HOLLAND was at this time the one European country in which man was allowed to worship his Maker according to the dictates of his conscience. Commercial activity in Europe has always been accompanied, or followed, by speculative freedom, and where these two forms of national vigour flourish religious bigotry languishes. The Dutch, like the Italians, and even in a higher degree, had from the earliest times shown a spirit of insubordination to papal authority. The decrees of the Holy See had frequently met with a stubborn resistance in which beggars and princes, prelates and burgesses heartily participated. The long feud between Guelf and Ghibelline, stirred up by Gregory Hildebrand’s overweening ambition, had found both the people and the clergy of Holland on the side of the Pope’s enemies. And not only the decrees but also the doctrines of Rome had often failed to command obedience in this undutiful daughter of the Church, who from the very first lent an attentive ear to the whisperings of infidelity. All the heresies that sprang up in Europe from the beginning of the twelfth century to the beginning of the sixteenth--from Tanchelyn to Luther--had been welcomed by the Dutch. Wickliffe found numerous sympathisers in the Netherlands; and the victims of the Holy See eager avengers. Many Hollanders, who had taken part in the crusade against Huss and his followers in Bohemia, returned home horror-struck at the cruelty of those under whose banner they had fought. Scepticism grew with the growth of ecclesiastical depravity and persecution with the growth of ecclesiastical authority, so that in no other region, not even excepting Spain, was the infernal ingenuity of the Inquisition more severely taxed than in Holland. It was here that the longest anathemas were pronounced, and the most hideous tortures endured. The annual returns of the banned, fleeced, flayed, and burnt, amounted to thousands. But at last tyranny bred despair, and despair rebellion. People and nobility were united in a common cause. If the burgesses hated the priests for their persecuting spirit, the barons hated them as cordially for the wealth and power which they had contrived to usurp. And then came the invention of the printing press to prepare the way for the great day of the Reformation, on which was signed the death-warrant of mediaeval Catholicism.