CHAPTER V

THE WARS OF RELIGION

Elizabeth died in 1603, and there was no descendant of Henry VIII. to inherit the throne. But Henry VII.'s daughter had married the King of Scotland, and a grandson of Henry VII. now held the Scottish Crown with the title of James VI. On the death of Elizabeth he became rightful hereditary King of England also, with the title of James I.

And now it might indeed seem as if the United Kingdom was about to enter upon years of peace and glory. Elizabeth's prudence and the valour of her seamen had won her military fame. Her alliance was sought by princes as far off as the Tsar of Russia and the Sophy, as the ruler was called, of Persia. She had possessions in India, far away in the East, in America far in the West. For the first time in her story she had Scotland as a second self, instead of a constant enemy on her very border. Ireland appeared to be subjugated. And she had no possessions on the Continent to draw her into troubles with France.

This hopeful prospect was soon clouded over owing, in large measure, to the folly of the Stuart kings, as that dynasty was called of which the Scottish James was the first. And yet, if it had not been for their folly, and also for their weakness, it is possible that England might have had to suffer even greater trials than did befall her, by reason of the despotic power which had been won for the Crown by Henry VIII, {70} and his great ministers Wolsey and Cromwell. But before that power could be broken, and the people could regain the rights that legally were theirs under the provisions of Magna Carta, the country had to suffer miserably through civil war and one of the kings had to lose his head on the executioner's block.

James I. tried to govern as Henry VIII. had governed before him, that is to say, he tried to govern without summoning a Parliament. Legally it was Parliament only that could vote the money that the king required to carry on the government. James tried to extort this money by what were politely called "loans." If those from whom they were demanded paid the required contributions, well and good. If they refused to pay, the Crown had sufficient power to misuse the processes of the law so as to punish them for their refusal.

[Sidenote: The "middle class"]

Henry had been able to govern despotically because the power of the nobles had been so reduced by the Wars of the Roses, and because he did not hesitate to reduce their power still further by executing all who withstood him. But by the time we come to the seventeenth century and the Stuart kings we find a change in the composition of the nation. It is a change which had been in progress elsewhere in Europe. It was that change by which what was soon to be called the "middle class" came into existence.

We saw it beginning first, where all modern culture had its first beginning and rebirth (renaissance) in the cities of Italy. It was the change occasioned by the growing habit of men to live in towns and cities, in larger collections, no longer so scattered. After the cities of Italy, we saw that the cities of the Netherlands came to be strong and to acquire much independence. In our own land London was, from a very early day, the chief city. Its power was the greater because it had, like the Continental cities, its trained bands, {71} its citizens who were more or less trained as soldiers, ready to fight for the city liberties under the lead of the Lord Mayor as the chief citizen. Our country never produced quite such important citizens of this class as the Doges, as the rulers of Venice were called, or the Medici, the great bankers, the merchant princes, of Florence, and others. We may class our Lord Mayor more nearly with the Burgomasters of the semi-independent cities of the Netherlands. True, he never either had or claimed an independence equal to theirs at the time of their greatest power: but that was a power which became much diminished during the struggles of the Reformation period.

It is worth notice that many words in our language indicate how the dwellers in cities and towns seem to have been considered as necessarily superior in culture and civilisation to the countrymen. The very word "civilisation" itself is from "civis," a citizen, one who lives in a city. The man of "urbane" or "polite" manners is the man who lives in an "urbs," which is Latin for "town," or πόλις, which is Greek for "city."

Thus there grew everywhere a force of this kind, a force of burghers or townsfolk, a middle class, which increased in power as the numbers of townsmen and their riches increased. In England the people, as against the king, had an advantage which the people of Continental countries had not, in their legal right to send representatives to Parliament before contributing to the expense of government. The right existed, even while they were not able to enforce it. And with the growth of this new power of the middle class they began to have greater power for its enforcement, or, at least, greater power to resist the punishments which the king had tried to impose on those who refused to supply him with money which had not been legally voted for his use.

The Tudors, for all their masterfulness, had been {72} more prudent than the Stuarts proved themselves. Even Henry VIII., in Wolsey's time, had consented to take only one-half of the sum which he had demanded as a contribution from the people. And we may often see that these Tudors, although they dealt so despotically with their nobility, appear to have kept a finger, as it were, on the pulse of the nation, and to have known how to give way when that pulse beat too forcibly in opposition. Perhaps it takes a strong character to yield, on occasion. Certainly the Tudors had what we should call strong characters, and they knew how to yield. The Stuarts had less strength, and they brought the country into cruel trouble by their inability to yield. Rather, perhaps, we should say, they yielded when they should have stood firm, and stood firm when they should have yielded. Had they yielded more discreetly the people would have had to wait longer for their freedom, though it is possible they might have won it by less painful means.

And although James's prospects looked so fair when he came to the throne of England, he yet came to a troubled inheritance. There was all that trouble between the State Church and the Puritans, a trouble which grew greater and which perhaps the Scottish element that James brought down to England with him increased. The Scottish element, if it were not Roman Catholic in religion, was mainly of the extreme Puritan type.

There was this double source of trouble, therefore--the king's illegal endeavour to govern and to extort supplies of money without a Parliament, and the increasing tension between the persecuted Puritan party and the party of the State Church. Both Puritans and Catholics had already suffered some persecution under Elizabeth, and under James these persecutions became more severe. It was only a year or two after his accession that the Gunpowder Plot was {73} discovered--a plot contrived by the Catholics to blow up the Houses of Parliament and all the legislators therein. After this discovery, the persecution of the Catholics became more severe than ever.

[Sidenote: The Stuart Kings]

The Puritans did not attempt any desperate measures of the kind, but we have seen that the very spirit of the whole Protestant movement was a critical spirit, a spirit of judging, of forming an opinion and not merely accepting the opinion of some one else, even if that some one were the Pope himself. We have seen how difficult it was for those English Protestants who had been abroad to accept the conditions which they found when they returned to England--the king occupying a position in the Church not very different from that which the Pope claimed. They were very apt, then, to be critical in matters of government as well as in matters of religion. And the actions of James, and of all the Stuart kings, were of a kind to provoke a great deal of criticism. The feeling throughout England began to be very strong against the Crown. It was tension, strained feeling, between a large section of the nation--a section that began to be more powerful with that growing power, which we have noticed, of the middle class--and the king who was the head of the State Church.

On the Continent there was tension quite as acute between the people and the princes, but there it was tension not so much between any two sections of the reformed Church, as between the people as members of the reformed Church and the princes as representatives of the old Church. Moreover in some lands the princes and rulers themselves were of the reformed religion.

In France it is the Catholic Crown and the State forces that we see opposed to the Protestants, there called Huguenots.

In Germany a Catholic League is made by the {74} rulers of the States that adhered to the old faith, and, in opposition, a Protestant Union is formed by the princes of the States that have accepted the doctrines of the Reformation. But also in Germany, we see that, in one of the States at least, a Catholic prince is set against a large Protestant section of his people. This was in Bohemia.

It was in France that the first violent outbreak, due to this tension, occurred--a rising of the Huguenots under the great Prince Condé. It was quickly suppressed, and Condé was taken and imprisoned. That was a rising of very small and unimportant character compared to one which happened three years later, in 1618, as a consequence of the opposition which we have just noted, between the king and people in Bohemia.

Bohemia was the land of Huss, one of the fore-runners of Luther's Reformation. The spirit of Protestantism was strong there. By attempting to persecute the Bohemians for their religious opinions and practices the king at once made that spirit stronger still, and the people appealed for support to the German princes of the Protestant Union. It was support, energetically given.

[Sidenote: Gustavus Adolphus]

The Bohemian king, on his side, had the help of the German rulers of States in the Catholic League and also the promised help of France and of Spain. James of England was appealed to, but declined. He was very fully occupied at home. But we see a new figure appearing on the stage, a figure of most attractive and romantic interest--that of Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden.

Sweden, and all Scandinavia, by which I mean Norway and Denmark also, have not come very prominently on the stage of the Great Story. Nor will they be there now for a very long period at a time. But at least twice we shall see a Swedish king appearing {75} in a dramatic fashion. Little Denmark is also the occasional scene of a great event. One of these occasions arrived very soon after the date which we have now reached. That date is 1618, the year of the commencement of what is known as the Thirty Years' War. The principal leader of the Protestant forces in that war was Gustavus Adolphus coming down from Sweden at the head of his armies at a moment when his help was sorely needed.

It was not the first time that he had made himself known and felt in the affairs of Central and Eastern Europe. About the year 1611, when he came to the throne of Sweden, a design was formed of uniting Sweden with Russia. The throne of Russia was the object of much dispute at the moment. The year before, the Poles had invaded Russia, had taken Moscow, and the son of the Polish king had been crowned Tsar. In the year of Gustavus's accession as King of Sweden, the Poles were driven out of Moscow again. We should remember that the first rulers of Russia, those under whom she had begun to be a nation, came from Sweden, and since there was no very apparent heir to the throne it might have seemed to the Muscovites not unnatural that a Swede should step into it. In the end, quite a different solution of the question was arrived at. A Tsar of the family of Romanoff, very distantly connected with the original sovereign family, was put on the throne, and founded the dynasty which endured until the last Tsar was deposed and done to death in the terrible revolution which happened during the Great War.

It is impossible here to pursue all the ups and downs of the fighting which went on in Germany, for Germany provided the principal battle-fields through that war of thirty years' duration. Knowing what we do of modern warfare, it may seem difficult for us to understand how the people of the countries that {76} were the scene of such prolonged fighting could survive at all. But we have to understand that the way in which wars were fought in those days was very different from the present manner.

[Sidenote: The Thirty Years' War]

In the first place, the numbers of the fighters on either side was small--ridiculously small, we may think. The total population of the countries was nothing like as dense as it is now. But even in proportion to that lesser population, the fighting forces were small. In the recent Great War we saw "nations in arms," as has been truly said. Every man who could possibly be spared from the peace work that had to be continued if people were to have food to eat and other bare necessities of life, was pressed into the fighting. In those older wars only a very few of the population fought. The rest might go on with their ordinary work, for the most part of an agricultural kind, so long as their land was lucky enough not to be the scene of the fighting.

And the troops moved slowly, so that the campaign was restricted to comparatively small spaces. In the winter there was little or no fighting. The soldiers went into "winter quarters." Probably this was largely because the roads were so bad and the country was so undrained and marshy, that it was almost impossible for them to move about with any artillery and baggage horses.

Generally they went into the towns for their winter quarters. And if these towns had walls round them, as in those days many had, they were tolerably secure within the walls, so long as they had collected enough provisions, because there was no artillery powerful enough to batter down a strongly built wall.

Doubtless the misery caused by the perpetual fighting, and the coming and going of armies during so many years, was very great, even so. It is said that in the principal areas ravaged by the war the population {77} was reduced to one-third of what it had been before. But a consideration of the leisurely way in which the fighting was conducted, and the small number engaged in it, helps us to realise how the people of the countries were able to endure it at all. It also helps us to understand how it was that it took so long to bring the war to a conclusion.

The Protestant King of Denmark took the lead of the Union at the beginning of the long struggle, and at first the Protestants suffered many defeats. The great leader of the Catholics, Wallenstein, overran Denmark itself. The outlook for the Protestant cause was as black as it well could be. At this darkest moment Gustavus Adolphus came with his Swedes from the north, and the Catholics were driven back. Within a few years he was invading Germany, and in 1632 he fought the very important battle of Lutzen, in which the Protestant forces were completely victorious. But it was a victory dearly bought, for Gustavus himself was killed in the battle and the Protestant cause found no other leader of equal ability.

The war dragged on. Spain and France had come in as members of the Catholic League, against the Protestants, but now there arose in France a new policy which set these two Catholic nations in opposition to each other. It is an opposition that is closely associated with the name of one man, the French king's great minister, Richelieu.

We may note here one of the minor results of the Reformation. Previously to the Reformation we find great ecclesiastics, that is to say, men holding the highest positions in the Church, as great ministers of the State also. Our Cardinal Wolsey is an instance. Indeed you will scarcely find an instance anywhere of a great minister who was not a high ecclesiastic. The reason is simple: they were the men who had the {78} education, and nearly the only men. But now many laymen were beginning to be men of learning also, and in most of the Protestant countries the State and the Church were not nearly so closely associated together as they still were in the Roman Catholic countries. Therefore we now begin to see that, whereas in the Catholic countries the chief ministers of State continue to be cardinals and great men of the Church, in the Protestant countries it is so no longer. The king's ministers are most often laymen.

[Sidenote: Richelieu's policy]

During part of the Thirty Years' War the great French cardinal, Richelieu, had on his hands a heavy task in suppressing a most formidable rising of the Huguenots, whose greatest strength was in the west. England sent a fleet to their assistance, but it effected little. They were compelled to yield, after very brave resistance, and in 1629 was arranged that Peace of Alais, which is noted in history as marking "the end of religious wars." Under that treaty the Huguenots were given equal political rights in France with the Catholics.

Nevertheless in Germany the Thirty Years' War, which certainly had its rise as a war about religion, dragged on for nearly a score of years longer, until its final settlement by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648.

The terms of that treaty might have been less favourable to the Protestants than they were had the two great Catholic nations of France and Spain been in accord. They had fallen, however, as we have seen, into bitter opposition, which broke out into active war. The real occasion of the war was, as before, the too masterful power which was held in a single hand owing to the accident that the Habsburg family, which governed in Austria, wore the Crown of Spain also. It still possessed those Southern States of the Netherlands which had not won their independence, {79} and it had the Duchy of Milan in Northern Italy as well as Naples in Southern Italy. The Habsburgs still surrounded France. Richelieu's aim was to break this circle. He was ruthless and subtle, and he was single-minded in his determination to make his king not only the despotic ruler of his own country but also powerful throughout Europe. The French monarch was served by his minister as effectively as our Henry VIII. by Wolsey and by Thomas Cromwell. Richelieu had put down a rising of the nobles against the Crown with severity as cruel as that of Henry's last, and worst, minister. The people of France had never secured the rights which the law gave them in England--though the Tudor kings paid those rights little respect--and they gave the nobles no support. In his first aim the great cardinal succeeded. The king became despotic in France.

His position in Europe, with so powerful an opponent in the field as the King of Spain, was not so easily secured. It was a curious twist of policy which brought France to the assistance of the Protestant Union in the later years of the Thirty Years' War--France, a Catholic State and under the influence of a cardinal of the Catholic Church, aiding Protestants against Catholics! And it was the aid of France which saved them, notwithstanding that the French armies twice suffered defeat in Germany.

Of course the motive that brought France in on the Protestant side was the opportunity of opposing Spain.

The Treaty of Westphalia, which really marked the end of the religious wars much more definitely than the Peace of Alais, gave France an extension of territory on her eastern border, at the cost of Germany. It gave Sweden compensation in money and in a fortress or two on the Baltic for what she had done in the war. Switzerland had borne a share in the fighting on the {80} Protestant side, and her independence was recognised by the treaty; and Holland, which had been practically a free country for years, was now formally declared to owe no dependence either to Spain or to the Emperor. The Emperor's power indeed, for a long while vague and declining, was now diminished to almost nothing.

But though Holland stood thus finally free, we have to remember that there still were what were called "the Spanish Netherlands," a district, under the rule of Spain, not very different in its boundaries from modern Belgium. In these Spanish Netherlands fighting between France and Spain continued, in spite of the Treaty of Westphalia. They met each other too in Italy, and the war lingered on with changing results for more than ten years. In Germany the Protestants had gained religious freedom under the Treaty of Westphalia, and the German princes of both Protestant and Catholic faiths had been freed from the rather uncertain bond of union in which they had been held by the Emperor. Thus disunited, they had little power, and the power of France became greater by their weakness.

[Sidenote: Mazarin's policy]

Richelieu died in 1642 and another great churchman, Cardinal Mazarin, became the king's chief minister in his place. But in the following year died also that king whom Richelieu had served faithfully, ably, and unscrupulously. He was succeeded by Louis XIV., the monarch whose Court was so splendid, with himself as the centre of its glory, that he is known as Le Roi Soleil--the Sun King. He was a child of four when he came to the throne. The regent was his mother, and since she was a daughter of Philip II. a reversal of the policy of Richelieu was expected from her. To the grievous disappointment of a large party in France itself and also in Spain and Austria, she put herself into the hands of Mazarin; and he was a {81} faithful follower of Richelieu. The war with Spain continued. But in the very year of the signing of the Treaty of Westphalia there broke out in France that uprising of the nobles and of the people which is called the "Fronde." It had a remarkable success at first; though a success which did not endure. Under the captaincy of the great Prince Condé, who had led an earlier rising of the nobles against the Crown and, before that, had taken a leading part on the Huguenots' side, Mazarin was driven from Paris.

The strength of the two parties was so evenly divided, however, that in this very same year Condé himself and a number of his adherents were put under arrest. Within three years from the middle of the century the Queen Mother, with Mazarin as her minister, was re-established in power and the old lines of policy were pursued, both at home and abroad.

Our England, as we have seen, played little direct part in the long drawn-out war between the Protestants and Catholics on the Continent. Neither did she directly take any large part in the European contest between the two great Catholic powers. She did, nevertheless, come into touch and into opposition with both France and Spain abroad.

The predominance of Portugal in the East had been finally broken. French, Dutch, and English all had sailed round the Cape and formed settlements in India and the Malay Archipelago, disputing with Spain and Portugal the trade of the East. In the West, in the New World, Spain for the most part was content to develop, in such peace as the English seamen would grant her, her empire in Mexico and South America. The occupation of Bermuda and of Barbadoes by the English was accomplished without as much opposition from Spain as we should expect to find, and Sir Walter Raleigh's settlement of Virginia, named after the Virgin Queen, Elizabeth, was achieved without {82} fighting except against the native Red Indians, was from this expedition that Sir Walter has the credit of introducing into England potatoes and tobacco.

Even before the beginning of the century we have seen the settlement of England's first Colony, Newfoundland, and it was in the first years of the seventeenth century that a trading port was established on the St. Lawrence river, soon to grow into the city of Quebec.

Spaniards had settled along the coast of what now is Florida, England had planted the colony which commemorates the Virgin Queen; and southward of Virginia lies a state still named after Louis, King of France--Louisiana. At that time it formed but a small part of a far larger territory so-called and claimed as a French possession. England and France, however, did not come to blows in this part of the newly found great continent, but they did fall to fighting over their settlements on the shore of the St. Lawrence. In the meantime settlers from England had formed a colony in what was called New England, between the St. Lawrence in the north and Virginia southward. Among these were the colonists who received the name of the Pilgrim Fathers--pilgrims flying from England for their religion's sake, to become the fathers of an important part of the great American nation.

[Sidenote: Religious differences]

We may pay a little further attention now to the reasons that induced them to go this pilgrimage. Their principal motive was to escape persecution on account of their religion. That desire led to several pilgrimages and movements of people of the same kind in course of the story. It was a similar motive, for instance, which made many of the Huguenots come to England and other foreign lands. Some went to Canada, where they encountered, as we have said, the English on the St. Lawrence. To understand the violent intolerance of any differences of religious belief {83} and practice which produced these movements, we have to understand the way in which the men of that date viewed those differences.

In the first place, looking at it from the Protestant side, the Protestants felt very bitterly the evil conduct which they saw in the establishments of the Church. They protested against these evils, and also against the authority claimed by the Pope. The Puritans in England, for nearly the same reasons, were in protest against what we may call the High Church Protestants and against the authority claimed by the Crown as head of that Church.

On the Catholic side, the Pope and all the authorities were naturally incensed against any who protested against his authority, because it was essentially part of his claim, as Pope, that he was infallible, that he could do no wrong, and that therefore it was a sin to protest against anything he might choose to do or affirm. And inevitably, since he was spiritual ruler of the Catholic kings, he used his immense influence to induce them to put down this defiance of his authority by their subjects.

Then that spirit of inquiry and of protest, which was directed first against the Pope and his commands, very easily led men into criticism of the authority of the kings themselves and into protest against their actions: and this was a kind of protest which was not at all agreeable to the despotic kings of that day.

Finally, we should note this point most particularly--that men had lately begun to read for themselves, for the first time, the Bible, and that in the Old Testament they found that the Lord punished Israel and Judah--whole nations at a time--because certain sections of those nations deviated from His true service. Thence they derived the conviction that if any section of a modern nation deviated and went astray from the practice of the true religion, that nation as a whole {84} was liable to divine punishment. We must get that conviction of theirs into our minds, and see all that is implied by it, if we would understand how it was that they were so fiercely intolerant of these religious differences. It explains a great deal of what is otherwise obscure and difficult about persecution done in the name of religion. It explains why the nations were so ready to send out of their midst any section that so differed from the majority in their religious beliefs: and it explains also why these sections were so very willing to go. The English Puritans who went to America, both at the time of the Pilgrim Fathers in 1620, and again later, must have felt that they were getting away from the society of wicked men in whose punishment they might expect to be included; and similarly the rest of the nation would be only too pleased to see them go--for the same reason, that the majority feared lest the wrath of Heaven should fall upon the whole mass of the people, because of the wickedness (that is to say, of the difference of religious belief and practice which they looked upon as wickedness) of this small section.

[Sidenote: Cavaliers and Puritans]

Ten years later than the expedition of the Pilgrim Fathers, that is to say, in 1630, there was a further large emigration of Puritans from Old England into New England. Under Charles I. who had succeeded James, and tried to pursue the same policy of governing and extorting money without a Parliament, the strained feeling between the Crown and the people grew more intense. They formed themselves into distinct parties--Royalists or Cavaliers on the outside, and Puritans on the other.

The smouldering hostility broke into open war. In the first battles the Royalists had the advantage. The Puritan armies were raw and badly organised. But in their ranks were men of ability and of stern purpose. Under the orders of Oliver Cromwell as {85} their commander-in-chief a rigid discipline was imposed. They went into battle singing hymns, inspired by an intense conviction that they were fighting in the service of the Lord. It was a union of discipline with zeal which the light-hearted and light-headed Cavaliers could not match.

The Royalists wore gallant and gay attire and flowing curls, and culled all the joys of life. The Puritans dressed themselves in sombre colours, set their faces into solemn lines and regarded even innocent mirth and amusement as a sin. The earnestness which marked all their behaviour they brought to the business of fighting.

After the fortunes of the war had gone variously in several campaigns, the Royalists suffered what really was a decisive defeat in the battle of Naseby in 1645. Their cause never recovered from it.

There was quartered in the north of England at this time a Scottish army. Charles had endeavoured to impose on the Church of Scotland the form of Protestantism which was the State religion in England. But the majority of the Scottish people professed a religion much more nearly akin to that of the English Puritans. They bound themselves by a Covenant (whence its adherents were called Covenanters) to oppose by all means in their power the priests and the bishops whom the Scottish king of the United Kingdom tried to force on them. They took arms and made their way victoriously south until they were bribed to stop and to establish themselves in quarters in the north of England by part payment and part promise of payment of a yearly sum. And to the protection of that army Charles fled, as his fortunes grew more and more desperate, after the defeat at Naseby in 1646. The payments promised to the Scots were much in arrears. After long negotiations they gave up their king into the hands of the English Puritans in exchange {86} for a large sum of money to quit the debt. Once the king escaped, but was recaptured, and in 1649, after a trial in which the verdict was certain from the first, was executed on the block.

The king being dead, the Parliament declared the country a Commonwealth, under Oliver Cromwell, who had the title of Protector. The Protector's powers were not strictly defined, and perhaps there was no real limit to them, seeing that he had the army, which was all-powerful, ready to do his bidding. And this was a power which he had proved that he would not hesitate to use. He was a man typical of the Puritan spirit--absolutely convinced of the justice of his cause and determined to make it prevail no matter at what cost of suffering to himself, to his friends, or to his enemies--a very terrible man, whose value, in those distracted times, was that he not only made himself a terror to his enemies at home, but also made England feared and respected abroad as she had not been under the weak Stuart kings.

So now, by the middle of the seventeenth century, we may at length truly say that Europe had passed through that most miserable period of wars about religion which accompanied and followed the Reformation. We have to look on those religious wars as one of the two great features in our story during that half-century. The other principal feature is the continual expansion of the white Europeans into countries which had been in the possession of men of colour.

England had sent a few ships, which effected little, to help the Huguenots in their fight with the French Crown, and we catch a far-off echo of that hostility in the fighting which took place between English and French over the French settlements in the St. Lawrence. The French were defeated, but for the time being they were allowed to remain in possession of their Canadian settlements.

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[Illustration: GENERAL WOLFE'S STATUE AT QUEBEC, CANADA.]

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Quebec had been founded as early as 1608. It was not until 1641 that the foundations were laid of Montreal. But in the meantime Prince Edward's Island, Nova Scotia, and several of the West Indian islands had been occupied by English colonists.

Portugal during most of this half-century was under the Spanish king. She regained her complete independence, under a king of her own, in 1640. But by that time she had lost her empire in the East. Spain, sailing west from the New World, had arrived at the Philippine Islands, which Portugal had reached going east. Thus neither had transgressed the famous Bull. And yet East and West did meet in those islands. Drake, moreover, in his famous circumnavigation of the world, had come to the neighbouring Spice Islands, going west.

Both English and Dutch had taken a hand in destroying the Portuguese claims to any exclusive right of settlement in the East. Between English and Dutch, a decision was not reached so easily. It was largely on account of the excessive prices charged by the Dutch for pepper and other spices brought from the East Indian islands that the British East India Company was formed. It received a charter from the Crown to found settlements and claim trading rights for England. The Dutch so stubbornly held and defended their trade in the islands that the British gained no headway there until after the first half of the century. They did, however, make some trading settlements on the mainland of India, of which the earliest was in Madras, in 1639.

But an immediate impression was made on the Dutch supremacy in the islands the moment that the resolute policy of Cromwell took the place of the easy indifference of the Stuarts.

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