The story of our own country at this time is especially humiliating. Cromwell, in the early years of the half-century which we have been considering, had set England high in the estimation of the world. But Cromwell had died, and with him had gone down much for which he had so strongly stood. Again two Stuarts succeeded one another on England's throne, and the English king, like a very Petit Monarque, became a pensionary, a paid creature, of the Grand Monarque of France. Charles II. of England, and James II. after him, with no sense of responsibility, acted both as knaves and fools, though both had good wits enough, had they used them rightly; and they brought England into the very valley of humiliation. Out of that humiliation she was rescued by the accession to the English throne--jointly with his English wife, daughter of James I.--of William of Orange, ruler of Holland. Englishmen of a later day have perhaps been less grateful than they should be for what some will call the happy accident, and others the Providential dispensation, that, at this critical moment, she found a king who had a sense of duty to {95} his subjects, and a king who brought so valuable an alliance as that of his Dutch fellow-countrymen. Had some such foreign source of strength not come to our country's aid, had the succession continued in the Stuart line with other kings like those Stuarts who had occupied the throne, it is not possible to say what her fortunes might have been, but it is scarcely possible to doubt that she must have fallen, for a while at least, under the sovereignty of France. As it was, she had fallen under a most despotic rule by her own kings. Partly under the pretence that he was about to make war against France, and partly by expending money that he had secretly received from the French king, Charles II. had raised a large army. He had employed it to stamp out all opposition at home. The Grand Monarque was a strict Roman Catholic, and he used all his power over his royal pensioners in England to induce them to bring England back into the fold of Rome. But if anything were needed to make the great majority of the English and Scottish people yet more determined than before that the State religion should not be that of Rome, a powerful influence towards the stiffening of that determination was supplied by a measure passed by Louis in 1685 and known in history as the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. [Sidenote: Edict of Nantes revoked] That Edict of Nantes had permitted to the Huguenots, the French Protestants, freedom to practise their religion and to live under no disadvantages, as compared with their fellow-countrymen of the Roman Church. The Revocation of the Edict not only withdrew those permissions, but was accompanied and followed by a deadly persecution under which many of the Huguenots lost their lives and the survivors fled to Protestant countries, especially to England and to Holland.