Yet, even in the midst of that gay spectacle, he could not but perceive every where the traces of destruction and decay. The city had been more than once plundered. The population had considerably diminished. Berlin, however, had suffered little when compared with most parts of the kingdom. The ruin of private fortunes, the distress of all ranks, was such as might appal the firmest mind. Almost every province had been the seat of war, and of war conducted with merciless ferocity. Clouds of Croatians had descended on Silesia. Tens of thousands of Cossacks had been let loose on Pomerania and Brandenburg. The mere contributions levied by the invaders amounted, it was said, to more than a hundred millions of dollars; and the value of what they extorted was probably much less than the value of what they destroyed. The fields lay uncultivated. The very seedcorn had been devoured in the madness of hunger. Famine, and contagious maladies produced by famine, had swept away the herds and flocks; and there was reason to fear that a great pestilence among the human race was likely to follow in the train of that tremendous war. Near fifteen thousand houses had been burned to the ground. The population of the kingdom had in seven years decreased to the frightful extent of ten per cent. A sixth of the males capable of bearing arms had actually perished on the field of battle. In some districts, no labourers, except women, were seen in the fields at harvest time. In others, the traveller passed shuddering through a succession of silent villages, in which not a single inhabitant remained. The currency had been debased; the authority of laws and magistrates had been suspended; the whole social system was deranged. For, during that convulsive struggle, every thing that was not military violence was anarchy. Even the army was disorganized. Some great generals, and a crowd of excellent officers had fallen, and it had been impossible to supply their place. The difficulty of finding recruits had, towards the close of the war, been so great, that selection and rejection were impossible. Whole battalions were composed of deserters or of prisoners. It was hardly to be hoped that thirty years of repose and industry would repair the ruin produced by seven years of havoc. One consolatory circumstance, indeed, there was. No debt had been incurred. The burdens of the war had been terrible, almost insupportable; but no arrear was left to embarrass the finances in time of peace. Here, for the present, we must pause. We have accompanied Frederic to the close of his career as a warrior. Possibly, when these Memoirs are completed, we may resume the consideration of his character, and give some account of his domestic and foreign policy, and of his private habits, during the many years of tranquillity which followed the Seven Years' War. ENGLAND. In course of publication; now ready, VOLS. I. to VIII. HISTORY OF ENGLAND FROM THE FALL OF WOLSEY TO THE DEFEAT OF THE SPANISH ARMADA. BY JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE, M.A. To be completed (on November 30, 1870) in Twelve Volumes, The Author's Prospectus. THE occasion of my undertaking the present work was, as regards myself, an involuntary leisure forced upon me by my inability to pursue the profession which I had entered, but which I was forbidden by the law to exchange for another; and, secondly, the attitude towards the Revolution of the 16th century which had been assumed by many influential thinkers in England and on the Continent. GOETHE had said of LUTHER and CALVIN that they had delayed the intellectual growth of Europe for centuries by calling in the mob to decide questions which should have been left to the thinkers. Our own Reformers, who for three centuries had been the object of enthusiastic panegyric, were being assailed with equally violent abuse by the High Churchmen on one side, and Liberal statesmen and political philosophers on the other. Lord MACAULAY had attacked CRANMER as one of the basest of mankind. It had become the fashion to speak with extreme severity of the persecution of the Catholics by ELIZABETH. Even writers on the whole favourable to the Reformation described the English branch of it as a good thing badly done. My own impression about it was, that the Reformation was both a good thing itself and that in England it had been accomplished with peculiar skill and success. The passions called out by religious controversy, which in France and Germany were the occasions of long and bloody wars, were controlled in England by the Government. I considered that on the whole the control had worked beneficially, and that those who condemned the repressive measures adopted towards the Romanists by ELIZABETH's ministers had made imperfect allowance for the temper of the times and for the impossibility of tolerating opinions which led immediately to rebellion. My original purpose was to confine myself to the reign of the great QUEEN for whom, looking to the spirit in which her government had been conducted, I felt great admiration. The attacks of LINGARD and others upon her personal purity I believed to be gratuitous and unjust. I intended as briefly as I could to undertake her vindication. With CRANMER and his companions, unwilling as I was to accept Lord MACAULAY'S judgment upon them, I had not proposed to meddle. I shared the prevailing views of the character of HENRY VIII.; and though I considered that if all the circumstances were known to us there might be found much to modify our censure on the Archbishop's behaviour, it was plain that he had gone along with the king in the most questionable actions of the reign. I found myself, however, unable to handle the later features of the Revolution without going back to the beginning of it. The coming of the Armada was the last act of a drama of which the divorce of QUEEN CATHARINE was the first. The publication of new materials, the improved accessibility of the records in our own and other countries, and the voluminous diplomatic correspondence which was thus opened to inquiry, threw fresh light upon much that had been obscure and unintelligible. I was thus led first to study more closely, and then to undertake the narrative of the entire period between the original quarrel with the Papacy and the point at which the separation of England from the Roman communion was finally decided. My general opinion on the character of the movement remains unchanged, but I have not consciously allowed myself to be influenced by my prepossessions; for of the persons whose actions I have had to describe there are several of the most distinguished about whom I have been compelled to alter the sentiments with which I commenced, at the sacrifice of favourite prejudices. A qualified defence of HENRY VIII. was forced upon me by the facts of the case. With equal reluctance 1 had to acknowledge that the wisdom of ELIZABETH was London: LONGMANS, GREEN, and CO. Paternoster Row. Cabinet Edition of Froude's History of England-continued. the wisdom of her ministers, and that her chief merit, which circumstances must divide with I owe an apology to the public for the length to which the book has run. I Thus, with my cordial thanks to the English public for the support which they London: LONGMANS, GREEN, and CO. Paternoster Row. |