The long fight against Spain and the Inquisition had stimulated the energies of the Church and the people of the Netherlands, and their Universities and theological schools soon rivalled older seats of learning. The University of Leyden, a thank-offering for the wonderful deliverance of the town, was founded in 1575; Franecker, ten years later, in 1585; and there followed in rapid succession the Universities of Gronningen (1612), Utrecht (1636), and Harderwyk (1648). Dutch theologians and lawyers became famous during the seventeenth century for their learning and acumen. CHAPTER VI. THE REFORMATION IN SCOTLAND.[273] If civilisation means the art of living together in peace, Scotland was almost four hundred years behind the rest of Western Europe in the beginning of the sixteenth century. The history of her kings is a tale of assassinations, long minorities, regencies scrambled and fought for by unscrupulous barons; and kingly authority, which had been growing in other countries, was on the verge of extinction in Scotland. Her Parliament or Estates of the Realm was a mere feudal assembly, with more than the usual uncertainty regarding who were entitled to be present; while its peculiar management by a Committee of the Estates made it a facile instrument in the hands of the faction who were for the moment in power, and robbed it of any stable influence on the country as a whole. The Church, wealthy so far as acreage was concerned, had become secularised to an extent unknown elsewhere, and its benefices served to provide for the younger sons of the great feudal families in a manner which recalls the days of Charles the Hammer.[274] Yet the country had been prepared for the Reformation by the education of the people, especially of the middle class, by constant intercourse between Scotland and France and the Low Countries, and by the sympathy which Scottish students had felt for the earlier movements towards Church reform in England and Bohemia; while the wealth and immorality of the Romish clergy, the poverty of the nobility and landed gentry, and the changing political situation, combined to give an impetus to the efforts of those who longed for a Reformation.