So wrote Richard Bernard, a fierily Protestant preacher, in 1628, at a time when English men and women were familiar with the battles that ravaged continental Europe. After England's brief and undistinguished interventions in continental wars in the 1620s, however, the English enjoyed a decade of peace, but they followed the course of the Thirty Years War and were shocked by its vividly reported horrors. They congratulated themselves on England's halcyon days even as many Englishmen fought abroad and, at home, knowledge of the laws and conditions of war was widespread. That knowledge was of many kinds – Bernard, for example, linked his biblical examples to the law of nations as recognised in his own day – but until 1639 its application remained comfortably distant from everyday English life. The multiple domestic tensions of the 1630s – religious, constitutional, financial and social – were contained, if with increasing strain, until war and its associated costs and taxation forced a crisis.