The cruelties inflicted during this war, especially during the last years of it, upon the defenseless people, are indescribable. The population of Germany is said to have diminished in thirty years from twenty to fifty per cent. The population of Augsburg was reduced from eighty thousand to eighteen thousand. Of the four hundred thousand inhabitants of Würtemburg as late as 1641, only forty-eight thousand were left. Cities, villages, castles, and houses innumerable had been burned to the ground. The bare statistics of the destruction of life and property are appalling.

The Peace of Westphalia, in 1648, confirmed the Ecclesiastical Reservation-fixing; however, 1624 as the normal year, to decide which faith should possess ecclesiastical properties. It modified the jus reformandi, according to which the religion of each state was to be determined by that of the prince; and in this matter, also, 1624 was made the normal year. That is to say, whatever might be the faith of the prince, the religion of each state was to be Catholic or Protestant, according to its position at that date. As to their share in the imperial administration, the two religions were placed on a footing of substantial equality. Religious freedom and civil equality were also extended to the Calvinists; only these three forms of religion were to be tolerated in the Empire. But the Empire was reduced to a shadow by the giving of the power to decide, instead of advising, in all matters of peace, war, taxation, and the like, to the Diet, and by the allowance granted to members of the Diet to contract alliances with one another and with foreign powers, provided no prejudice should come thereby to the Empire or the Emperor. The independence of Holland and of Switzerland was formally acknowledged. Sweden obtained the territory about the Baltic, which Gustavus had wanted, in addition to other important places about the North Sea, and the mouths of the Oder, the Weser, and

ENGLAND UNDER JAMES I.

438

the Elbe; in consequence of which cession Sweden, became a member of the German Diet. Among the aoquisitions of France were the three bishoprics, Metz, Toul, and Verdun, and the landgraviate of Upper and Lower Alsace; France thus gaining access to the Rhine. Both Sweden and France, by becoming guarantees of the peace, obtained the right to interfere in the internal affairs of Germany. So great was the penalty paid for civil discord.

England, during the reign of the Stuart kings, de scended from the lofty position which it had held among the European states, as a bulwark of Protestantism. James I. (1603-1625) brought to the throne the highest notions of kingly authority, and in connection with them, a cordial hatred of Presbyterianism, which his experiences in Scotland led him to regard as a natural ally of popular government. He expressed his conviction in the maxim, "No bishop, no king." The contrast between obsequious prelates on their knees before him, and the ministers of the Kirk who pulled his sleeve as they administered their blunt rebukes, delighted his soul. He found himself not only delivered from his tormentors, but an object of adulation. He had once said of the "neighbor Kirk in England" that "it is an evil-said mass in English;" but he was cured of this aversion, if it was ever seriously entertained. During the reign of James, the gulf between the Anglican Church and the Puritans was widened, chiefly in consequence of two changes which took place in the former. The episcopal polity which had been regarded. in the age of Elizabeth, as one among various admissible forms of Church government, came to be more and more considered a divine ordinance, and indispensable to the constitution of a Church; so that, as Macaulay expresses it, a Church might as well be without the doctrine of the 1 Calderwood, v. 105, 106; Burton, vi. 221.

1

Trinity or the Incarnation, as without bishops. The other change was the spread in the Anglican body, of the Arminian theology, which introduced a doctrinal difference that had not existed before, between the established Church and the Puritans. As the common enemy, which Anglican and Puritan combined to oppose, became less formidable, since the great majority of the nation were now hostile to the Catholic Church, the two Protestant parties were less restrained from mutual contention, and were led by the very influence of their conflict with one another to sharpen their characteristic points of difference.

James lost no time in evincing his hostility to the Puritans. On his way to London, the Millenary petition, signed by nearly a thousand ministers, who asked for the abolishment of usages most obnoxious to the Puritans, was not only received with no favor, but ten of those who had presented the petition were actually imprisoned by the Star Chamber, on the ground that their act tended to sedition and treason. The petitioners were not Separatists; they made no objection to episcopacy. They complained of non-residence, pluralities, and like abuses, and of the cross in baptism, the cap and surplice, and a few other ceremonial peculiarities.2 The opportunity was presented for a scheme of Comprehension, which, had it been adopted, would have had the most important consequences; but that opportunity was not embraced. In the Hampton Court Conference, where a few Puritan divines met the bishops, the King treated the former with

1 James sent delegates to the Synod of Dort, who made to him full reports of its proceedings. Some of them he rewarded with promotion in the Church. Mrs. Hutchinson, writing of the interval between 1639 and 1641, in the next reign, says of the doctrine of predestination: "At that time this great doctrine grew much out of fashion with the prelates, but was generally embraced by all religious and holy persons in the land." Life of Col. Hutchinson, p. 66 (Bohn's ed.). The admirable picture of Puritan character presented in this memoir is marred only by the writer's strong prejudice against Cromwell. The literature on the history of Arminianism in the English Church is given by Cunningham, The Reformers and the Theology of the Reformation, p. 168 seq.

2 Hallam, ch. vi. (p. 173).

ENGLAND UNDER JAMES I.

435

unfairness and insolence. He plumed himself on the theological learning and acumen which he fancied himself to possess, and which formed one of his titles to the distinction, which his flatterers gave him, of being the Solomon of his age. The praises lavished on him by the bishops, -one of whom declared that he undoubtedly spoke by the direct inspiration of the Holy Ghost-in connection with their extravagant theory of royal authority, and of the submission owed by the subject, filled him with delight. This Conference had one valuable result. Dr. Reynolds, one of the Puritan representatives, and perhaps the most learned man in the kingdom, recommended that a new or revised version of the Scriptures should be prepared; and this suggestion James, who complained of certain marginal observations in "the Geneva Bible," which were unfavorable to the sacredness of royalty, caught up and caused to be carried out. The desire of the clergy to enhance their own authority by exalting that of the crown, appears in the ambitious schemes of Bancroft, the Archbishop of Canterbury, which encountered the resist ance of Coke, the great champion of the common law. As long as Cecil was in power, the foreign politics of James were not destitute of spirit; but the timidity of the King, joined with his desire to marry his son to a Spanish princess, prevented him from efficiently supporting his son-inlaw, the Elector Palatine, at the outbreaking of the thirty years' war, and moved him basely to sacrifice Raleigh to the vengeance of Spain. His want of common sense was manifested in his attempt to impose episcopacy upon the Scottish Church. His arbitrary principles of government, which he had not prudence enough to prevent him from

1 The Hampton Court Conference is interesting and important, as presenting the characteristics of the two ecclesiastical parties and of the sovereign. Most of the accounts of it are derived from Dr. Barlow's report, who was on the anti-Puritan side. See Fuller, Church History, v. 266; Neal, p. ii., ch. i.; Cardwell, History of Conferences, p. 121; Burton, History of Scotland, vi. 218 seq. Hallam (Const. Hist., ch. vi.) has candid and just remarks on the behavior of the king and of the bishops.

constantly proclaiming, prepared the way for the great civil contest that broke out in the next reign.

Charles I. (1625-1649) made the deliberate attempt to govern England without a Parliament. There is no doubt that it was his design to convert the limited monarchy into an absolute one. Although a sincere Protestant, he sympathized fully with what may be termed the Romanizing party in the English Church, or the party which stood at the farthest remove from Puritanism, and nearest to the religious system of the Church of Rome. Charles's treatment of the Papists was vacillating. Now the laws would be executed against them, and now the execution of them would be illegally suspended by the King's decree. But the occasional severities of the government towards them could not efface the impression which had been made by the sending of an English fleet to aid in the blockade of Rochelle (1625), which the French King was seeking to wrest from the Huguenots. Laud, an honest but narrow-minded and superstitious man, became Archbishop of Canterbury, in 1633. To advance, in respect to doctrine and ceremonies, as near as possible to the Roman Catholic system, without accepting the jurisdiction of the Pope, was his manifest inclination. He records his dreams in his diary. On one occasion he dreamed that he was reconverted to the Church of Rome.1 It was an unpleasant dream, since it related to a danger that, as he doubtless felt, attended his measures, but which he meant to escape. His impracticable character and lack of tact, even James I. accurately discerned. "The plain truth is that I keep Laud back from all place of rule and authority, because I find that he hath a restless spirit, and cannot see when matters are well, but loves to toss and change, and to bring things to a pitch of reformation, floating in his own brain, which may endanger the steadfastness of that which is in a

1 Burton, Hist. of Scotland, vi. 390.