The world of high politics has never been conspicuous for its knowledge of human nature.A strong blow from a strong arm would, it was believed both at Versailles and Quebec, shatter forever a weak rival and give France the prize of North America.Officers in Canada talked loftily of the ease with which France might master all the English colonies.The Canadians, it was said, were a brave and warlike people, trained to endure hardship, while the English colonists were undisciplined, ignorant of war, and cowardly.The link between them and the motherland, said these observers, could be easily broken, for the colonies were longing to be free.There is no doubt that France could put into the field armies vastly greater than those of England.Had the French been able to cross the Channel, march on London and destroy English power at its root, the story of civilization in a great part of North America might well have been different, and we should perhaps find now on the banks of the Hudson what we find on the banks of the St.Lawrence--villages dominated by great churches and convents, with inhabitants Catholic to a man, speaking the language and preserving the traditions of France.
The strip of inviolate sea between Calais and Dover made impossible, however, an assault on London.Sea power kept secure not only England but English effort in America and in the end defeated France.
England had defenses other than her great strength on the sea.In spite of the docility towards France shown by the English King, Charles II, himself half French in blood and at heart devoted to the triumph of the Catholic faith, the English people would tolerate no policies likely to make England subservient to France.This was forbidden by age-long tradition.The struggle had become one of religion as well as of race.A fight for a century and a half with the Roman Catholic Church had made England sternly, fanatically Protestant.In their suspicion of the system which France accepted, Englishmen had sent a king to the scaffold, had overthrown the monarchy, and had created a military republic.This republic, indeed, had fallen, but the distrust of the aims of the Roman Catholic Church remained intense and burst into passionate fury the moment an understanding of the aims of France gained currency.
There are indeed few passages in English history less creditable than the panic fear of Roman Catholic plots which swept the country in the days when Frontenac at Quebec was working to destroy English and Protestant influence in America.In 1678, Titus Oates, a clergyman of the Church of England who had turned Roman Catholic, declared that, while in the secrets of his new church, he had found on foot a plot to restore Roman Catholic dominance in England by means of the murder of Charles II and of any other crimes necessary for that purpose.Oates said that he had left the Church and returned to his former faith because of the terrible character of the conspiracy which he had discovered.
His story was not even plausible; he was known to be a man of vicious life; moreover, Catholic plotters would hardly murder a king who was at heart devoted to Catholic policy.England, however, was in a nervous state of mind; Charles II was known to be intriguing with France; and a cruel fury surged through the nation.For a share in the supposed plots, a score of people, among them one of the great nobles of England, the venerable and innocent Earl of Stafford, were condemned to death and executed.
Whatever Charles II himself might have thought, he was obliged for his own safety to acquiesce in the policy of persecution.
Catholic France was not less malignant than Protestant England.
Though cruel severity had long been shown to Protestants, they seemed to be secure under the law of France in certain limited rights and in a restricted toleration.In 1685, however, Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes by which Henry IV a century earlier had guaranteed this toleration.All over France there had already burst out terrible persecution, and the act of Louis XIVbrought a fiery climax.Unhappy heretics who would not accept Roman Catholic doctrine found life intolerable.Tens of thousands escaped from France in spite of a law which, though it exiled the Protestant ministers, forbade other Protestants to leave the country.Stories of plots were made the excuse to seize the property of Protestants.Regiments of soldiers, charged with the task, could boast of many enforced "conversions." Quartered on Protestant households, they made the life of the inmates a burden until they abandoned their religion.Among the means used were torture before a slow fire, the tearing off of the finger nails, the driving of the whole families naked into the streets and the forbidding of any one to give them shelter, the violation of women, and the crowding of the heretics in loathsome prisons.By such means it took a regiment of soldiers in Rouen only a few days to "convert" to the old faith some six hundred families.
Protestant ministers caught in France were sent to the galleys for life.The persecutions which followed the revocation of the Edict of Nantes outdid even Titus Oates.
