the great
house of Austria, reigning supreme in Spain and in Germany, could not be
allowed to crush the Duke of Savoy on the one side, and Bohemia, Moravia,
and the Netherlands on the other without danger of subjection for France.
Yet the aim of the Queen-Regent was to cultivate an impossible alliance
with her inevitable foe.

And in England, ruled as it then was with no master mind to enforce
against its sovereign the great lessons of policy, internal and external,
on which its welfare and almost its imperial existence depended, the only
ambition of those who could make their opinions felt was to pursue the
same impossibility, intimate alliance with the universal foe.

Any man with slightest pretensions to statesmanship knew that the liberty
for Protestant worship in Imperial Germany, extorted by force, had been
given reluctantly, and would be valid only as long as that force could
still be exerted or should remain obviously in reserve. The
"Majesty-Letter" and the "Convention" of the two religions would prove as
flimsy as the parchment on which they were engrossed, the Protestant
churches built under that sanction would be shattered like glass, if once
the Catholic rulers could feel their hands as clear as their consciences
would be for violating their sworn faith to heretics. Men knew, even if
the easy-going and uxorious emperor, into which character the once busy
and turbulent Archduke Matthias had subsided, might be willing to keep
his pledges, that Ferdinand of Styria, who would soon succeed him, and
Maximilian of Bavaria were men who knew their own minds, and had mentally
never resigned one inch of the ground which Protestantism imagined itself
to have conquered.

These things seem plain as daylight to all who look back upon them
through the long vista of the past; but the sovereign of England did not
see them or did not choose to see them. He saw only the Infanta and her
two millions of dowry, and he knew that by calling Parliament together to
ask subsidies for an anti-Catholic war he should ruin those golden
matrimonial prospects for his son, while encouraging those "shoemakers,"
his subjects, to go beyond their "last," by consulting the
representatives of his people on matters pertaining to the mysteries of
government. He was slowly digging the grave of the monarchy and building
the scaffold of his son; but he did his work with a laborious and
pedantic trifling, when really engaged in state affairs, most am