upon the Inquisition. In Spain the ballad writers sung of
nothing but a holy strife of Christians against the Lutherans
who had declared war upon God's Church. For the mass
of the people of both sides it was a new crusade. ¹

On the other hand, to represent the struggle as purely
religious would be almost as wrong as to conceive it as
purely political. The truth is, its causes were three-
fold, each having its special influence on the three great
classes of the State. For the people it was mainly
religious, for the Government it was mainly political,
for the merchants it was mainly commercial. Each
class no doubt was more or less conscious of all three
motives for its attitude; but for the people it was a
struggle of the Reformation against the Papacy, for the
statesmen it was a defence of the new idea of British
nationality against the idea of a dominant Spanish
Empire, and for the merchants it was an aggressive
determination to break down the barriers with which
Spanish policy sought to inclose the New World and to
shut the way to the Indies. It was the last movement,
perhaps, which was really the most actively important
of the three. It was the aggressive policy of our com-
merce which finally made war inevitable, and it was that
too which furnished the men and the means for carrying it
on. But for the blows it gave to Spanish finance Parma
must have completed the reduction of the Low Countries,
and with the Low Countries reduced Philip could
easily have forgiven England her heresy. For the incor-
poration of the kingdom into his system he could well
have been willing to wait till it came, as so much else had
come to his house, by the peaceful operation of dynastic
causes. But the intrusion of foreigners and heretic

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