the time of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew. In France the popular sympathy was by no means in favour of Protestantism: the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, which inflicted such a terrible blow on the Huguenot cause, would otherwise have been hardly possible. It is true that the great Huguenot leader, Henry of Navarre, became king of France, but his accession, the result of his personal genius, did not carry with it a Huguenot triumph as a consequence. Henry had to abjure Protestantism,—a Protestant King of France was impossible.
The great struggle in England came later, and probably in consequence the victory was more decided on the Puritan side. The enthusiasm with which Mary Tudor—“Bloody Mary”—was received, and the Catholic insurrections in the reign of her successor, show that there was at first some popular feeling on the Catholic side; but by the time of James I., Catholicism was practically dead in 111 England82 The Book of Sports issued by his Government, which encouraged the people to play various games on Sunday after the fashion of the Middle Ages, was widely received as an outrage on the feelings of the growing middle class in town and country. We have here the first manifestation of that curious Sabbatarianism, which seems to be confined to these islands, and the origin of which is very obscure, since the original Calvinists, such as John Knox, and even Calvin himself, were not enthralled by it.
The maritime power of England has its beginning in the later Tudor period in contrast to the Middle Ages, when seafaring matters were of little national importance in England, the carrying of the northern seas being almost entirely in the hands of the Flemings and the Hansers. But under Elizabeth the English seamen, gentlemen adventurers and merchants, stimulated by the discovery of America, the prosaic accounts 112 of practical money-getting, and the legends of fabulous wealth that there awaited the fearless and boundless greed of the new knight-errantry of commerce, fitted out ships for filibustering expeditions to the New World. They practically went to war on their own account with the