The first of this series was the war carried on in Holland and the Netherlands against the Catholic foreigners— the Spaniards—into whose hands they had been thrown by the family affairs of the house of Austria. Although noblemen took up the side of the rebels—e.g. Egmont and Horn, executed for so doing—this war was in the main a war of the bourgeois democracy on behalf of Protestantism, embittered by the feeling of a Teutonic race against a Latinised one. There is to be found in it even some foretaste of the revolutionary sanscullote element, as shown by the eagerness with which the rebels took up the nickname of gueux, or beggars, flung at them in scorn by their foes, as well as by the extreme bitterness of the ruder seafaring population, the men whose hats bore the inscription, “Better Turk than Pope.”
In Germany the struggle known as 109 the “Thirty Years’ War” was between the two opposing parties amongst the great vassals of the German Empire, whose power was used for the aggrandisement of the house of Austria, and also for the enforcement of Catholicism on the more northern countries. The reader must not forget, moreover, that these countries were to the full as oppressively governed as those which obeyed the bidding of the emperor.
This miserable war, after inflicting the most terrible suffering on the unhappy people, who were throughout treated with far less mercy and consideration than if they had been beasts, after having crushed the rising intelligence of Germany into a condition from which it has only arisen in days close to our own, dribbled out in a miserable and aimless manner, leaving the limits of Protestant and Catholic pretty much where it had found them; but it also left the people quite defenceless against their masters, the bureaucratic kings and princes.
In France the religious struggle took a very bitter form, but it was far more 110 political than in Germany. The leaders were even prepared to change their creed when driven into a corner—as Henry of Navarre at