He had been in Paris less than a year when an event happened which made him doubly sure of the soundness of his position, and tenfold increased his belief in the ultimate victory of his Church over all other denominations.  The Commonwealth of England collapsed, and Charles II. was called to the throne from which his father had been hurled by Oliver Cromwell.  Nothing can give any idea of the shock experienced by France on hearing of the development and success of the Great Rebellion in England.  No Frenchman at that time understood what the English Constitution was.  The course of French history had led the people of France to put all the strength they possessed in the hands of their kings, and to treat as a public enemy any one who resisted, or even attempted to limit in any way, the royal authority.  To people holding such opinions the English nation after the month of January, 1649, appeared as a nation of parricides.  And the feeling was intensified by the fact that the wife of the beheaded king, Henrietta Maria, was a sister of the King of France, a daughter of the beloved Henry IV., whose death by Ravaillac’s dagger was still mourned by every French patriot.  The triumph of Cromwell, the proud position which England occupied in Europe during his protectorate, left however hardly any hope that the rebellious nation would ever acknowledge the errors of her ways; and lo! in a moment, without any effort on his part, without any struggle, the dead king’s son resumed his rights, and every one who had been in arms against him lay prostrate at his feet.  The same nation that had rebelled against the levying of the “ship money” and the proceedings of the Star Chamber allowed Charles II. almost as absolute an authority as ever the King of France possessed.  Once cured of her political errors, was England not to be soon cured of her theological errors?  After repenting her rebellion against the King, was she not to repent her rebellion against the Pope?  Such were the questions which Bossuet, which the whole of France, began to ask.  Or rather, these were to them no longer questions:  the people of France began to look across the Channel with confident expectation of a religious counter-revolution.  The collapse of the Commonwealth could not but be followed by the collapse of the Reformation.

When Louis XIV., after Cardinal Mazarin’s death, took in his own hands the management of the affairs of the State; when the marriage of the brilliant Henrietta of England with the Duke of Orleans made the sister of the English King a sister-in-law to the King of France; when triumph after triumph on the field of war, of diplomacy, of literature, of art, added to the power and glory of France, which had never swerved in her allegiance either to King or Church,—­the feeling grew that only in unity of Faith, Law, and King were truth and prosperity to be found by nations.  The saying “Une foi, une loi, un roi” (one faith, one law, one king), which may be said to sum up Bossuet’s religious, social, and political beliefs, seemed to all an incontrovertible and self-evident axiom.