The half century between 1559 and 1610 must assuredly rank as one of the most brutal and bigoted in the history of modern Europe. The massacre in Paris on St Bartholomew's day in 1572; the calculated savagery of the duke of Alba's Council of Blood and the wild atrocities of the Calvinistic Beggars in the Netherlands; the persecution of the Moriscos in Spain—these were merely the more spectacular barbarities of an age unsurpassed for cruelty until our own day.

Yet what, in the history of the later sixteenth century, is just as striking as man's inhumanity to man is man's impotence before events, his inability to control his circumstances or to dominate his destiny. Thus in the political field the greatest monarch of his time, Philip II of Spain, was unable to conquer a weak England or a disunited France; could hold only half his rebellious Netherlands; and ended his reign, as he had begun it, in bankruptcy. His noblest opponent, William the Silent, died knowing that a union of his beloved fatherland upon a basis of mutual toleration between rival religions was a dream as remote as the hopes that Sir Edward Kelley and Marco Bragadino cherished of transmuting base metals into gold. With others the gap between aspiration and achievement was narrower only because they pitched their ambitions lower, and indeed for the most part the rulers of this time did pitch their ambitions much lower than those of the preceding generation. Was not one of the most successful of them, Elizabeth I of England, renowned above all for her chronic indecision and her dexterity in avoiding action?

The Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis ended a war that had become, if indeed it had not started as, ‘a race between spent horses’. It was a peace of exhaustion and it endured because for many years to come none of the states of western Europe felt strong enough to risk another general conflict. Yet although all were afraid to strike, some were still willing to wound. And the internal instability that afflicted all of them, bred of exhaustion and fevered by a crisis of conscience in religion, gave to any dissatisfied power repeated hopes of undermining the foundations upon which the 1559 settlement rested.

In that settlement the British Isles occupied a crucial position. For the treaties left one of the two outstandingly great powers of western Europe, France, hemmed in and all but encircled by the territories of the other, Spain. The dominions of Philip II of Spain ran almost all around France—from Spain itself through the Balearic islands, Sardinia, and Sicily to Naples, the Tuscan ports, Parma, and Milan, with dependent Corsica, Genoa, and Savoy-Piedmont linking on to Franche-Comté and the Netherlands. If the British Isles or at least England could be added to these, as during Mary Tudor's marriage to Philip II (1554–8), then the ring would be complete and virtually unbreakable. If, on the other hand, the French could control England as well as Scotland, then the sea route through the Channel and the Straits of Dover could be closed to the Spaniards.