Title page:

The King of Fighting Men may quite truly be said to have been bred on a battlefield. For within sight of the hill on which His home-town was built lay some of the most famous battlegrounds of the Ancient World.

It has fallen to the lot of two little countries to be the cockpits of the world's greatest conflicts. These two little countries are the Holy Land and the Low Countries.

In the Low Countries we have a little patch of ground, including part of France as well as Belgium and the Netherlands, facing the south-east cost of England, but not half the size of England, nor a hundredth part of Europe, which in the last six centuries has staged more of the decisive battles of the world than all the rest of Europe put together.

It was the field of Crecy, in France near the border of Belgium, which in 1346 saw the beginning of the downfall of mediaeval feudalism, when the English bowmen and the light-armed footmen of Ireland and Wales, put to rout the steel-clad: knights of France, and demonstrated the possibility of a military basis for democracy. As John Richard Green, that prince of English historians put it:

The lesson which England had learned at Bannockburn she taught the world at Crecy. The whole social fabric of the Middle Ages rested on a military basis; and its base was suddenly withdrawn. The church had struck down the noble; the bondsman proved more than a match in sheer hard fighting for the knight. From the day of Crecy, feudalism tottered slowly but surely to its grave.

Within modern gunshot of Crecy, and north of the River Somme, lies the field of Agincourt, the most brilliant battle of the closing years of the Hundred Years War, as Crecy was of its opening years.

In the days of the Reformation, it was in the Low Countries that the bloodiest and most determined conflicts of those bitter religious wars took place.

And it was at the same time, when the thirst for power of King Philip of Spain threatened the liberty of the entire world, that it became evident, as never before, that the freedom of England was bound up with the freedom of this part of Europe lying so close to her and separated from her by so narrow a channel.

When religious bigotry and his passion for supreme dominion led Philip to send the Duke of Alba to tread underfoot the constitutional freedom of the Low Countries and to purge them of Protestantism by sword and stake, Alba and his Spanish soldiers rivaled Von Bissing and Hitler in the frightfulness of the atrocities by which he strove to crush the heroic people of this ill-fated land. And even while the cold self-interest of Queen Elizabeth kept England as a nation from giving aid to the gallant Prince of Orange in the unequal struggle, she recognized the revolt of the Netherlands as the "bridle of Spain which kept war out of our gates."

The relentless hanging drawing and quartering of thousands of Jesuit priests in England, and the horrors suffered by English sailors in the Spanish inquisition, lashed the people of England and Spain into a fury of religious fanaticism. And thousands of English volunteers stole across the Channel to fight in the ranks of William the Silent. But it was only after the assassination of William of Orange left Flanders at the mercy of the Prince of Parma, Alba's successor, that the tall of Antwerp convinced even Elizabeth that England must act, if the one "bridle of Spain which kept war out of our gates" was to be saved.

Lord Leicester was hurried to Flanders with 8,000 men. And it was this landing of an English army in Flanders, together with the dispatching of fresh batches of priests to the gibbet in England, and the death of Mary, Queen of Scots, who bequeathed her rights in the English crown to Philip, as the nearest heir in blood of the Roman Catholic faith, that broke down the caution and hesitation of Philip, and led him to equip the great Armada for the conquest of England.

It

¹ The Table of contents of Calvin's book can be found with letter W-MCP2-3b.035.

For chapter 2, see Box 04-029.

For chapter 3, see Box 04-030.

For chapter 4, see Box 04-031.

For chapter 5, see Box 04-031.

For chapter 6, see Box 04-033.