of
public worship which the Edict of Nantes of the year 1598 had guaranteed
them.

The war, after the habit of such encounters, did not decide anything,
when it came to an end with the treaty of Westphalia in 1648. The
Catholic powers remained Catholic and the Protestant powers stayed
faithful to the doctrines of Luther and Calvin and Zwingli. The Swiss
and Dutch Protestants were recognised as independent republics. France
kept the cities of Metz and Toul and Verdun and a part of the Alsace.
The Holy Roman Empire continued to exist as a sort of scare-crow state,
without men, without money, without hope and without courage.

The only good the Thirty Years War accomplished was a negative one. It
discouraged both Catholics and Protestants from ever trying it again.
Henceforth they left each other in peace. This however did not mean
that religious feeling and theological hatred had been removed from this
earth. On the contrary. The quarrels between Catholic and Protestant
came to an end, but the disputes between the different Protestant sects
continued as bitterly as ever before. In Holland a difference of
opinion as to the true nature of predestination (a very obscure point of
theology, but exceedingly important the eyes of your great-grandfather)
caused a quarrel which ended with the decapitation of John of
Oldenbarneveldt, the Dutch statesman, who had been responsible for
the success of the Republic during the first twenty years of its
independence, and who was the great organising genius of her Indian
trading company. In England, the feud led to civil war.

But before I tell you of this outbreak which led to the first execution
by process-of-law of a European king, I ought to say something about the
previous history of England. In this book I am trying to give you only
those events of the past which can throw a light upon the conditions of
the present world. If I do not mention certain countries, the cause is
not to be found in any secret dislike on my part. I wish that I could
tell you what happened to Norway and Switzerland and Serbia and China.
But these lands exercised no great influence upon the development of
Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I therefore pass
them by with a polite and very respectful bow. England however is in
a different position. What the people of that small island have done
during the last five hundred years has shaped the course of history in
every corner of the world. Wi