Kitabı oku: «The Eighteen Christian Centuries», sayfa 25

SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

Distinguished Men

Bacon, Milton, Locke, Corneille, Racine, Molière, Kepler, (1571-1630,) Boyle, (1627-1691,) Bossuet, (1627-1704,) Newton, (1642-1727,) Burnet, (1643-1715,) Bayle, (1647-1706,) Condé, Turenne, (1611-1675,) Marlborough, (1650-1722.)

THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

ENGLISH REBELLION AND REVOLUTION – DESPOTISM OF LOUIS THE FOURTEENTH

We are apt to suppose that progress and innovation are so peculiarly the features of these latter times that it is only in them that a man of more than ordinary length of life has witnessed any remarkable change. We meet with men still alive who were acquainted with Franklin and Voltaire, who have been presented at the court of Louis the Sixteenth and have visited President Pierce at the White House. But the period we have now to examine is quite as varied in the contrasts presented by the duration of a lifetime as in any other age of the world. Of this we shall take a French chronicler as an example,—a man who was as greedy of news, and as garrulous in relating it, as Froissart himself, but who must take a very inferior rank to that prose minstrel of “gentle blood,” as he limited his researches principally to the scandals which characterized his time. We mean the truth-speaking libeller Brantôme. |A.D. 1616.|This man died within a year or two of Shakspeare, and yet had accompanied Mary to Scotland, and given that poetical account of the voyage from Calais, when she sat in the stern of the vessel with her eyes fixed on the receding shore, and said, “Adieu, France, adieu! I shall never see you more;” and again, on the following morning, bending her looks across the water when land was no longer to be seen, and exclaiming, “Adieu, France! I shall never see you more.” The mere comparison of these two things—the return of Mary to her native kingdom, torn at that time with all the struggles of anarchy and distress, and the death of the greatest of earth’s poets, rich and honoured, in his well-built house at Stratford-on-Avon—suggests a strange contrast between the beginning of Brantôme’s literary career and its close: the events filling up the interval are like the scarcely-discernible heavings in a dark and tumultuous sea,—a storm perpetually raging, and waves breaking upon every shore. In his own country, cruelty and demoralization had infected all orders in the State, till murder, and the wildest profligacy of manners, were looked on without a shudder. Brantôme attended the scanty and unregretted funeral of Henry the Third, the last of the house of Valois, who was stabbed by the monk Jacques Clement for faltering in his allegiance to the Church. A sentence had been pronounced at Rome against the miserable king, and the fanatic’s dagger was ready. Sixtus the Fifth, in full consistory, declared that the regicide was “comparable, as regards the salvation of the world, to the incarnation and the resurrection, and that the courage of the youthful Jacobin surpassed that of Eleazar and Judith.” “That Pope,” says Chateaubriand, the Catholic historian of France, “had too little political conviction, and too much genius, to be sincere in these sacrilegious comparisons; but it was of importance to him to encourage the fanatics who were ready to murder kings in the name of the papal power.” Brantôme had seen the issuing of a bull containing the same penalties against Elizabeth, the death of Mary on the scaffold, and the failure of the Armada. After the horrors of the religious wars, from the conspiracy of Amboise in 1560 to the publication of the edict of toleration given at Nantes in 1598, he had seen the comparatively peaceful days of Henry the Fourth, till fanaticism again awoke a suspicion of a return to his original Protestant leanings, as shown in his opposition to the house of Austria, and Ravaillac renewed the meritorious work of Clement in 1610. Last of all, the spectator of all these changes saw England and Scotland forever united under one crown, and the first rise of the master of the modern policy of Europe, for in the year of Brantôme’s death a young priest was appointed Secretary of State in France, whom men soon gazed on with fear and wonder as the great Cardinal Richelieu.

In England the alterations were as great and striking. After the troubled years from Elizabeth’s accession to the Armada, a period of rest and progress came. Interests became spread over the whole nation, and did not depend so exclusively on the throne. Wisdom and good feeling made Elizabeth’s crown, in fact, what laws and compacts have made her successors’,—a constitutional sovereign’s. She ascertained the sentiments of her people almost without the intervention of Parliament, and was more a carrier-through of the national will than the originator of absolute decrees. The moral battles of a nation in pursuit of some momentous object like religious or political freedom bring forth great future crops, as fields are enriched on which mighty armies have been engaged. The fertilizing influence extends in every direction, far and near. If, therefore, the intellectual harvest that followed the final rejection of the Pope and crowning defeat of the Spaniard included Shakspeare and Bacon, and a host of lesser but still majestic names, we may venture also to remark, on the duller and more prosaic side of the question, that in the first year of the seventeenth century a patent was issued by which a commercial speculation attained a substantive existence, for the East India Company was founded, with a stock of seventy-two thousand pounds, and a fleet of four vessels took their way from the English harbours, on their first voyage to the realm where hereafter their employers, who thus began as merchant adventurers, were to rule as kings. The example set by these enterprising men was followed by high and low. During the previous century people had been too busy with their domestic and religious disputes to pay much attention to foreign exploration. They were occupied with securing their liberties from the tyranny of Henry the Eighth and their lives from the truculence of Mary. Then the plots perpetually formed against Elizabeth, by domestic treason and foreign levy, kept their attention exclusively on home-affairs. But when the State was settled and religion secure, the long-pent-up activity of the national mind found vent in distant expeditions. A chivalrous contempt of danger, and poetic longing for new adventure, mingled with the baser attractions of those maritime wanderings. The families of gentle blood in England, instead of sending their sons to waste their lives in pursuit of knightly fame in the service of foreign states, equipped them for far higher enterprises, and sent them forth to gather the riches of unknown lands beyond the sea. Romantic rumours were rife in every manor-house of the strange sights and inexhaustible wealth to be gained by undaunted seamanship and judicious treatment of the natives of yet-unexplored dominions. Spain and Portugal had their kingdoms, but the extent of America was great enough for all. Islands were everywhere to be found untouched as yet by the foot of European; and many a winter’s night was spent in talking over the possible results of sailing up some of the vast rivers that came down like bursting oceans from the far-inland regions to which nobody had as yet ascended,—the people and cities that lay upon their banks, the gold and jewels that paved the common soil. Towards the end of Elizabeth’s reign, these imaginings had grown into sufficing motives of action, and gentlemen were ready from all the ports of the kingdom to sail on their adventurous voyages. In addition to the chance those gallant mariners had of realizing their day-dreams by the tedious methods of discovery and exploration, there was always the prospect of making prize of a galleon of Spain; for at all times, however friendly the nations might be in the European waters, a war was carried on beyond the Azores. Not altogether lost, therefore, was the old knightly spirit of peril-seeking and adventure in those commercial and geographical speculations. There were articles of merchandise in the hold, gaudy-coloured cloths, and bead ornaments, and wretched looking-glasses, besides brass and iron; but all round the captain’s cabin were arranged swords and pistols, boarding-pikes, and other implements of fight. Guns also of larger size peeped out of the port-holes, and the crew were chosen as much with a view to warlike operations as to the ordinary duties of the ship. The Spaniards had made their way into the Pacific, and had established large settlements on the shores of Chili and Peru. Scenes which have been reacted at the diggings in modern times took place where the Europeans fixed their seat, and ships loaded with the precious metals found their way home, exposed to all the perils of storm and war. Drake had pounced upon several of their galleys and despoiled them of their precious cargo. Cavendish, a gentleman of good estate in Suffolk, had followed in his wake, and, after forcing his way through the Straits of Magellan, had reached the shores of California itself and there captured a Spanish vessel freighted with a vast amount of gold. All these adventures of the expiring sixteenth century became traditions and ballads of the young seventeenth. Raleigh, the most accomplished gentleman of his time, gave the glory of his example to the maritime career, and all the oceans were alive with British ships. While Raleigh and others of the upper class were carrying on a sort of cultivated crusade against the monopoly of the Spaniards, others of a less aristocratic position were busied in the more regular paths of commerce. We have seen the formation of the India Company in 1600. Our competitors, the Dutch, fitted out fleets on a larger scale, and established relations of trade and friendship with the natives of Polynesia and New Holland, and even of Java and India. But the zeal of the public in trading-speculations was not only shown in those well-conducted expeditions to lands easily accessible and already known: a company was established for the purpose of opening out the African trade, and a commercial voyage was undertaken to no less a place than Timbuctoo by a gallant pair of seamen of the names of Thomson and Jobson. It was not long before these efforts at honest international communication, and even the exploits of the Drakes and Cavendishes, who acted under commissions from the queen, degenerated into lawless piracy and the golden age of the Buccaneers. The policy of Spain was complete monopoly in her own hands, and a refusal of foreign intercourse worthy of the potentates of China and Japan. All access was prohibited to the flags of foreign nations, and the natural result followed. Adventurous voyagers made their appearance with no flag at all, or with the hideous emblem of a death’s head emblazoned on their standard, determined to trade peaceably if possible, but to trade whether peaceably or not. The Spanish colonists were not indisposed to exchange their commodities with those of the new-comers, but the law was imperative. The Buccaneers, therefore, proceeded to help themselves to what they wanted by force, and at length came to consider themselves an organized estate, governed by their own laws, and qualified to make treaties like any other established and recognised power. Cuba had been nearly depopulated by the cruelties and fanaticism of its Spanish masters, and was seized on by the Buccaneers. From this rich and beautiful island the pirate-barks dashed out upon any Spanish sail which might be leaving the mainland. Commanding the Gulf of Mexico, and with the power of crossing the Isthmus of Panama by a rapid march, those redoubtable bandits held the treasure-lands of the Spaniards in terrible subjection. And up to the commencement even of the eighteenth century the frightful spectacle was presented of a powerful confederacy of the wildest and most dissolute villains in Europe domineering over the most frequented seas in the world, and filling peaceful voyagers, and even well-armed men-of-war, with alarm by their unsparing cruelty, and atrocities which it curdles the blood to think of.

Eastward as far as China, westward to the islands and shores of the great Pacific, up the rivers of Africa, and even among the forests of New Holland and Tasmania, the swarms of European adventurers succeeded each other without cessation. The marvel is, that, with such ceaseless activity, any islands, however remote or small, were left for the discovery of after-times. But the tide of English emigration rolled towards the mainland of North America with a steadier flow than to any other quarter. The idea of a northwest passage to India had taken possession of men’s minds, and hardy seamen had already braved the horrors of a polar winter, and set examples of fortitude and patience which their successors, from Behrens to Kane, have so nobly followed. But the fertile plains of Virginia, and the navigable streams of the eastern shore, were more alluring to the peaceful and unenterprising settlers, whose object was to find a new home and carry on a lucrative trade with the native Indians. In 1607, a colony, properly so called,—for it had made provision for permanent settlement, and consisted of a hundred and ten persons, male and female,—arrived at the mouth of the Chesapeake. The river Powhatan was eagerly explored; and at a point sufficiently far up to be secure from sudden attack from the sea, and on an isthmus easily defended from native assault, they pitched their tents on a spot which was hereafter known as Jamestown and is still honoured as the earliest of the American settlements. Our neighbour Holland was not behindhand either in trade or colonization, and equally with England was excited to fresh efforts by its recovered liberty and independence. In all directions of intellectual and physical employment those two States went boundingly forward at the head of the movement. The absolute monarchies lay lazily by, and relied on the inertness of their mass for their defence against those active competitors; and Spain, an unwieldy bulk, showed the intimate connection there will always exist between liberal institutions at home and active progress abroad. The sun never set on the dominions of the Spanish crown, but the life of the people was crushed out of them by the weight of the Inquisition and despotism. The United Provinces and combined Great Britain had shaken off both those petrifying institutions, and Englishmen, Scotchmen, and Dutchmen were ploughing up every sea, presenting themselves at the courts of strange-coloured potentates, in regions whose existence had been unknown a few years before, and gradually accustoming the wealth and commerce of the world to find their way to London and Amsterdam.

To go from these views of hardihood and enterprise, from the wild heaving of unruly vigour which animated the traffickers and tyrants of the main, to the peaceful and pedantic domestic reign of James the First, shows the two extremes of European character at this time. The English people were not more than four millions in number, but they were the happiest and most favoured of all the nations. This was indeed the time,

 
“Ere England’s woes began,
When every rood of land maintain’d its man;”
 

for we have seen how the division of the great monastic properties had created a new order in the State. All accounts concur in describing the opening of this century as the period of the greatest physical prosperity of the body of the people. A great deal of dulness and unrefinement there must still have been in the boroughs, where such sage officials as Dogberry displayed their pomp and ignorance,—a great deal of clownishness and coarseness in country-places, where Audreys and Autolycuses were to be found; but among townsmen and peasantry there was none of the grinding poverty which a more unequal distribution of national wealth creates. There were great Whitsun ales, and dancings round the Maypole; feasts on village greens, and a spirit of rude and personal independence, which became mellowed into manly self-respect when treated with deference by the higher ranks, the old hereditary gentry and the retired statesmen of Queen Bess, but bristled up in insolence and rebellion when the governing power thwarted its wishes, or fanaticism soured it with the bitter waters of polemic strife. The sturdy Englishman who doffed his hat to the squire, and joined his young lord in sports upon the green, in the beginning of James’s reign, was the same stout-hearted, strong-willed individual who stiffened into Puritanism and contempt of all earthly authorities in the unlovely, unloving days of the Rump and Cromwell. Nor should we miss the great truth which lies hidden under the rigid forms of that period,—that the same noble qualities which characterized the happy yeoman and jocund squire of 1620—their earnestness, energy, and intensity of home affections—were no less existent in their ascetic short-haired descendants of 1650. The brimfulness of life which overflowed into expeditions against the Spaniards in Peru, and unravellings of the tangled rivers of Africa, and trackings of the wild bears among the ice-floes of Hudson’s Bay, took a new direction when the century reached the middle of its course, and developed itself in the stormy discussions of the contending sects and the blood and misery of so many battle-fields. How was this great change worked on the English mind? How was it that the long-surviving soldier, courtier, landholder, of Queen Elizabeth saw his grandson grow up into the hard-featured, heavy-browed, keen-sworded Ironside of Oliver? A squire who ruined himself in loyal entertainments to King James on his larder-and-cellar-emptying journey from Edinburgh to London in 1603 may have lived to see his son, and son’s son, rejoicing with unholy triumph over the victory of Naseby in 1644 and the death of Charles in 1649.

Great causes must have been at work to produce this astonishing change, and some of them it will not be difficult to point out. Perhaps, indeed, the prosperity we have described may itself have contributed to the alteration in the English ways of thought. While the nation was trampled on by Henry the Eighth, with property and life insecure and poverty universally diffused, or even while it was guided by the strong hand of Elizabeth, it had neither power nor inclination to examine into its rights. The rights of a starving and oppressed population are not very great, even in its own eyes. It is the well-fed, law-protected, enterprising citizen who sees the value of just and settled government, because the blessings he enjoys depend upon its continuance. The mind of the nation had been pauperized along with its body by the life of charitable dependence it had led at the doors of church and monastery in the olden time. It little mattered to a gaping crowd expecting the accustomed dole whether the great man in London was a tyrannical king or not. They did not care whether he dismissed his Parliaments or cut off the heads of his nobility. They still found their “bit and sup,” and saw the King, and Parliament, and nobility, united in obedience to the Church. But when this debasing charity was discontinued, independence came on. The idle hanger-on of the religious house became a cottager, and worked on his own land; by industry he got capital enough to take some additional acres; and the man of the next generation had forgotten the low condition he sprang from, and had so sharpened his mind by the theological quarrels of the time that he began to be able to comprehend the question of general politics. He saw, as every population and potentate in Europe saw with equal clearness, that the question of civil freedom was indissolubly connected with the relation between Church and State; he perceived that the extent of divergence from the old faith regulated in a great measure the spirit, and even the constitution, of government where it took place,—that adhesion to Rome meant absolutism and dependence, that Calvinism had a strong bias towards the republican form, and that the Church he had helped to establish was calculated to fill up the ground between those two extremes, and be the religious representative of a State as liberal as Geneva by its attention to the interests of all, and as monarchical as Spain by its loyalty to an hereditary crown. Now, the middle ground in great and agitating affairs is always the most difficult to maintain. Both sides make it their battle-field, and try to win it to themselves; and according as one assailant seems on the point of carrying his object, the defender of that disputed territory has to lean towards the other. Both parties are offended at the apparent inconsistency; and we are therefore not to be surprised if we find the Church accused of looking to both the hostile camps in turn.

James was a fatal personage to every cause he undertook to defend. He had neither the strength of will of Henry, nor the proud consistency of Elizabeth; but he had the arrogance and presumption of both. Questions which the wise queen was afraid to touch, and left to the ripening influence of time, this blustering arguer dragged into premature discussion, stripped them of all their dignity by the frivolousness of the treatment he gave them, and disgusted all parties by the harshness and rapidity of his partial decisions. Every step he took in the quelling of religious dissension by declarations in favour of proscription and authority which would have endeared him to Gregory the Seventh, he accompanied with some frightful display of his absolutist tendencies in civil affairs. The same man who roared down the modest claims of a thousand of the clergy who wished some further modification of the Book of Common Prayer threw recusant members of Parliament into prison, persecuted personal enemies to death, with scarcely a form of law, punished refractory towns with loss of franchises and privileges, and made open declaration of his unlimited power over the lives and properties of all his subjects. People saw this unvarying alliance between his polemics and his politics, and began to consider seriously whether the comforts their trade and industry had given them could be safe under a Church calling itself reformed, but protected by such a king. If he was only suspected in England, in his own country he was fully known. Dearer to James would have been a hundred bishops and cardinals seated in conclave in Holyrood than a Presbyterian Synod praying against his policy in the High Kirk. He had even written to the Pope with offers of accommodation and reconcilement, and made no secret of his individual and official disgust at the levelling ideas of those grave followers of Knox and Calvin. Those grave followers of Knox and Calvin, however, were not unknown on the south side of the Tweed. The intercourse between the countries was not limited to the hungry gentry who followed James on his accession. A community of interest and feeling united the more serious of the Reformers, and visits and correspondence were common between them. But, while a regard for their personal freedom and the security of their wealth attracted the attention of the English middle class to the proceedings of King James, events were going on in foreign lands which had an immense effect on the development of the anti-monarchic, anti-episcopal spirit at home. These events have not been sufficiently considered in this relation, and we have been too much in the habit of looking at our English doings in those momentous years,—from the end of James’s reign to the Restoration,—as if Britain had continued as isolated from her Continental neighbours as before the Norman Conquest. But a careful comparison of dates and actions will show how intimate the connection had become between the European States, and how instantaneously the striking of a chord at Prague or Vienna thrilled through the general heart in Edinburgh and London.

The Reformation, after achieving its independence and equality at the Treaty of Augsburg in 1555, had made great though silent progress. Broken off in Germany into two parties, the Lutheran and the Calvinist, who hated each other, as usual, in exact proportion to the smallness of their difference, the union was still kept up between them as regarded their antagonism to the Papists. With all three denominations, the religious part of the question had fallen into terrible abeyance. It was now looked on by the leaders entirely as a matter of personal advancement and political rule. In this pursuit the fanaticism which is generally limited to theology took the direction of men’s political conduct; and there were enthusiasts among all the sects, who saw visions, and dreamed dreams, about the succession to thrones and the raising of armies, as used to happen in more ancient times about the bones of martyrs and the beatification of saints. The great object of Protestants and Catholics was to obtain a majority in the college of the Prince Electors by whom the Empire was bestowed. This consisted of the seven chief potentates of Germany, of whom four were secular,—the King of Bohemia, the Count Palatine of the Rhine, the Duke of Saxony, and the Marquis of Brandenburg; and three ecclesiastic,—the Archbishops of Mentz, Trèves, and Cologne. The majority was naturally secured to the Romanists by the official adhesion of these last. But it chanced that the Elector of Cologne fell violently in love with Agnes of Mansfeldt, a canoness of Gerrestein; and having of course studied the history of our Henry the Eighth and Anne Boleyn, he determined to follow his example, and offered the fair canoness his hand. He was unwilling, however, to offer his hand without the Electoral crozier, and, by the advice of his friends, and with the promised support of many of the Protestant rulers, he retained his ecclesiastical dignity and made the beautiful Agnes his wife. This would not have been of much consequence in a lower rank, for many of the cathedral dignitaries in Cologne and other places had retained their offices after changing their faith; but all Germany was awake to the momentous nature of this transaction, for it would have conveyed a majority of the Electoral voices to the Protestants and opened the throne of the empire itself to a Protestant prince. Such, however, was the strength at that time of the opposition to Rome, that all the efforts of the Catholics would have been ineffectual to prevent this ruinous arrangement but for a circumstance which threw division into the Protestant camp. Gebhard had adhered to the Calvinistic branch of the Reformation, and the Lutherans hated him with a deadlier hatred than the Pope himself. With delight they saw him outlawed by the Emperor and excommunicated by Rome, his place supplied by a Prince of Bavaria, who was elected by the Chapter of Cologne to protect them from their apostate archbishop, and the head of the house of Austria strengthened by the consolidation of his Electoral allies and the unappeasable dissensions of his enemies. While petty interests and the narrowest quarrels of sectarianism divided the Protestants, and while the Electors and other princes who had adopted their theological opinions were doubtful of the political results of religious freedom, and many had waxed cold, and others were discontented with the small extent of the liberation from ancient trammels they had yet obtained, a very different spectacle was presented on the other side. Popes and Jesuits were heartily and unhesitatingly at work. “No cold, faint-hearted doubtings teased them.” Their object was incommoded by no refinements or verbal differences; they were determined to assert their old supremacy,—to trample out every vestige of resistance to their power; and they entered upon the task without scruple or remorse. Ferdinand the Emperor, the prop and champion of the Romish cause, was as sincere and as unpitying as Dominic. When he had been nominated King Elect of Bohemia, in 1598, while yet in his twentieth year, his first thought was the future use he might make of his authority in the extermination of the Protestant faith. The Jesuits, by whom he was trained from his earliest years, never turned out a more hopeful pupil. His ambition would have been, if he had had it in his power, to become a follower of Loyola himself; but, as he was condemned by fate to the lower office of the first of secular princes, he determined to employ all its power at the dictation of his teachers. He went a pilgrimage to Loretto, and, bowing before the miraculous image of the Virgin, promised to reinstate the true Church in its unquestioned supremacy, and bent all his thoughts to the fulfilment of his vow. Two-thirds of his subjects in his hereditary states were Protestant, but he risked all to attain his object. He displaced their clergy, and banished all who would not conform. He introduced Catholics from foreign countries to supply the waste of population, and sent armed men to destroy the newly-erected schools and churches of the hateful heretics. This man was crowned King of Bohemia in 1618, and Emperor of Germany in the following year.

The attention of the British public had been particularly directed to German interests for the six years preceding this date, by the marriage of Frederick, Elector Palatine of the Rhine, with Elizabeth, the graceful and accomplished daughter of King James. Frederick was young and ambitious, and was endeared to the English people as leader of the Protestant cause against the overweening pretensions of the house of Austria. That house was still the most powerful in Europe; for though the Spanish monarchy was held by another branch, for all the purposes of despotism and religion its weight was thrown into the same scale. Spanish soldiers, and all the treasures of America, were still at the command of the Empire; and perhaps Catholicism was rather strengthened than weakened by the adherence of two of the greatest sovereigns in the world, instead of having the personal influence of only one, as in the reign of Charles the Fifth. All the Elector’s movements were followed with affectionate interest by the subjects of his father-in-law; but James himself disapproved of opposition being offered to the wildest excesses of royal prerogative either in himself or any other anointed ruler. Besides this, he was particularly hostile to the young champion’s religious principles, for the latter was attached to the Calvinistic or unepiscopal party. |A.D. 1619.|James declined to give him any aid in maintaining his right to the crown of Bohemia, to which he was elected by the Protestant majority of that kingdom on the accession of Ferdinand to the Empire, and managed to show his feelings in the most offensive manner, by oppressing such of Frederick’s co-religionists as he found in any part of his dominions. The advocates of peace at any price have praised the behaviour of the king in this emergency; but it may be doubted whether an energetic display of English power at this time might not have prevented the great and cruel reaction against freedom and Protestantism which the victory of the bigoted Ferdinand over his neglected competitor introduced. A riot, accompanied with violence against the Catholic authorities, was the beginning of the troubles in Bohemia; and Ferdinand, as if to explain his conduct to the satisfaction of James, published a manifesto, which might almost be believed to have been the production of that Solomon of the North. “If sovereign power,” he says, “emanates from God, these atrocious deeds must proceed from the devil, and therefore must draw down divine punishment.” This logic was unanswerable at Whitehall, and the work of extermination went on. Feeble efforts were forced upon the unwilling father-in-law; for all the chivalry of England was wild with sympathy and admiration of the Bohemian queen. Hundreds of gallant gentlemen passed over to swell the Protestant ranks; and when they returned and told the tale of all the horrors they had seen, the remorseless vengeance of the triumphant Church, and all the threatenings with which Rome and the Empire endeavoured to terrify the nations which had rebelled against their yoke, Puritanism, or resistance to the slightest approach towards Popery either in essentials or externals, became patriotism and self-defence; and at this very time, while men’s minds were inflamed with the descriptions of the torturings and executions which followed the battle of Prague in 1620, and the devastation and depopulation of Bohemia, James took the opportunity of forcing the Episcopal form of government on the Scottish Presbyterians.