History of the United Netherlands, 1590b | Page 2

from passing quietly to his daughter, as heiress to her

mother, daughter of Henry II., he was now fully bent upon making his
own without further loss of time. England, in consequence of the
mishap of the year eighty-eight, he was inclined to defer appropriating
until the possession of the French coasts, together with those of the
Netherlands, should enable him to risk the adventure with assured
chances of success.
The Netherlands were fast slipping beyond his control, to be sure, as he
engaged in these endless schemes; and ill-disposed people of the day
said that the king was like Aesop's dog, lapping the river dry in order to
get at the skins floating on the surface. The Duke of Parma was driven
to his wits' ends for expedients, and beside himself with vexation, when
commanded to withdraw his ill-paid and mutinous army from the
Provinces for the purpose of invading France. Most importunate were
the appeals and potent the arguments by which he attempted to turn
Philip from his purpose. It was in vain. Spain was the great, aggressive,
overshadowing power at that day, before whose plots and whose
violence the nations alternately trembled, and it was France that now
stood in danger of being conquered or dismembered by the common
enemy of all. That unhappy kingdom, torn by intestine conflict,
naturally invited the ambition and the greediness of foreign powers.
Civil war had been its condition, with brief intervals, for a whole
generation of mankind. During the last few years, the sword had been
never sheathed, while "the holy Confederacy" and the Bearnese
struggled together for the mastery. Religion was the mantle under
which the chiefs on both sides concealed their real designs as they led
on their followers year after year to the desperate conflict. And their
followers, the masses, were doubtless in earnest. A great principle--the
relation of man to his Maker and his condition in a future world as laid
down by rival priesthoods--has in almost every stage of history had
power to influence the multitude to fury and to deluge the world in
blood. And so long as the superstitious element of human nature
enables individuals or combinations of them to dictate to their fellow-
creatures those relations, or to dogmatize concerning those conditions--
to take possession of their consciences in short, and to interpose their
mummeries between man and his Creator--it is, probable that such
scenes as caused the nations to shudder, throughout so large a portion
of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries will continue to repeat

themselves at intervals in various parts of the earth. Nothing can be
more sublime than the self-sacrifice, nothing more demoniac than the
crimes, which human creatures have seemed always ready to exhibit
under the name of religion.
It was and had been really civil war in France. In the Netherlands it had
become essentially a struggle for independence against a foreign
monarch; although the germ out of which both conflicts had grown to
their enormous proportions was an effort of the multitude to check the
growth of papacy. In France, accordingly, civil war, attended by that
gaunt sisterhood, murder, pestilence, and famine, had swept from the
soil almost everything that makes life valuable. It had not brought in its
train that extraordinary material prosperity and intellectual
development at which men wondered in the Netherlands, and to which
allusion has just been made. But a fortunate conjunction of
circumstances had now placed Henry of Navarre in a position of
vantage. He represented the principle of nationality, of French unity. It
was impossible to deny that he was in the regular line of succession,
now that luckless Henry of Valois slept with his fathers, and the
principle of nationality might perhaps prove as vital a force as
attachment to the Roman Church. Moreover, the adroit and
unscrupulous Bearnese knew well how to shift the mantle of religion
from one shoulder to the other, to serve his purposes or the humours of
those whom he addressed.
"The King of Spain would exclude me from the kingdom and heritage
of my father because of my religion," he said to the Duke of Saxony;
"but in that religion I am determined to persist so long as I shall live."
The hand was the hand of Henry, but it was the voice of Duplessis
Mornay.
"Were there thirty crowns to win," said he, at about the same time to
the States of France, "I would not change my religion on compulsion,
the dagger at my throat. Instruct me, instruct me, I am not obstinate."
There spoke the wily freethinker, determined not to be juggled out of
what he considered his property by fanatics or priests of either church.
Had Henry been a real devotee, the fate of Christendom might have
been different. The world