the duchies, the outlines of which have just been indicated, and which
was the natural sequel of the campaign carried out four years earlier on
the same territory, had been ended by a mockery. In France, reduced
almost to imbecility by the absence of a guiding brain during a long
minority, fallen under the distaff of a dowager both weak and wicked,
distracted by the intrigues and quarrels of a swarm of self-seeking
grandees, and with all its offices, from highest to lowest, of court,
state, jurisprudence, and magistracy, sold as openly and as cynically as
the commonest wares, there were few to comprehend or to grapple with the
danger. It should have seemed obvious to the meanest capacity in the
kingdom that the great house of Austria, reigning supreme in Spain and in
Germany, could not be allowed to crush the Duke of Savoy on the one side,
and Bohemia, Moravia, and the Netherlands on the other without danger of
subjection for France. Yet the aim of the Queen-Regent was to cultivate
an impossible alliance with her inevitable foe.

And in England, ruled as it then was with no master mind to enforce
against its sovereign the great lessons of policy, internal and external,
on which its welfare and almost its imperial existence depended, the only
ambition of those who could make their opinions felt was to pursue the
same impossibility, intimate alliance with the universal foe.

Any man with slightest pretensions to statesmanship knew that the liberty
for Protestant worship in Imperial Germany, extorted by force, had been
given reluctantly, and would be valid only as long as that force
could still be exerted or should remain obviously in reserve.
The "Majesty-Letter" and the "Convention" of the two religions would
prove as flimsy as the parchment on which they were engrossed, the
Protestant churches built under that sanction would be shattered like
glass, if once the Catholic rulers could feel their hands as clear as