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 The First Two Stuarts and their Foreign Policy
  The First Two Stuarts and their Foreign Policy; Part 6

The First Two Stuarts and their Foreign Policy; Part 6

Meantime Charles had got into difficulties with France. At the end of his father's reign he was engaged to marry a French princess, Henrietta Maria, and on his accession he married her. By the terms of the marriage treaty concessions were promised to the Roman Catholics in England, and James also, just before his death, had undertaken to lend ships to the French king. The French king and his famous minister, Richelieu, wanted to use the ships to aid them in a war against the Protestants in France, the Huguenots as they were called. Charles, after futile endeavours and dis­creditable subterfuges to evade his father's promises (Amongst other tingss, a mutiny was arranged so that the ships might not be given up), was obliged to lend them—to the great wrath of his subjects in England.

Later on the King of France demanded that the promised concessions to the Catholics in England should be granted, and in 1627 the two countries gradually drifted into war. Buckingham was himself sent with an expedition to capture a fort in the Isle of Rhe, in order to assist La Rochelle, the Huguenot stronghold on the west coast of France which the French king was still besieging. At that time there was no standing army, and a force largely composed of the riffraff of the country was not likely to be successful. Buckingham, however, did well, and inspired his men with courage, if not with enthusiasm; and, but for the fact that, through no fault of his own, the French managed to revictual the fort, and that, through contrary winds, reinforcements failed to leave England, he might have succeeded. As it was, Buckingham came back discredited in the eyes of the country. Before he could fit out another expedition, the tenpenny knife of a disappointed officer called Felton, who thought, as many others thought, that the assassination of Buckingham was a meritorious act, closed his career (1628).

With Buckingham's death, "there was an abrupt transition", it has been said, " from a policy of adventurous activity to one of utter inaction". Charles would make proposals, at one and the same time, to France for an alliance against Spain, and to Spain for an alliance against France. He would offer to help Gustavus Adolphus, the King of Sweden, the new champion of Protestantism in Germany, and not the King of Denmark, and then to help the King of Denmark and not Gustavus. One ambassador said to Charles, "The truth is you pull down with one hand as fast as you build up with the other": and the criticism was a just one. Moreover, circumstances were against the prosecution of an active policy. At first, Charles had no money to back his schemes; and later he had his hands full with his quarrel with his own subjects. As a result, the influence of Great Britain in foreign affairs became a negligible quantity for the remainder of Charles's reign.

The Thirty Years War, therefore, ceased to be influenced by or to influence Great Britain; and we can only briefly allude to its later developments. Gustavus Adolphus had a brief spell of brilliant success and was then killed at the famous battle of Lutzen (At the crisis of the battle, a thick November mist obscured the sun, and Gustavus. losing his way, was killed by the enemy ) (1632). The Protestant cause appeared hopeless. But Richelieu, though he suppressed Protestants in France, was willing to support them in Germany by force of arms so as to weaken the house of Hapsburg. During the later stages of the war, the French armies exerted a decisive influence and were brilliantly successful. The war came finally to an end in 1648, France and Sweden acquiring large parts of what had been German territory whilst the German states were left more disunited and independent than before the war broke out. Upon Germany and the German nation the effects of the war, material and moral, were appalling—indeed, in the opinion of Bismarck, the great Prussian statesman, Germany was still suffering from these effects in 1880.

Chronology
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