lture of the south and west lay on its wild forces like a light
frost. This semi-civilized world had long been asleep; but it had begun
to dream. In the generation before Elizabeth a great man who, with all
his violence, was vitally a dreamer, Martin Luther, had cried out in his
sleep in a voice like thunder, partly against the place of bad customs,
but largely also against the place of good works in the Christian
scheme. In the generation after Elizabeth the spread of the new wild
doctrines in the old wild lands had sucked Central Europe into a cyclic
war of creeds. In this the house which stood for the legend of the Holy
Roman Empire, Austria, the Germanic partner of Spain, fought for the old
religion against a league of other Germans fighting for the new. The
continental conditions were indeed complicated, and grew more and more
complicated as the dream of restoring religious unity receded. They were
complicated by the firm determination of France to be a nation in the
full modern sense; to stand free and foursquare from all combinations; a
purpose which led her, while hating her own Protestants at home, to give
diplomatic support to many Protestants abroad, simply because it
preserved the balance of power against the gigantic confederation of
Spaniards and Austrians. It is complicated by the rise of a Calvinistic
and commercial power in the Netherlands, logical, defiant, defending its
own independence valiantly against Spain. But on the whole we shall be
right if we see the first throes of the modern international problems in
what is called the Thirty Years' War; whether we call it the revolt of
half-heathens against the Holy Roman Empire, or whether we call it the
coming of new sciences, new philosophies, and new ethics from the north.
Sweden took a hand in the struggle, and sent a military hero to the help
of the newer Germany. But the sort of military heroism everywhere
exhibited offered a strange combination of more and more complex
strategic science with the most naked and cannibal cruelty. Other forces
besides Sweden found a career in the carnage. Far away to the
north-east, in a sterile land of fens, a small ambitious family of
money-lenders who had become squires, vigilant, thrifty, thoroughly
selfish, rather thinly adopted the theories of Luther, and began to lend
their almost savage hinds as soldiers on the Protestant side. They were
well paid for it by step after step of promotion; but at this time their
pr