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W now enter on the crucial struggle, with religion at its centre, which absorbed the last twenty years of the Prince's life, and in the end closed it by the assassin's bullet. Philip, the Spanish troops, the Consulta, the Cardinal, had all in turn withdrawn in face of the growing force of the Reformation, and the widespread indignation they each aroused. They had withdrawn—but only to gain time, and for a far more deadly spring. Silently, in the recesses of Spain, Philip was organising a more crushing persecution, a far stronger alien army, and martial law under the ruthless Alva.

It must be remembered that in 1564 Protestantism itself was only in its first generation, everywhere in a state of flux and of rudiment. All persons well past middle life had been baptized and bred up as Catholics. The Council of Trent had only just formulated its final doctrines; the Church of England was still in the making; in the Netherlands, in England, in most parts of Germany, the Protestants were still in a minority, and themselves divided into hostile sects. In France,