to receive the Imperial title also. The Electors of Germany, however, refused to elect Philip and, with the assent of Charles, Ferdinand, Charles's younger brother, became the new Emperor.
Charles, although a firm supporter of the authority of the Church of Rome, had done his best, by the publication of that "Interim" mentioned in the last chapter, and by a merciful treatment of the defeated Protestants, to bring the two parties together again. He failed; but he had made the effort. The character of Philip did not dispose him to follow his father in any attempts at peace-making. He was ardently jealous for the ecclesiastical authority of Rome and appears to have had much of the tyrant's spirit: he was very impatient of opposition, and showed no favour to any who differed from him in opinion. Heresy was, in his view, a sin against the Church, which it was his duty to put down by the most effective means in his power, wherever he might find it among his subjects. Wherever it was even so much as suspected, the strictest search should be made for its unmasking.
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And to him, being in this mood, there was a machine ready to his hand--an institution of the Church known as the Inquisition. Inquisition means inquiry; and the particular object for which the Inquisition was instituted was to inquire into alleged instances of heresy--that is to say, of doctrines and practices of which the Church did not approve--and also into instances of the practice of magic and sorcery, which were deemed to be miracles performed by men with the aid of the devil.
The first institution of "Inquisitors," or officials appointed for such inquiry, dated back to the early centuries of the Church's existence, and in those early centuries the punishment which the Inquisitors were allowed to impose on persons convicted of heresy were very mild in comparison with later penalties. They were not allowed to inflict death, nor to use torture in order to extract confession.
In the time of Philip II., the Inquisition in Spain, under the name of the Holy Office, became largely independent of the Church of Rome. It actually brought before its Courts bishops of the Church. And it shrank from no cruelty of torture inflicted on suspected persons, in order to make them confess: it even tortured witnesses, to extract from them the testimony, true or false, which the Inquisitors desired. Convicted persons were publicly burnt. There was no appeal from its decisions. An accused person had scarcely a chance of escaping conviction. And the religious zeal of the Inquisitors was quickened by the circumstance that the estates of the convicted were confiscated and distributed to the Church, or partly to the Church and partly to the Crown.
[Sidenote: Netherlands in revolt]
It is no more than fair to the Church of Rome to say that though the severity and injustice of the Inquisition under the Church's direct authority were harsh enough, they were far less cruel than under {57} the Holy Office of Spain, which became a veritable terror. The Netherlanders had largely accepted reformed doctrines. They had become Protestant, that is to say heretics, in the eyes of Philip. He had been their sovereign only a few years when he sent his Inquisitors among them to root the heresy out by torture, confiscation of estates, and by burning at the stake. The natives were brave and stubborn. They resisted with armed force.
It had all the aspect of a vain, even a ridiculous resistance--bound to fail, certain to be punished with relentless cruelty. To enforce obedience and to carry out measures of punishment, Philip sent an army under command of a general notorious for his harsh severity, the Duke of Alva. In such an outlined sketch as this the details cannot be given of the extraordinary struggle which the Netherlands, under that very great leader and statesman, William of Orange, surnamed the Silent, finally brought to a successful end against all the might of Spain. Again and again their endurance seemed on the point of being overcome. Once, at least, they were saved only by the desperate expedient of breaking chasms in the raised dykes which protect that low-lying land from the sea, and allowing the water to flood the country. They had a small naval force before this struggle began. Dutch ships had helped Charles in that attempt which he made to put down the Mahommedan pirates of the north coast of Africa. Now, as the fight with Spain went on, they added to their fleet. With but a few ships, they gained a victory, which meant much to them, over a far larger Spanish fleet. Some of the Spanish ships captured in that battle helped to increase their own naval forces.
England, under Mary, whom Philip had married in 1554, naturally would give Holland no help. She had, besides, her own religious troubles, for Mary, {58} under her husband's direction, was doing all that she dared to bring England back under the authority of Rome. No tribunal with the name of Inquisition or of Holy Office was established, but the persecution of Protestants, with torture and burning, went forward almost as briskly as if there had been. A small force came to Holland's help from Germany, at one moment of the long struggle, but little could be expected from that country, in which the states were divided in their sympathies between Rome and the Reformation. The attitude of France was uncertain and varied. Her natural action would have been to oppose Spain, as in the days of Francis and Charles, but she was a Roman Catholic country. She was distracted, too, by her own troubles with her own Protestants, called Huguenots. The form of Protestantism which had made its way in France was somewhat different from that taught by Luther. It inclined to the doctrines taught by Calvin. But Calvin was a reformer as earnest and even more bitter than Luther himself in opposition to Rome. It was what has been called, after him, the Calvinistic form of Protestantism which prevailed in the Netherlands also, and, with some modification, in England and Scotland. The details of the difference we need not consider. The main feature which they had in common and which so affected this Greatest Story was their resistance to Rome.
[Sidenote: The Huguenots]
The origin of that name Huguenot, by which the Protestants in France were known, is doubtful, nor does it greatly matter. Beginning in the reign of Francis, the reformed party in France grew stronger during the reign of several succeeding kings. There were two great families in France at this time, the Bourbons and the Guises. The former became leaders of the Protestants and the latter of the Catholics. Civil war broke out in 1562. Elizabeth of England {59} sent troops to help the Huguenots, but the fortune of the war went against them. A Catholic League was formed for their extermination. A general massacre of Huguenots on St. Bartholomew's Day, in 1572, has made that day lamentable in the reformed Church ever since.
Still the Protestants held on, in the far west of France, under the leadership of that Henry of Navarre who became King of France in 1589. To bring peace to his country he formally declared himself a Catholic, but he so favoured the cause of reform that two years before the end of the century he passed a famous measure, the Edict of Nantes, by which the French Protestants were granted freedom to think and act as they pleased in all religious matters, without penalty of any kind.
Such being the divisions in France during the struggle of the Netherlands against Spain, it was not likely that she would give much assistance to either side. Elizabeth sent a small army, which effected little. She might perhaps have been more liberal with her help, but England had her full share of troubles too. There was still a large English party sympathising with Rome. The change in the State religion which Elizabeth effected as soon as she succeeded her half-sister Mary--the Catholic and the wife of the King of Spain--was not easy. She found herself with a French war on her hands, a war into which Philip had persuaded Mary towards the end of her reign. Almost its only result had been that Calais, England's last possession in France, had been lost to her.
Elizabeth quickly made peace with France; and that peace included Scotland also. We have seen, and we shall see again, how ready France always was to embarrass England by taking the side of Scotland in the constant Scottish and English wars. Elizabeth {60} made peace with France; but since at this moment there really were two parties dividing France, it was not easy to be at peace with both. Elizabeth, as we also have seen, so far helped the Bourbons, the Huguenots, as to send some troops to their aid; and for that aid Havre, with its fine harbour at the mouth of the Seine, was handed over to England. But the Huguenots were defeated. Havre was English only for a very short time.
And Catholic France was now again helping Scotland, favouring the cause of Mary, Queen of Scots, who married a short-lived French king. In Scotland the reformed religion, of Calvin's type, had taken a hold which was destined to grow firmer as time went on; but for the present the Catholics were in strength there too. Their queen was Catholic. She was hardly more than in name a queen, for she was but a child when she came to the throne, and spent years of her short life as Elizabeth's prisoner. Finally she was executed, most probably by Elizabeth's order, although it was an order which Elizabeth denied.
It was almost wholly by their own stout courage that the United Provinces, as they were called, of the Netherlands did at length gain their freedom, and not only freedom to serve God as they saw fit, but also freedom from the sovereignty of Spain. It was a freedom which was not formally acknowledged till many years later; but it was practically won in 1579. These United Provinces were seven in number, of which one was called Holland: and this Holland came, after a while, to be the name for the whole. The seven lay in the north, and were united as a federation under the rule of William of Orange. The southern provinces remained for a while longer under the power of Spain.
Into this new and free State came many of the reformed religion flying from persecution in their {61} own countries. Holland became populous. Her industries developed. Her foreign trade increased. She had a large trading fleet. It ventured into those waters round the Cape of Good Hope which the Portuguese claimed as their own. It disputed with them the trade of the islands in the Malay Archipelago. And even here the fighting took on something of a religious character, for the battle was between ships of Protestant Holland and of Catholic Portugal.
Exactly the same character pertained to certain encounters of ships which began to take place more and more frequently westward of the line which the Pope's Bull had marked out to divide the sphere of Portugal from that of Spain--encounters between the ships of Elizabeth and of Philip of Spain. By the year 1581 that line lost what importance it ever had, because Philip made good, by force of arms, his rather doubtful claim to the throne of Portugal. For three reigns, lasting over sixty years, the King of Spain was King of Portugal also, although the smaller kingdom never lost her national identity.
[Sidenote: England's Navy]
England had begun to have a considerable fleet. She had long had necessity for ships of war to protect her exports, principally of wool, to the Continent. She was under the necessity of making her fleet stronger and stronger by reason of the growing strength, just noted, of the Dutch fleet, which came from all the ports across the Channel. And especially she had need to strengthen it since Philip, whose proposal of marriage Elizabeth had declined, threatened her with his Armadas. Hostility to England had become a religious duty in his sight. Elizabeth had been excommunicated. The Act of Supremacy, by virtue of which her father had been declared head of the Church in England, had been passed again in her favour, in order to wipe out the measures of reaction {62} towards Rome which had marked the reign of Mary. Ireland had risen in revolt in 1560, and a joint expedition of Spaniards and Italians landed to aid the rebels. They were overwhelmed and destroyed by one, Raleigh, whom Elizabeth knighted as Sir Walter.
And so, on the English side, and on the side of all the princes of Europe who professed the reformed religion, the war against Spain became a religious war. To waylay the Spanish treasure-ships from the Indies was an adventure which appealed to the sailors of England. It gratified them to get these treasures for their own and for their Queen and country, and moreover it was this wealth, thus robbed from the conquered Indies, with which the enemies of the reformed Church built and equipped their ships of war. So we have Drake and Frobisher and other heroes adventuring into the Pacific and even sailing round the world in vessels which seem to us almost ridiculously small for such great enterprise. They attacked any Spanish ship they met, they landed and sacked Spanish settlements in South America, they even ventured into the very harbours of Spain herself, to "singe the King of Spain's beard," as they put it.
The King of Spain could not for ever endure these "singeings" so insulting to his dignity. In 1588 he launched, for the destruction of England, the largest naval force ever seen. It was that force known to history as the Great Armada.
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[Illustration: SIR FRANCIS DRAKE.]
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Our country was saved assuredly more by the storms of heaven than by the valour of even such splendid fighting seamen as the troublous times had produced. Survivors of the vast fleet of Spain, after a severe hammering by Drake in the Channel, completely circumnavigated our islands, going eastward and northward through the Straits of Dover and so round the north coasts of Scotland and down along {64} the western shores, everywhere losing ships on the way. Even now, in such lonely places as some of the small islands lying to the north of Scotland, are found evidences of the Spaniards' wreckage. Only a very small number of that Grand Armada sailed their crippled way back into the harbours of Spain.
In the years that followed, England then being allied with Henry IV. of France, her ships were seen more than once attacking the shipping in the very harbours of proud Spain.
It is obvious, from the position as official head of the reformed Church in which the Act of Supremacy had first placed our Henry VIII., and had then confirmed, in a position of scarcely less authority, his daughter Elizabeth, that the form which Protestantism took in England, as the State religion, differed from its forms elsewhere. On the Continent, none of the rulers of the States that had adopted the doctrines of Luther or of Calvin had thought of claiming such a position. In England under Henry and under Elizabeth it must have seemed that, while protesting against the authority of the Pope over the Church, Englishmen acquiesced in a like authority vested in the Crown. It was a transfer of allegiance. But Luther, and yet more so Calvin, would have bitterly resented that the Church should be under any authority except that of her own choosing. Moreover, the English Protestants retained many of the ceremonies and services, and performed many of the rites, of the Church of Rome. Calvin's ideal of worship was that it should consist in the simplest and most direct communication of man with God, with no aids of beautiful music and rich colour and other appeal to the emotions, such as the Romans used. All this he specially hated. The rules of life among pious followers of Calvin were extremely strict. Austere behaviour and a serious expression of countenance were rigidly {65} demanded of them. They regarded even the most innocent amusement as contrary to the spirit of their religion.
This is perhaps a difference which it would be out of place, in a story sketched in mere outlines, to mention even at such short length as this, were it not that it was a difference which had serious consequences in the reigns of those Scottish kings who succeeded Elizabeth on the throne of England. How that came about was thus:
[Sidenote: The Puritans]
In the reign of Mary, the Roman Catholic queen, very many English Protestants had fled abroad. They had gone to lands where the Calvinistic doctrines were followed. Under Elizabeth they ventured back into their native land; and the form of Protestantism that they found there was a shock to them. They could not range themselves as members of a Church that had practices which they detested. They formed themselves into a separate sect under the name of Puritans. At once they found themselves in opposition to, not in conformity with (and were therefore sometimes spoken of as Non-conformists), the national Church. They were subjected to persecution even by a Protestant Government. From denying the authority of the Crown as head of the Church, it was not a very long step to denying the authority of the Crown in other, less spiritual, matters. And it was this denial that led to Oliver Cromwell's Commonwealth, to the cutting off of Charles I.'s head, to the sailing of the Pilgrim Fathers to America, and all that was to follow therefrom. Surely we are justified in finding a space to note a difference of opinion in which such astonishing things had their beginning.
During Elizabeth's reign our country was reduced to its insular boundaries, and yet never before does there seem to have been a time when England was {66} so aware of her greatness as she was under Elizabeth. Never, moreover, was there such a splendour of English literary achievement, from the plays of Shakespeare downward.
The truth is that she really was doing a very great work, though probably Englishmen of that day only dimly realised what that work was. She, with the Dutch and other Protestant States, was gradually wearing down the greatness of Spain, and all that Spain stood for.
What Spain stood for was despotic power in Church and State. Our Henry and Elizabeth were despotic in both, but the Stuart kings who succeeded them were not made of the right human stuff for despots, and both Church and State won freedom under them. Spain's power suffered a gradual but constant diminution. She was fighting on all sides--constantly struggling with France or Italy.
And Elizabeth's seamen kept harrying her in every quarter of the Atlantic and even in the far Pacific, The English Colony of Newfoundland was established. Elizabeth had relations as far east and south as Persia, as far east and north as Muscovy, where Russia was gradually consolidating herself.
Russia gained an important victory over the Turks in 1569. Moscow, her capital, was indeed burnt by invading Mongols as late as 1571, but in the year following the conquerors were themselves defeated. The other Slav State, Poland, gained a great accession of strength by absorbing the large territories of Livonia and Lithuania. During the sixteenth century we do not find the Scandinavian nations taking much direct part in the big story, but in 1587 the King of Sweden was King of Poland also. The general tendency of affairs in that part of the world's stage, however, was for those two, Poland and Russia, to be forming themselves into two strong nations of Slav people, {67} on the eastern border of the Teutonic people of Germany. That is an element in the story to be borne in mind.
[Sidenote: Affairs in the East]
Farther eastward again, Russia was extending her power in Siberia and working out towards that China of which there is still little story to tell, because, of all nations of the world, she has ever changed least and most slowly. The day had not yet come for Russia's reaching southward towards Constantinople on the one side or towards India on the other. The Turk was as yet so strong that she had to fight hard to keep him out of her own borders. She was still on the defensive in that south-western corner of her empire.
But India had to suffer invasion nevertheless in this sixteenth century by a people coming down from Afghanistan and the north. They were Mongols, usually given the name of Moguls. They were a Mahommedan people, and under the reign of the Grand Mogul, Akbar, which covered nearly all the latter half of the century, they were continually extending their rule over the Hindus. It is in this Mahommedan invasion that we see the real beginning of that division and opposition in India of Hindus and Mahommedans which has played a large part in the story of that country ever since, and which is a principal cause of her troubles even to-day. There were Moslems in India before the coming of the so-called Moguls, but not in anything like the same force or number.
On the eastern side of Afghanistan lay Persia, and beyond Persia, to the west again, began the Turkish Empire. Between the Persians and these Ottoman Turks--Mahommedans both, but belonging to different sects--fighting went on with little pause, and with no result of any long duration. Persia's position was difficult, for on the eastern border she was always {68} subject to attack from the Moguls. That she kept her independence is due in part doubtless to the valour of her soldiers, but also, in large part, to the engagements of the Moguls with India and of the Turks with their European neighbours on land and sea. Even the heavy defeat of the Turkish navy at Lepanto by no means put an end to their activities in the Mediterranean. In 1573, two years after that battle, they lost Tunis; but were still strong enough to regain that valuable port the very next year.
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