ed for the good of the Huguenots of France?

And yet the unfortunate suppression of religious liberty in Bohemia, and
the sufferings of those who came to her rescue, especially the
misfortunes of the Elector Palatine, arrayed the Protestant princes of
Germany against the Emperor, and created general indignation throughout
Europe. Austria became more than ever a hated and dreaded power, not
merely to the States of Sweden, Denmark, Holland, and England, but to
Catholic France herself, then ruled by that able and ambitious statesman
Cardinal Richelieu, before whose tomb in an after age the czar Peter
bowed in earnest homage from the recollection and admiration of his
transcendent labors in behalf of absolutism. Even Richelieu, a prince of
the Church and the persecutor of the Huguenots, was alarmed at the
encroachments of Austria, and intrigued with Protestant princes to
undermine her dangerous ascendency.

Then opened the second act of the bloody drama of the seventeenth
century, when the allied Protestant princes of Germany, assisted by the
English and the Dutch, rallied under the leadership of Christian, King
of Denmark, and resolved to recover what they had lost; while Bethlen
Gabor, a Transylvanian prince, at the head of an army of robbers,
invaded Hungary and Austria. The Emperor, straitened in his finances,
was in no condition to meet this powerful confederacy, although the
illustrious Tilly was the commander of his forces.

But the demon of despotism, who never sleeps, raised up to his
assistance a great military genius. This was Wallenstein, Duke of
Friedland, the richest noble in Bohemia. The person whom he most
resembled, in that age of struggle and contending forces, when despotism
sought unscrupulous agents, was Thomas Wentworth, Earl of
Strafford,--the right hand of Charles I., in his warfare against the
liberties of England. Like Stratford, he was an apostate from the
principles in which he had been educated; like him, he had arisen from a
comparatively humble station; like him, his talents were as commanding
as his ambition,--devoted first to his own exaltation; and, secondly, to
the cause of absolutism, with which he sympathized with all the
intensity that a proud and domineering spirit may be supposed to feel
for the struggles of inexperienced democracy. Like the English
statesman, the German general was a Jesuit in the use of tools, jealous
of his authority, liberal in his rewards, and fearful in his ve