the Catholics by nearly ten to one. Bohemia, the Austrias, Moravia,
Silesia, Hungary were filled full of the spirit of Huss, of Luther, and
even of Calvin. If Spain was a unit, now that the Moors and Jews had
been expelled, and the heretics of Castille and Aragon burnt into
submission, she had a most lukewarm ally in Venice, whose policy was
never controlled by the Church, and a dangerous neighbour in the
warlike, restless, and adventurous House of Savoy, to whom geographical
considerations were ever more vital than religious scruples. A sincere
alliance of France, the very flower of whose nobility and people inclined
to the Reformed religion, was impossible, even if there had been fifty
infantes to espouse fifty daughters of France. Great Britain, the
Netherlands, and the united princes of Germany seemed a solid and serried
phalanx of Protestantism, to break through which should be hopeless. Yet
at that moment, so pregnant with a monstrous future, there was hardly a
sound Protestant policy anywhere but in Holland. How long would that
policy remain sound and united? How long would the Republic speak
through the imperial voice of Barneveld? Time was to show and to teach
many lessons. The united princes of Germany were walking, talking,
quarrelling in their sleep; England and France distracted and bedrugged,
while Maximilian of Bavaria and Ferdinand of Gratz, the cabinets of
Madrid and the Vatican, were moving forward to their aims slowly,
steadily, relentlessly as Fate. And Spain was more powerful than she
had been since the Truce began. In five years she had become much more
capable of aggression. She had strengthened her positions in the
Mediterranean by the acquisition and enlargement of considerable
fortresses in Barbary and along a large sweep of the African coast,
so as to be almost supreme in Africa. It was necessary for the States,
the only power save Turkey that could face her in those waters, to
maintain a perpetual squadron of war ships there to defend their commerce
against attack from the Spaniard and from the corsairs, both Mahometan