n their
realms. In England, the government was uncompromisingly Protestant. Then
the pope and Philip tried intervention by fostering rebellion in
Catholic Ireland and by the Jesuit mission of Parsons and Campion in
England, but the only effect was to make the Protestantism of the
government the more implacable.

A change in Philip's methods in the Netherlands separated the northern
Protestant provinces from the Catholic Walloons. The assassination of
William of Orange decided the rulers of some of the northern German
states who had been in two minds. The accession of Rudolf II. of Austria
had a decisive effect in South Germany. When the failure of the house of
Valois made the Huguenot Henry of Navarre heir to the French throne, the
Catholic League, supported by the pope, determined to prevent his
succession, while the reigning king, Henry III., Catholic though he was,
was bitterly opposed to the Guises.

The immediate effect was the compulsory submission of the king to the
Guises and the League, followed by the assassination, first of Guise and
then of the king, at the moment when the Catholic aggression had taken
shape in the Spanish Armada, and received a check more overwhelming than
Philip was ready to recognise.

In certain fundamental points, the papacy was now re-asserting
Hildebrandine claims--the right of controlling succession to temporal
thrones. It is an error to regard it as essentially a supporter of
monarchy; it was the accident of the position which commonly brought it
into alliance with monarchies. In the Netherlands, it was by its support
of the constitutional demands of the Walloon nobles that the south was
saved for Catholicism. It asserted the duty of peoples to refuse
allegiance to princes who departed from Catholicism, and it was
Protestant monarchism which replied by asserting the divine right of
kings; the Jesuits actually derived the power of the princes from the
people. Thus a separate Catholic party arose, which, maintaining the
divine appointment of princes, restricted the intervention of the church
to spiritual affairs, and in France supported Navarre's claim to the
throne; while, on the other hand, Philip and the Spaniards, strongly
interested in preventing his succession, were ready to maintain, even
against a fluctuating pope, that heresy was a permanent bar to
succession, not to be removed even by recantation.

Sixtus V. found himself unable to decide. The rapid demise of three
pope