The Puritans did not attempt any desperate measures of the kind, but we have seen that the very spirit of the whole Protestant movement was a critical spirit, a spirit of judging, of forming an opinion and not merely accepting the opinion of some one else, even if that some one were the Pope himself. We have seen how difficult it was for those English Protestants who had been abroad to accept the conditions which they found when they returned to England--the king occupying a position in the Church not very different from that which the Pope claimed. They were very apt, then, to be critical in matters of government as well as in matters of religion. And the actions of James, and of all the Stuart kings, were of a kind to provoke a great deal of criticism. The feeling throughout England began to be very strong against the Crown. It was tension, strained feeling, between a large section of the nation--a section that began to be more powerful with that growing power, which we have noticed, of the middle class--and the king who was the head of the State Church. On the Continent there was tension quite as acute between the people and the princes, but there it was tension not so much between any two sections of the reformed Church, as between the people as members of the reformed Church and the princes as representatives of the old Church. Moreover in some lands the princes and rulers themselves were of the reformed religion. In France it is the Catholic Crown and the State forces that we see opposed to the Protestants, there called Huguenots. In Germany a Catholic League is made by the {74} rulers of the States that adhered to the old faith, and, in opposition, a Protestant Union is formed by the princes of the States that have accepted the doctrines of the Reformation. But also in Germany, we see that, in one of the States at least, a Catholic prince is set against a large Protestant section of his people. This was in Bohemia. It was in France that the first violent outbreak, due to this tension, occurred--a rising of the Huguenots under the great Prince Condé. It was quickly suppressed, and Condé was taken and imprisoned. That was a rising of very small and unimportant character compared to one which happened three years later, in 1618, as a consequence of the opposition which we have just noted, between the king and people in Bohemia. Bohemia was the land of Huss, one of the fore-runners of Luther's Reformation. The spirit of Protestantism was strong there. By attempting to persecute the Bohemians for their religious opinions and practices the king at once made that spirit stronger still, and the people appealed for support to the German princes of the Protestant Union. It was support, energetically given. [Sidenote: Gustavus Adolphus]