THE NEW ENGLANDER. No. CLIV. JANUARY, 1880. ARTICLE I.-THE MASSACRE OF ST. BARTHOLOMEW.* By Corys Park Fisher. If the FRANCE, in the age when Protestantism was spreading in Europe, found herself in a place where two seas met. ship of state did not go to pieces, like the vessel which threw St. Paul upon the coast of Malta, it had to struggle through a long and frightful tempest from which it barely escaped. In the other European countries, the situation was different. There was intestine discord, but not to the same extent; or with consequences less ruinous. In Germany, the central authority was too weak to coerce the Lutheran states. The war undertaken by Charles V. for that purpose was brief, and comparatively bloodless. The final issue was the freedom of the Protestants for a long period, until imperial fanaticism, in the early part of the seventeenth century, brought on the terrible Thirty Years' War, which exhausted. * This Article was finished before the publication of the admirable History of the Rise of the Huguenots in France, by Professor Henry M. Baird. (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1879.) Professor Baird's narrative is founded on thorough researches, and is an accurate and impartial, and, at the same time, vivid description of the progress of the Reformation in France from its beginning to the close of the reign of Charles IX. what was left of the vitality of the German Empire, and ended in the establishment of Protestant liberties at the Peace of Westphalia (1648). In England, as late as Elizabeth's reign, not less than one half the population preferred the old Church; but in the wars of the Roses, the nobles had been decimated, and regal authority strengthened; and the iron will of the Tudor sovereigns, Henry VIII. and Elizabeth, coupled with an inbred hatred of foreign rule, ecclesiastical and secular, and supported by the fervent love of a great party to the Protestant faith, kept the nation on one path, and stifled various attempts at insurrection, which might otherwise have blazed up in civil war. In Scotland, the league of the nobles with the reformers, aided by the follies of Mary Stuart, proved strong enough to uphold against the opposing faction the revolution which had made Calvinism the legal religion of the country. In Sweden, Protestantism speedily triumphed under the popular dynasty erected by Gustavus Vasa. In the Netherlands, there was a fierce battle continued for the greater part of a century; but the contest of Holland was against Spain, to throw off the yoke that she was determined to fasten upon that persecuted and unconquerable race. In Italy and in the Spanish peninsula, Protestantism did not gain strength enough to stand against the revived fanaticism of its adversary, and was swept away, root and branch. In general, it may be said that in the North, among the peoples of the Teutonic stock, the preponderance was so greatly on the side of the Protestants, that the shock occasioned by the collision of opposing parties was weakened and unity was preserved; while in the South, among the Romanic peoples below the Alps and the Pyrenees, the Catholic cause had a like predominance in a much greater degree, and overwhelmed all opposition. But, as for France, she stood midway between the two mighty currents of opinion. Her people belonged, in their lineage and tongue, to the Latin race; but they had somewhat more of German blood in their veins than their brethren in the South, and-what is much more important-by their geographical situation, previous history, and culture, they were made. much more sensitive to the influences of what was then modern thought. |