sceptre of the younger branch of Austria, the Protestants outnumbered 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