France, which had been unjustly usurped by another family in times past to his detriment, and which only a mere human invention—­a “pleasantry” as Alva had happily termed it, called the “Salic law”—­prevented from passing quietly to his daughter, as heiress to her mother, daughter of Henry ii., he was now fully bent upon making his own without further loss of time.  England, in consequence of the mishap of the year eighty-eight, he was inclined to defer appropriating until the possession of the French coasts, together with those of the Netherlands, should enable him to risk the adventure with assured chances of success.

The Netherlands were fast slipping beyond his control, to be sure, as he engaged in these endless schemes; and ill-disposed people of the day said that the king was like Aesop’s dog, lapping the river dry in order to get at the skins floating on the surface.  The Duke of Parma was driven to his wits’ ends for expedients, and beside himself with vexation, when commanded to withdraw his ill-paid and mutinous army from the Provinces for the purpose of invading France.  Most importunate were the appeals and potent the arguments by which he attempted to turn Philip from his purpose.  It was in vain.  Spain was the great, aggressive, overshadowing power at that day, before whose plots and whose violence the nations alternately trembled, and it was France that now stood in danger of being conquered or dismembered by the common enemy of all.  That unhappy kingdom, torn by intestine conflict, naturally invited the ambition and the greediness of foreign powers.  Civil war had been its condition, with brief intervals, for a whole generation of mankind.  During the last few years, the sword had been never sheathed, while “the holy Confederacy” and the Bearnese struggled together for the mastery.  Religion was the mantle under which the chiefs on both sides concealed their real designs as they led on their followers year after year to the desperate conflict.  And their followers, the masses, were doubtless in earnest.  A great principle—­the relation of man to his Maker and his condition in a future world as laid down by rival priesthoods—­has in almost every stage of history had power to influence the multitude to fury and to deluge the world in blood.  And so long as the superstitious element of human nature enables individuals or combinations of them to dictate to their fellow-creatures those relations, or to dogmatize concerning those conditions—­to take possession of their consciences in short, and to interpose their mummeries between man and his Creator—­it is, probable that such scenes as caused the nations to shudder, throughout so large a portion of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries will continue to repeat themselves at intervals in various parts of the earth.  Nothing can be more sublime than the self-sacrifice, nothing more demoniac than the crimes, which human creatures have seemed always ready to exhibit under the name of religion.