French and English engagement there mirrored their increasing involvement in the Flanders war to the north. After Anjou’s enterprise in the Netherlands failed and he died, Elizabeth I signed a treaty with the Dutch (20 August 1585). She agreed to supply 6,000 troops, and pay a quarter of their defence needs, and installed a commander to run the war- effort in the wake of William of Orange’s assassination. Spain’s approach to England and France had similar characteristics. It began with dissident groups, who offered Spain their advice and support while painting an optimistic picture of the prospects for Spain’s intervention. In the English case, disenchanted Catholic émigrés served as the conduit. At the closing sessions of Trent in 1563, there were discussions about unseating Elizabeth and replacing her with Mary Queen of Scots; Philip II grew weary of unrealistic propositions from Rome on how to do so. But after 1580 he became persuaded that such an intervention was an integral part of, as he put it, ‘the war in the Netherlands, which is as holy as a war can be’. In France, Catholics across the Pyrenees and on the northeastern borders (Picardy, Champagne) sought men and money from Spain to turn the civil wars in their direction. Here too, Philip II became persuaded that a pre-emptive intervention to block the heretic Henry of Navarre from the French throne (he became the direct heir after Anjou’s death in 1584) was not only necessary but in accordance with God’s will.

In each case, there was a preliminary ‘cold war’, typified by diplomatic tension and plots. In 1570, a Florentine financier, Roberto Ridolfi, who was involved in the abortive ‘Rising of the Northern Earls’ in England the previous year, tried to interest Alba and Philip II in an invasion of England and the unseating of Elizabeth. The plot was uncovered and Ridolfi’s messenger was arrested and tortured. On the evidence which he revealed, the duke of Norfolk was arrested and executed in 1572. In November 1583, Francis Throckmorton, a cousin of the queen’s first lady-in-waiting, was convicted of plotting to assassinate the queen and put Mary Queen of Scots on the throne, this time with the support of Mary’s in-law, Henri, duke of Guise, and the Spanish. In September 1584, at the initiative of the Guises, Henri and his brothers Louis, cardinal of Lorraine, and Charles, duke of Mayenne, met at Nancy to conclude the Catholic League, composed of ultra-Catholic malcontent nobles and a fringe movement of Parisians, convinced that it was their duty to prevent the heretic Henry of Navarre acceding to the French throne. In December 1584 (or, more probably in January of the following year) Henri de Guise signed a secret treaty with Spain at the Guise family seat of Joinville in Champagne. Spain promised to pay an annual pension of 200,000 écus against Guise’s undertaking that, come the death of the reigning king, Henry III, he would work to install a Catholic prince of the blood (Charles, cardinal de Bourbon) on the throne. In October 1585, as another plot to assassinate Queen Elizabeth materialized (the Babington Plot, after Antony Babington, an English Catholic whose revelations led to Mary Queen of Scots’ execution at Fotheringay on 8 February 1587), Philip II committed himself to ‘the Enterprise of England’ (the Impresa da Inglaterra).

Spanish schemes for an English invasion dated back to the summer of 1559 when Philip sailed down the Channel from the Netherlands en route for Spain. Then, as later, he rejected the proposition as risky and impolitic. He had played a role in instigating the rebuilding of the English navy in 1557–8, and knew its potential. A moderate Protestant regime under Elizabeth I could be lived with, so long as it did not adversely impact on the security of Philip’s dominions. That assessment, however, began to change in the early 1580s, following Drake’s circumnavigation voyage of 1577–80, the growth of English piracy in the Atlantic and Caribbean, its intervention in the Azores on behalf of Portuguese rebels, culminating in its expeditionary force to the Netherlands in 1585. Without any formal declaration of war, Spain’s preparations for the Armada began early in 1586. It took over two years to assemble, almost from scratch, the projected naval force. The huge engagement tied down the efforts and resources of the Spanish state, delaying the fleet’s departure in 1588 until late in the season. Even as the 122 ships arrived off Land’s End towards the end of July, the strategic difficulties of the operation had not been resolved. The duke of Parma had consistently warned that it could not be undertaken until he had recaptured a large enough port on the Dutch coast, and that it would divert resources from the campaign in the Netherlands. Obliged to keep his forces close by the coast through the early summer of 1588, he eventually gave up hope, standing down the crews on his own ships just as the Armada made its way up the Channel.

Storms in the Bay of Biscay scuppered two English efforts to engage with the vessels in Spanish waters in June and July. Sceptical as to whether the Armada would embark so late in the season, the English fleet of sixty-six vessels was caught resupplying in Plymouth Sound. It succeeded, however, in giving chase to the huge crescent of Spanish ships making their way up the Channel. The Spanish force held its line despite numerous English attempts to engage and the expending of a good deal of its ammunition. It lost only two ships (and both of these to accidents) as it moved towards the Dutch coast. Then, however, the Spanish admiral, the duke of Medina Sidonia, elected to anchor off Calais on 6 August. That furnished the opportunity for the English to organize a fire-ship attack, accompanying strong winds blowing the Spanish fleet into the North Sea. Four Spanish ships were lost but the rest made their getaway northwards. The vast majority of Spanish losses came as the fleet made its way round the British Isles back home.

The defeat raised doubts about Spanish invincibility, not least among its Dutch rebels and among the opponents of the Catholic League in France. In 1590, and again in 1592, the Spanish army was diverted to aid the Catholic League in France. Spain’s strategic theatre expanded as its military engagements multiplied – in Brittany, Picardy, Normandy, Languedoc and (via the duke of Savoy) in Dauphiné and Provence. Meanwhile, the Dutch Stadholder, Mauritz of Nassau, launched offensives to push the Spaniards out of the northeastern Netherlands and secure the river strongholds.

THE CATHOLIC LEAGUE IN FRANCE

The death of the last direct heir to the French throne (François, duke of Anjou) on 10 June 1584 opened up a struggle for succession which, aligned with religious fault-lines, struck at the bedrock of dynastic politics. No one had written the script for a unitary dynastic state with a sacral kingship where the succession lay in the hands of a Protestant prince, the Bourbon Henry, king of Navarre. Henry had a huge landed patrimony, the majority of which came from the Albret-Foix-Armagnac inheritance of his mother, Jeanne d’Albret. The Pyrenean kingdom of Navarre had mostly been dismembered by Spain, but a title still remained, attached to the independent principality of Béarn. There, women could inherit, queens could rule as of right, and its rulers could be deposed for not upholding its customs. Under the influence of Queen Jeanne, the principality became a Calvinist stronghold. The Protestantism which Henry had inherited from his mother was intertwined with the destiny of Béarn. From his father (Antoine de Bourbon) he inherited, however, his distant claim to the French throne, and a tradition of rejecting any confessional straitjacket. Mortally wounded at the siege of Rouen in 1562, Antoine had been taken by barge up the Seine to Les Andelys, where he received the Mass and the last rites from a Catholic priest, expressed his wish to live and die according to the Augsburg Confession, and had the Scriptures read to him by a Calvinist physician.

After Henry of Navarre married the Catholic Marguerite de Valois in 1572 (against the wishes of his mother), he abjured his Protestantism in the wake of the massacre of St Bartholomew only to recover it once more as he quit the French court four years later. By the mid-1580s he had surrounded himself with Protestants and Catholics loyal to the cause of the Bourbon succession to the French throne, which he presented at home and abroad as a matter of princely predestination. He rejected religious conversion to accommodate the needs of the moment, and used his refusal as a way to assert his authority over others.

The others in question were the Guises – Henri, son of François, and other members of the Guise family, notably his two brothers, Charles and Louis. The Guises were nowhere near as wealthy as Navarre – but they looked to their relatives the dukes of Lorraine for support, and beyond them to Spain. The Guises were marginalized by Henry III, and their discontent nurtured their support for the Catholic cause. They projected the defeat of Protestant heresy onto a broad canvas. In a letter dated 2 April 1587 to the Spanish ambassador in France, Don Bernardino de Mendoza, Guise gave his word that he would ‘not dismount from his horse’ until the Catholic religion was re-established in France and his opponents ruined. That was two months after the execution of his cousin Mary Stuart in England. Reported in Paris on 1 March 1587, that event advertised the ‘cruelties’ to which English Catholics were subjected (and, by extension, what they could expect from Navarre’s accession to the throne). It demonstrated that a twice-crowned head could be excised to truncate a religiously inconvenient succession (which is why Mary Stuart was executed). Libels circulating in Paris blamed Henry III for not having saved his sister-in-law. They were the work of the ‘Sixteen’ (la Seize, from the policing arrangements which divided the city into sixteen sectors). Bourbon royalist historians dismissed that group as fanatics but, in reality, they enjoyed support from well-established citizens. Thanks to an informant, Henry III escaped two coups in February and March 1587. Another, on 2 September 1587, came close to realization. The Catholic League was a media event, Parisian printers taking the lead, followed in due course by other print centres in France.

The Guises had an ambivalent relationship with the Sixteen, an organization which they had not willed into being and could not readily control. Henri de Guise had no plan beyond that of mobilizing Catholic loyalties. He would probably have preferred to devote his energies to the battlefield. As it was, he became engaged in publicity to emphasize his esteem and impose his will on the king. That was a dangerous game, especially when the king in question knew that the Guises were on the Spanish payroll and suspected (with good reason) that the libels circulating about his homosexual relations with the mignons were part of the ongoing game of cat-and-mouse. On 9 May 1588, the duke of Guise’s entry into Paris turned into a victory parade. When the king ordered Swiss mercenaries into the capital before sunrise on 12 May they were met by the insurrection they were supposed to prevent. Barricades of chains, reinforced by paving stones, barrels and staves, stretched across the streets. That afternoon, the duke of Guise stepped onto the streets, not as a battle commander but in white satin breeches, greeted as the saviour of Paris. The following day, Henry III fled the capital through the Tuileries garden, his humiliation overwhelming.

The game of cat-and-mouse went on for the rest of the year. Weakened by the collapse of his authority, Henry III summoned deputies to an Estates General at Blois on 16 October 1588, where he hoped to recover the initiative. But, turning the pro-League sentiments of the deputies to his advantage, Guise used the occasion to impose himself once more upon the king. On the morning of 23 December, Henri de Guise was called to the king’s apartment, where Henry’s bodyguard assassinated him, the cardinal of Guise being put to death similarly the following morning. The king called it a coup de majesté, Étienne Pasquier a coup d’état. Pope Sixtus V called it a tyrannical act, and excommunicated him (24 May 1589).

As news of the Guises’ death spread, there was a spontaneous uprising by Catholics against the king. On 1 January, a wall-painting of the assassination was put up in the church of Sainte-Geneviève-des-Ardents in the capital. On the following day, the tombs of some mignons were ransacked and royal coats of arms torn down from city buildings. The first of many processions took place twenty-four hours later. On 7 January Sorbonne theologians approved a ‘withdrawal of obedience’ from Henry III, now known as ‘Henri de Valois’ or, in the anagram ascribed to the Paris preacher Jean Guincestre, ‘Vilain Hérodes’. Recognized royalists fled the city as the Parlement was purged on 13 January and its first president, Achille de Harlay, imprisoned. A new League municipal government was put in place with a Council of the Union to coordinate its activities with other League-declared municipalities elsewhere. Almost without asking for it, Mayenne, the one Guise brother who had not been at Blois and who had escaped the king’s vengeance, had a cause to fight for, a provisional government to work with and an enemy to defeat.

That enemy was the legitimate king, which made the League and Mayenne sound more anti-monarchical than they really were. With not many options left, Henry III made common cause with Henry of Navarre and together they assembled an army of 40,000 men to besiege Paris in the summer of 1589. At his military headquarters in St-Cloud on the morning of 1 August, a monk, Jacques Clément, drew out a knife and stabbed the king, who died a day later. Clément was himself killed by the king’s bodyguard. To League Catholics, he was a martyr, inspired by God, and the floodgates of vituperation against the last Valois king opened. In retrospect, that marked high-water for the League, whose problem of how to conjugate Catholicity and kingship was just beginning.

Their candidate to the throne was the octogenarian uncle of Henry of Navarre, Charles de Bourbon (‘Charles X’). He was kept prisoner by Navarre in the fortress at Maillezais, allowed no contact with the outside world, had no direct heirs and died there on 9 May 1590. In his name and under the fiction of his authority, Mayenne and the League conducted a provisional government. That stretched the legal fiction of the separation between state and king, for it was not clear to what extent Mayenne could exercise the royal powers of nominating magistrates, deciding on disputed municipal elections and appointing bishops in the king’s name. These issues concerned the League in Paris, where the Sixteen became a municipal power bloc, running the city. But with no military success to his name and increasing criticism of his rule, Mayenne purged the General Council in Paris in March 1590.

Mayenne’s greatest hope for defeating Navarre lay early on in August 1589. The royalist nobility did not rally to Navarre and, with no more than 12,000 in his army, the Protestant king retreated to Dieppe to await English reinforcements. With a force over twice as large, Mayenne failed to dislodge him from trenches around the castle at Arques (21 September 1589). On 30 October, Navarre’s men appeared before the walls of Paris. On 14 March 1590, the armies of Mayenne and Navarre engaged once more, this time at Ivry. Again, Navarre’s forces were smaller than those of his opponents, but it took him only an hour to dismiss Mayenne from the field. Over 6,000 League supporters lost their lives and a myth was born. Henry IV told his troops on the eve of battle to follow the distinctive white plume of feathers in his helmet if their standards were captured. Henry IV’s image-builders used that as divine approbation for his right to the throne.

The victory at Ivry heralded a quasi-siege of Paris. It was eventually broken by relief convoys from Parma in early September 1590, although by then 30,000 Parisians had died of starvation. Mutual recriminations grew amid rumours that Navarre had spies in the city, or that he might convert to Catholicism. Royalist sympathizers (known as politiques to their opponents) became targets of suspicion. In the autumn of 1591, a new Council of Ten, formed of activists from the Sixteen, was instituted to tighten Paris security. They drew up a ‘red list’ (papier rouge) on which the fate of suspects was indicated (‘P’, ‘D’ or ‘C’: Hanged, Stabbed or Thrown Out [Pendu, Dagué or Chassé]). On 15 November 1591 the leading magistrate of the Parlement of Paris was arrested on the orders of the council, along with two other judges, all three being summarily executed in prison. Mayenne’s return to the capital on 28 November 1591 signalled the end of the Sixteen as he replaced the governor of the Bastille, disbanded the Council of Ten and hanged three of the Sixteen’s leaders. The rest fled or lay low.

Mayenne’s reason for liquidating the Sixteen lay not simply with events in Paris. On 2 September 1591, the Council of Ten wrote to Philip II to invite him to assume the French crown. That opened up the issue to which Mayenne had no solution: the royal succession. After the death of Charles X, Catholic supporters could only imagine that they were in an interregnum, it being up to an Estates General to elect a new ruler. In January 1593, Mayenne eventually convened it (or rather, a rump of a constitutive assembly) in Paris. The duke of Feria arrived in February 1593 as Philip II’s personal envoy to promote the election of the Spanish infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia to the throne. The proposal had some dynastic logic to it – she was the granddaughter of Henry II and Catherine de Médicis. But it was too open an interference in French affairs. Indeed, Feria had already made Mayenne various promises if he would support the proposal. On 14 May, the candidature of the infanta was officially launched before the Estates.

Three days later, on 17 May, Henry of Navarre announced his intention to convert back to Catholicism. His decision was timed to consolidate the gathering voices of opinion in the League Estates and elsewhere towards a Navarrist solution. On 20 June, the League Estates declared that they could not accept a foreign prince as their sovereign and, a week later, on 27 June, the Parlement of Paris agreed a text which demanded that Mayenne respect the Salic law as the ‘fundamental law’ of the kingdom. While Parisian preachers denounced Navarre as an untrustworthy heretic turncoat, a lampoon of the League Estates began to circulate entitled the ‘Satyre Menippée’, facetiously presenting its deputies as high on a Spanish drug called ‘catholicon’ (a little pill shaped like a Spanish doubloon). Navarre’s conversion finally took place on 25 July 1593 at St-Denis, the sepulchre of the kings of France. The king never said ‘Paris is worth a Mass’, though the phrase is suggestive of the new political logic of ‘reason of state’ that was emerging as an answer to politico-religious conflicts. He did call it a ‘somersault’, indicating the risks that he knew he was running. The abjuration opened the door to a slow reconciliation in France, beginning with a general truce (six days after the abjuration) and a declaration on 27 October that all those who rallied to the king would be automatically pardoned. Henry IV entered Paris with his forces at daybreak on 22 March 1594 with hardly a shot being fired. While the king made his way to Notre-Dame, the remaining Spanish garrison discreetly left by another gate.

RELIGION AND POLITICS

The use of violence to maintain a community of belief by force became a contentious issue in the divided politics of Christendom in the later sixteenth century. Its political culture had developed, in theory and practice, ways of controlling violence and accentuating the legitimacy of rulership and authority in the name of the commonwealth. A chivalric honour code determined what was, and was not, acceptable violence and encouraged notions of what constituted legitimate behaviour in warfare. The instruments of law, the Church and urban authority increasingly controlled the private pursuit of vengeance, feud and other forms of interpersonal violence. In the sixteenth century, however, the state played a greater part in people’s lives, especially in western Europe. The Reformation furnished the circumstances and arguments for saying that there were limits to the powers claimed by those states. It is no coincidence that the violence that erupted in political life was fiercest where the powers of states were strongest and where the influence of religious change was most fiercely contested. Nor is it surprising that the arguments about violence – about limiting the power of the state to commit it, and giving others the responsibility to control it – were first heard among exiles and migrant communities, where the politics of conviction were at their strongest. Ideas about ‘rights of resistance’ and ‘rights of revolt’ had a cross-national – and ultimately cross-confessional – dynamic that reflected the conflicts to which they were related.

Jean Calvin, the theologian to whom the early Protestant communities in exile turned for advice, understood the anxieties that religious change provoked. God alone had the power, he said in the first edition of his Institutes, to deal with tyrannical princes. Individuals who refused to obey legitimate authority should expect to pay the price for doing so. They were best advised to live somewhere out of a tyrant’s reach. Yet, under the influence of the theologian Pierre Viret, Calvin introduced nuances. In the closing passage to the final, 1559 edition of the Institutes he acknowledged that there might be intermediary authorities, like the Ephors of ancient Sparta, whose responsibility was to ‘restrain the will of kings’. That was how Lutheran theologians in Hesse and Saxony justified princely resistance to the emperor in the 1540s, and it had resurfaced in the siege of Magdeburg in 1551. Calvin refused to go further and accord any legitimacy to a private individual in revolt against authority.

But that was not the case for English exiles in the Rhineland. John Ponet argued (in A Shorte Treatise of Politike Power, 1557), just as John Knox (in The First Blast of the Trumpet, 1558) and Christopher Goodman (How Superior Powers Ought to be Obeyed, 1558), that resistance against established authority could be justified, though they differed in detail over the justifications which they offered. Knox, writing in prophetic mode, regarded the rule of queens (Mary of Guise, Mary Stuart and Mary Tudor) as against God’s will, communicated to all men through nature. They were tyrants by their own acts and (though in his Scottish writings he was less clear-cut) this justified the taking up of arms by the godly. Ponet was more attentive to law and precedents. Admitting that the English people had deposed tyrants in the past, he nevertheless advised that: ‘Christen men ought well to consider and weighe mennes commaundementes, before they be hastie to doo them, to see if they be contrarie or repugnaunt to goodes commaundementes and justice: which, if they be, they are cruell and evill, and ought not to be obeyed.’

Such were the roots of the arguments for a ‘right of resistance’ expressed by those whom the Catholic writer William Barclay called ‘monarchomachs’ – those who wanted to ‘overthrow monarchy’ (monarchiam demoliri). The most notorious works, conceived in part before but published after the massacre of St Bartholomew, included François Hotman’s Francogallia (1573), Beza’s The Right of Magistrates (1574) and a work published under a pseudonym recalling Junius Brutus, Rome’s republican founder, entitled Vindiciae contra Tyrannos (‘Defences’ – but also ‘Revenges’ and ‘Legal Recriminations’ – ‘against Tyrants’, 1579), a work in which Philippe Duplessis-Mornay had a hand. These were more than pamphlets for the moment. They treated the issue of the limits of political obedience at a general level. Beza revived the notion of a legal ‘contract’ and linked it to the theological conception of a ‘covenant’. He thought that there existed not simply a pact between people and ruler but also between God, ruler and people. The people could invoke God’s sanctions against a ruler who broke his engagements (to people or to God). Hotman deployed his knowledge of the early history of the Franks to prove, as he supposed, that they had deposed through a ‘public assembly’ kings who exceeded their powers. That authority could be resurrected. The author of the Vindiciae argued further that the people not only should disobey and resist a prince whose authority was tyrannical and ruining the true Church, but should also call on foreign princes professing ‘true religion’ to come to their aid.

Although not acknowledged explicitly, such arguments had an impact on Catholics who, in similar circumstances, looked for reasons to limit or reject constituted political authority. In Spain, their ideas found an echo in the writings of the Jesuits – Emmanuel Sá, Tomás Sánchez de Córdoba and Juan de Mariana. The last of these had been an academic in Rome, Paris and the Low Countries before he returned to Spain in 1574 to become a senior figure in the Toledo Inquisition. In his On kingship and its institution (1599) he argued that, although sovereigns held their authority ultimately from God, it was mediated to them by communities. Kings had to put themselves at the service of the people, who could deliver judgement in the name of God upon what kings did. Disaffection was a judgement which princes should heed or face the consequences in terms of Godly-inspired sanction (which might be removal from office by one means or another). Mariana explicitly approved of Jacques Clément’s regicidal act, referring to it as ‘the eternal glory of France’. In the face of the rising incidence of assassination attempts on the rulers of Christian commonwealths, the ‘mutual obligation’ between ruler and ruled – that which guaranteed the love of the people for its prince – had never seemed so remote from reality. It is hardly surprising that the contentions over religion in the second half of the sixteenth century should lead in some places to a more absolute conception of power, and in others to a distancing of the state from confessional politics.

PATRIA AND RELIGION

‘Nationhood’ existed in this period and was often evoked, becoming part of the contentions over religion. But people meant different things by it and deployed it in contradictory ways. Soldiers fighting for Charles V at the battle of Mühlberg (1547) cried ‘Santiago, Spagna’ though many of them were not Spanish or from Habsburg dominions. Those serving in the Dutch armies in 1576 wrote to mutineers from the other side: ‘We are from the same nation as you, all Spaniards.’ Chronicles of the Spanish peninsula equated the Spanish with Castile and its language, but that was at odds with the senses of belonging in the other kingdoms of the peninsula. Philip II invited a national response to the capture of the Spanish fleet and sack of Cádiz by the earl of Essex in 1596, but the Castilian Cortes of the year before were already sceptical about such appeals, replying that the only commonwealth which now existed was ‘a common misery for every one’.

The Reformation, however, added meaning to nationhood. Luther appealed to Germans against slippery and corrupt Rome. French Protestants reworked the myths of free Gaul, whose liberties were enshrined in assemblies which elected and deposed rulers. In German Protestant principalities the references to patria became more insistent. William of Orange presented himself as the saviour of the ‘fatherland’ and a ‘patriot’. But he was of German birth, spoke French for preference, and had publicly to repudiate the accusation that he was a stranger in the Netherlands.

To most people, patria meant their native town or province, ‘everybody’s country, fatherland, the town, village, hamlet or any other place where one is born’, as a Dutch dictionary put it in 1562. In Dutch, the word Vaderland also denoted ‘heaven’ in the translations of Luther’s Bible, giving a religious particularity to patriotic evocation in the Dutch Revolt. But the revolt’s supporters were more united by their Hispanophobia than by their patriotism. Within their churches distinctions still existed between Hollanders, Brabanters and Walloons. The growing exiledom in the Reformation nurtured a patriotism that romanticized the past into a land that never was and fostered xenophobia which distorted the present and warped the future.

National consciousness was a way by which those who believed in the Christian commonwealth spun out myths about a collective past in which the people collectively had a positive role. Scholars and antiquarians gave their histories a new veracity by printing the accompanying evidence from early charters. The results were noticeable, especially in Protestant Europe, where the upheavals of the Reformation created new states or made people see old ones in new ways. By the end of the sixteenth century, there were four new published histories of Scotland, one each for Denmark and Sweden, no fewer than fourteen for Poland and five each for Bohemia and Hungary. English Protestant writers evoked the past variously (‘England’, ‘Britain’ and ‘Albion’), but when they projected it onto the institutionalized present it acquired a more defined ethnocentricity. That was as true of Holinshed’s chronicle of English kings as of Foxe’s martyrology. France’s scholar-jurists delineated how their national myth was embodied in living organisms that were part of its commonwealth, especially its sovereign law courts and (Gallican) Church. When English common-lawyer antiquarians evoked the ancient constitution, they imagined a commonwealth in which they belonged and to which they contributed. That commonwealth was, however, what the civic and religious turmoil of the Post-Reformation was all about, and what it placed in doubt.