Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 06.djvu/79

 in it one way or the other. But Spain, even more than Rome, was the chosen throne of Popery; which in that time meant temporal and eternal Damnability, Falsity to God’s Gospel, love of prosperous Darkness rather than of suffering Light,—infinite baseness rushing short-sighted upon infinite peril for this world and for all worlds. King James, with his worldly-wise endeavourings to marry his son into some firstrate family, never made a falser calculation than in this grand business of the Spanish Match. ‘The soul of England abhorred to have any concern with Spain or things Spanish. Spain was as a black Domdaniel, which, had the floors of it been paved with diamonds, had the Infanta of it come riding in such a Gig of Respectability as was never driven since Phaëton’s Sun-chariot took the road, no honest English soul could wish to have concern with. Hence England illuminated itself. The articulate tendency of this Solomon King had unfortunately parted company altogether with the inarticulate but ineradicable tendency of the Country he presided over. The Solomon King struggled one way; and the English Nation with its very life-fibres was compelled to struggle another way. The rent by degrees became wide enough!

For the present, England is all illuminated, a new Parliament is summoned; which welcomes the breaking of the Spanish Match, as one might welcome the breaking of a Dr. Faustus’s Bargain, and a deliverance from the power of sorcerers. Uncle Oliver served in this Parliament, as was his wont, for Huntingdonshire. They and the Nation with one voice impelled the poor old King to draw out his fighting tools at last, and beard this Spanish Apollyon, instead of making marriages with it. No Pitt’s crusade against French Sansculottism in the end of the Eighteenth Century could be so welcomed by English Preservers of the Game, as this defiance of the Spanish Apollyon was by Englishmen in general in the beginning of the Seventeenth. The Palatinate was to be recovered, after all; Protestantism, the sacred cause of God’s Light and Truth against the Devil’s Falsity and