great change has taken place in the last two centuries and a half; and that the English Puritans, the course of whose development we are attempting to trace, the men who founded New England and marched to victory under Cromwell, bore little resemblance to the machinelike beings who have succeeded them in the factory and field.

If the presence in England of these Netherland refugees had produced no other effects than those already noticed, their immigration would be one of the memorable events of history. Certainly no body of men, seeking an asylum in distress, ever brought such gifts to repay their benefactors. But there was another result of their presence, more immediate and therefore more striking.

The great struggle for civil liberty in England, to which Puritanism gave birth, did not fairly open until after Elizabeth had passed away, friendless and unlamented. It ultimately settled the question between a despotic and a constitutional form of government for the English nation. Meantime, however, another question had to be determined-whether, when foes on all sides. were plotting its destruction, there would remain such a thing as an English nation at all. It is customary to point to the destruction of the Spanish Armada as the event which decided that issue. But the cause of English Catholicism, the foe of the national existence, was dead before Philip's fleet ever set sail from home. Nothing was needed except to give it a fitting burial. That it certainly received when the doomed Spanish ships went down before the elements. No monarch, not even the greatest conqueror falling on the field of battle, could ask for a nobler resting-place than the ocean, or a funeral train more majestic than that which

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followed, even into its grave, the Lost Cause of the sixteenth century.

The contest, in which English Catholicism as a political power disappeared forever, was carried on partly by land and partly by sea during the first twenty-five years of Elizabeth's reign. It was to some extent, as we have seen, a theological warfare, but, after all, dogmas played but a small part in its settlement. Protestantism won the victory because the English people came to believe that the Spaniards, who to them represented the papacy, were tyrannical, treacherous, cruel, and, what perhaps influenced them not the least, the natural enemies of their material prosperity. To establish such a belief, something was needed besides the lofty teachings of the Puritan divines, or the exemplary lives of the Netherland refugees.

That want was mainly supplied by the drama acted in the Netherlands, where Spain, although unconscious of the fact, was fighting for her life. It required some education to read the Bible and to comprehend the difference between the conflicting creeds, but here was a series of object-lessons which the most illiterate could understand. The exhibition during the reign of Mary had taught the people much; but that lesson was on a petty scale, and was brief in its duration. This was a tragedy that went on year after year, and was to continue for more than the lifetime of a man as allotted by the Psalmist. Its victims, instead of being counted by the score, were numbered by the tens of thousands.

Time softened the recollections of the Marian persecution. The ignorance, corruption, and immorality in the Established Church turned many men from a Refor mation which could bear such fruits. In the northern

and western counties, the reaction in favor of the old faith was very marked when the Jesuits and seminary priests began their missionary labors. But nothing ever thus affected the population of the southern and eastern counties. They knew too well what was meant by a Catholic restoration. Their towns were filled with intelligent, truthful men, every one of whom was a living witness to tales of horror, compared with which the worst atrocities described in Foxe's "Book of Martyrs" almost dwindled into insignificance. A few years ago an American scholar exhumed the old records and laid this story before the world. Its narration, even on the cold printed page, stirs a fever in the veins of the practical, unimpassioned man of the nineteenth century. Let the reader now try to imagine what was the effect upon the English people, when, by the fireside and in the market-place, this tale was told by thousands of men, women, and children, who themselves had seen the scaffolds running with blood, the flames blazing up around the stake, the sacking of towns, the violation of mothers, and the indiscriminate massacre of the white-haired grandfather and the helpless babe.

It was not necessary that the auditors should possess any deep religious convictions to be affected by such recitals. They belonged to a race who were then among the most romantic and poetical that the world has ever known. Everything in their lives had tended to develop these characteristics. In summer, the landsmen watched their sheep, surrounded by goblins and fairies, attendant spirits always bred in the imaginations of men engaged in such pursuits. In the long winter days, they had little to do except to indulge in the rudest of sports, tempered in the evening by the songs of their minstrels, who were pre-eminently a national institution, forerun

IMPRESSIONABLE NATURE OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE 503

ners of the host of singing birds that gave us the poetry of the Elizabethan age. *

The men who lived on the sea-coast were even more governed by their feelings and imagination. Navigation is to-day a matter of science. Vessels are propelled and steered by machinery. Every course is laid down on a chart, every harbor has been sounded, every market has been studied. Three hundred years ago, to the British sailor the world, outside a very narrow range, was an unexplored domain. It was a fairy region in which nothing was impossible, little improbable. For such a people Shakespeare wrote his plays. To them the witches of "Macbeth," the ghost in "Hamlet,” the "men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders," were as real as any of the persons who lived about them. These Elizabethan Englishmen, with their poetical and chivalric instincts, were as impressionable as children, and as easily affected by anything which outraged their sense of justice, provided they themselves were not the aggressors. In addition to this, they had the love of adventure which has always marked the race. It was impossible that such men should be unaffected by such a war as was going on before their very eyes.

The first class in the community, moved to take an active part in the struggle, was, as might be expected, not composed of the religious or even the sober-minded ele

*Guizot's "Shakespeare," pp. 38, 40. In 1315, the Royal Council, being desirous to suppress vagabondage, forbade all persons except minstrels to stop at the houses of prelates, earls, and barons to eat or drink; nor might there enter on cach day, into such houses, "more than three or four minstrels of honor," unless the proprietor himself invited a larger number. In the days of Elizabeth the minstrels had fallen into some disrepute, but they had left their impress on the national character. Drake, p. 270.

ment. It was made up of the men whom civil convulsions usually bring to the surface, the scum of society, broken-down adventurers, who, having gambled away all else, have nothing left but their lives for stakes. How they took to the sea, and by their piracies reflected discredit on the English name, we have seen in a former chapter. Those who, at the outset, crossed over to the Netherlands and offered their services to the insurgents for the war by land, were of much the same character. Some did good service in the siege of Harlem, forming part of the heroic garrison which was massacred at its capture. But the majority were of a different stamp, being willing to fight on the side which gave the larger pay. So dangerous was the treachery among them that, in 1573, the Prince of Orange, unable to distinguish friend from foe, determined to send them all home, and they were accordingly dismissed.*

Five years elapsed before it was deemed safe to reenlist any more English troops. In the interval, a decided change had taken place in public feeling. Elizabeth was pursuing her accustomed system of vacillation. If the patriots gained a victory she inclined to give them aid; but in their misfortunes, when assistance was most needed, she always professed herself the friend of Spain. It was not so, however, with her councillors, Burghley and Walsingham. They saw that in the success of the Netherland revolt lay the safety of England, and they encouraged in its behalf the Puritan sentiment, which was slowly developing into fanaticism. The corsairs on the sea were extending their field of operations. From

*Froude, xi. 33. Some of these volunteers exhibited the ferocity in the Netherlands which their countrymen had shown in Ireland. Froude, x. 393.