1624 Bristol's reply. BRISTOL LEAVES SPAIN. 165 offer, he said, he could not but esteem as it deserved, but it troubled him more than the malice of his enemies had ever done; for against that he could appeal to the security of a good conscience and of his sovereign's justice; whereas what had now been said to him forced him to consider whether he had not been serving Spain rather than his own country. Spain, he proceeded to say, was not indebted to him the value of a leaf of paper. Whatever he had done, he had done because he thought it to be the best for England. He went home perfectly contented, and fully satisfied that he would meet with justice and protection from his sovereign. He was not, therefore, under the necessity of seeking the favour of another Prince. To speak plainly, he ended by saying, he would rather offer himself to the slaughter in England than be Duke of Infantado in Spain.1 of Philip. Jan. 28. He takes leave of Philip. A few days later, on January 28, Bristol took formal leave When his audience was at an end, the King drew from his own finger a valuable ring to present to the ambassador, an honour before unheard of at the Spanish Court. The next day Philip left Madrid for Seville on a journey of inspection into the state of the navy. It was the public signal that, though no formal notice had been given, the marriage treaty was practically at an end. Whatever Bristol may have thought of the causes of his failure, he had at least a clear presentiment of its results. "I 1623. ment of "2 66 will heartily pray to God," he had written, in one of his December. last letters from Madrid, to prevent that miserable His presenti- storm which is like suddenly to be raised in Christencoming evil. dom, if it be not speedily prevented by His especial goodness.' The war now about to blaze up once more from its smouldering ashes was indeed of such a nature that no one, acquainted with the real merits of the parties, could look upon without horror. On one side the cause of German nationality and of legal order was bound in an inextricable bond with an ecclesiastical despotism which was sapping the root of all moral and intellectual vigour. On the other side was a Protestantism which had lost all respect for law, and which had allied itself with the selfish greed of princes, and with the marauding instincts of the plunderers by whom the honourable name of soldiers was disgraced. The coming The future Years' War. miseries of that war were beyond even Bristol's of the Thirty vision. The help which Charles was eager to render to his brother-in-law proved to be vain. No cause could support the accumulated burden of Frederick's incapacity, of Charles's weakness, and of the selfishness of Mansfeld and Christian; but when the victory had been won by the sword of Tilly, and the whole of Northern Germany lay at the Emperor's feet, then was revealed in turn the incapacity of Ferdinand to become the second founder of the Empire. He might have been the head of a united Germany; he might have given renewed life to the old national institutions, and have made the cold and calculating aggressions of Richelieu and of Louis XIV. impossible. Lorraine and Alsace would still have remained German soil, and, what was of far greater consequence, two centuries of moral and political anarchy would have been spared to the noble German nation. Unhappily Ferdinand was still the Ferdinand of old. By the Edict of Restitution he replaced the two religions upon that legal basis which, in his eyes, was all in all. In the composition of his mind there was no room for the political element which weighs the feelings, the hopes, the passions of men before proceeding to action. He cared little that his extremity of law was held by half the nation to be the extremity of injustice. Therefore it was that, instead of standing, as he might have stood, at the head of a united people, he found himself coercing a divided nation by the sword of an army which represented nothing but a faction. And what an army it was! Mansfeld and Christian were no longer alive, and their misdeeds had ceased to be a terror to German citizens and peasants. Frederick was living in hopeless exile, unregretted and forgotten. It was round Wallenstein, the general who represented the majesty of the Imperial name, and the cause of order against anarchy, that every element of disturbance gathered. During the first years. 1623 THE FUTURE OF GERMANY. 167 of strife, men of every creed had cast yearning eyes towards him who wore the crown of the Ottos and the Fredericks, to seek for that help which might reduce the chaos into order. They would never look with hope to Vienna again. The Empire had survived external contempt and internal dissolution; but the iniquities of Wallenstein laid it in the dust. For a moment, the avenging arm of the great Swede was raised to redress the balance of the war, and to re-establish the Empire upon a Protestant basis. With the genius to construct as well as to destroy, it is probable that if he had been born a German prince, he might have stood at the head of a new and happier era. As it was, his career, even if his days had been prolonged, was predestined to failure. It was the last effort, almost till our own day, to establish any national order in Germany. After him came that waste and howling wilderness, resounding with shrieks and bitter cries, and filled with the struggles of brutal and degraded beings who seemed in form alone to resemble human kind. The hideous misery of that war, if war it can be called, no writer would willingly descend to recount; no reader would care to hear recited. Feeling in England. Yet, if Bristol was in the right in holding that the sword of England could not be drawn in such a war to the advantage of herself or of the Continent, he was scarcely conscious of the wide basis upon which rested that uneasy dissatisfaction with the existing state of things which had spread amongst all classes of the population at home; for he was hardly aware how completely the conditions of European politics had changed since he first arrived at Madrid. in 1611. Then the evil, before which the rising Change in the condition intellect of the time shrank with horror, was the of progress. prolongation of the religious strife. Everywhere the tendency of the age was towards an obliteration of the line drawn with such marked distinctness between the two creeds. in the field of speculation, the historian of the progress of tolerance can point to the spread of the Arminian theory. In the field of practical politics, he can trace the growing preponderance of political over theological arguments for persecution. Differing in everything else, Pym and Ferdinand II. would have agreed in repudiating the notion that a heretic ought to be imprisoned or put to death simply because he was a heretic. Before 1623 a great change had passed over the scene. Divide the blame as we may, the fact was undoubted that the old religion was encroaching upon Protestant soil. The evil most to be dreaded was no longer the continuance of war, but the imminence of defeat. In Germany the rashness of Frederick had betrayed the key of the Protestant position into Catholic hands. In England the weakness of James had granted to Spain a basis of operations against his own faith. For the interests of the human race, a barrier must be raised against the great enemy of its progress. It was this alteration of circumstances, far more than his personal quarrel with Buckingham, which threw Bristol into discordance with the spirit of the age. Partly from the habitual deference to the home government which is the inevitable law of an ambassador's life, partly from his own mental constitution, his eyes were fixed too exclusively upon the horrors of a religious war. He saw all that was evil in those who had aroused it. He did not see that resistance to Catholic supremacy was rapidly becoming a necessity. He adopted, without a thorough examination of their ultimate tendencies, schemes for pacification which had not originated with himself, but which, faulty as they were, might perhaps lead to the consummation which he so ardently desired. Moral posi testantism. In truth, the balance of the two religions was only to be redressed by means which did not lie within the sphere of Bristol's intellect. No candid person can survey tion of Pro- the world at the beginning of the seventeenth century without acknowledging that as far as the leaders were concerned, moral superiority was not on the Protestant side. It would be an insult to Ferdinand, to Maximilian, and to Tilly, to compare them for an instant with Frederick or with Mansfeld. Even Philip IV. and Olivares were superior to their English visitors. Liars as they were, they hoped to achieve by their falsehoods something more than the gratification of their immediate interests, or of their personal г 1623 GERMANY AND ENGLAND. 169 vanity. The great question which the Protestants of that age were called upon to solve was the eternal question which presents itself to all who have embraced freedom in any form. Would they regard their liberty as a means by which to grasp the conception of a higher order than they had known before? Would they learn discipline and obedience? Would they reverence law, and count truth as a most precious jewel? If they could do this, then the victories of Wimpfen and Höchst and Stadtloo would have been won in vain. If not, the world would turn in disgust to the stillness of Papal absolutism, that it might escape from the miseries which the abuse of liberty had set before it. Such was the question which Germany had failed to comprehend, but to which England was ready to respond. The men of that generation were prepared to build upon the foundations of that reverence at once for justice and for freedom which the events of centuries had laid deep in the English character. The world was to learn that there were men who were ready to suffer and to die, if need be, on behalf of principles more true, and of an order more fruitful of good and noble life than anything which Ferdinand and Maximilian had found it possible to conceive. From the study of Bacon, from the parsonage of George Herbert, from the pulpit of Baxter, from the prison of Eliot, a light was to break forth, splendid in its multiplicity of colour and of brilliancy, which would teach the world to shrink from anarchy and despotism alike, and to entrust the treasure of its moral and intellectual progress to ordered liberty. Position of How long the conflict in which England was about to engage would last, and to what issues it might finally be conducted, it was impossible to foretell. But to anyone Charles. who, like Bristol, had a full knowledge of the events which had recently been passing in Spain, it must have been evident that the league which appeared to be springing up between the Prince of Wales and the English nation could not by any possibility be longlived. It was to no purpose that Charles had listened to the explosion of loyalty which had greeted his return; it was to no purpose that he found himself acci |