In Germany, the Augsburg declaration, which made the religion of each prince the religion also of his dominions, the arrangement was favourable to a Catholic recovery; since princes were more likely to be drawn back to the fold than populations, as happened notably in the case of Albert of Bavaria, who re-imposed Catholicism on a country whose sympathies were Protestant.  In Germany, also, much was done by the wide establishment of Jesuit schools, whither the excellence of the education attracted Protestants as well as Catholics.  The great ecclesiastical principalities were also practically secured for Catholicism.

The Netherlands were under the dominion of Philip of Spain, the most rigorous supporter of orthodoxy, who gave the Inquisition free play.  His severities induced revolt, which Alva was sent to suppress, acting avowedly by terrorist methods.  In France the Huguenots had received legal recognition, and were headed by a powerful section of the nobility; the Catholic section, with which Paris in particular was entirely in sympathy, were dominant, but not at all securely so—­a state of rivalry which culminated in the massacre of St. Bartholomew, while Alva was in the Netherlands.

Nevertheless, these events stirred the Protestants both in France and in the Netherlands to a renewed and desperate resistance.  On the other hand, some of the German Catholic princes displayed a degree of tolerance which permitted extensions of Protestantism within their realms.  In England, the government was uncompromisingly Protestant.  Then the pope and Philip tried intervention by fostering rebellion in Catholic Ireland and by the Jesuit mission of Parsons and Campion in England, but the only effect was to make the Protestantism of the government the more implacable.

A change in Philip’s methods in the Netherlands separated the northern Protestant provinces from the Catholic Walloons.  The assassination of William of Orange decided the rulers of some of the northern German states who had been in two minds.  The accession of Rudolf II. of Austria had a decisive effect in South Germany.  When the failure of the house of Valois made the Huguenot Henry of Navarre heir to the French throne, the Catholic League, supported by the pope, determined to prevent his succession, while the reigning king, Henry III., Catholic though he was, was bitterly opposed to the Guises.

The immediate effect was the compulsory submission of the king to the Guises and the League, followed by the assassination, first of Guise and then of the king, at the moment when the Catholic aggression had taken shape in the Spanish Armada, and received a check more overwhelming than Philip was ready to recognise.