The war dragged on. Spain and France had come in as members of the Catholic League, against the Protestants, but now there arose in France a new policy which set these two Catholic nations in opposition to each other. It is an opposition that is closely associated with the name of one man, the French king's great minister, Richelieu. We may note here one of the minor results of the Reformation. Previously to the Reformation we find great ecclesiastics, that is to say, men holding the highest positions in the Church, as great ministers of the State also. Our Cardinal Wolsey is an instance. Indeed you will scarcely find an instance anywhere of a great minister who was not a high ecclesiastic. The reason is simple: they were the men who had the {78} education, and nearly the only men. But now many laymen were beginning to be men of learning also, and in most of the Protestant countries the State and the Church were not nearly so closely associated together as they still were in the Roman Catholic countries. Therefore we now begin to see that, whereas in the Catholic countries the chief ministers of State continue to be cardinals and great men of the Church, in the Protestant countries it is so no longer. The king's ministers are most often laymen. [Sidenote: Richelieu's policy] During part of the Thirty Years' War the great French cardinal, Richelieu, had on his hands a heavy task in suppressing a most formidable rising of the Huguenots, whose greatest strength was in the west. England sent a fleet to their assistance, but it effected little. They were compelled to yield, after very brave resistance, and in 1629 was arranged that Peace of Alais, which is noted in history as marking "the end of religious wars." Under that treaty the Huguenots were given equal political rights in France with the Catholics. Nevertheless in Germany the Thirty Years' War, which certainly had its rise as a war about religion, dragged on for nearly a score of years longer, until its final settlement by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648.