But in 1700 the wars of the Spanish Succession broke out, and the Palatinate was again overrun with troops. The treaty of Ryswick gave a temporary relief and many refugees returned to their homes. Many of the inhabitants were butchered, others died of exposure, others fled, and the few who remained were left in a most miserable condition. He purposed to make the country as nearly a desert as possible, and to do so wantonly burned cities and towns as well as isolated dwellings, cut down orchards and uprooted vines. Then in the wars of 1688-89, while the rest of Germany which might have given aid was busy warding off the Turks, Louis XIV took the opportunity of weakening the enemy, venting his malice against the protestants, and doing a pleasure to Madame de Maintenon by devastating the province in a way unparalleled in modern history. Turenne in 1674 thoroughly ravaged the province in accordance with his policy of making the enemy support his army. Lying as it does on the eastern boundary of France, it was easily accessible to the French soldiery a fertile country, it offered excellent opportunity for maintaining an army and being protestant it was an especial object of resentment to the French King. In all these struggles no portion of Germany suffered so much as that part called the Lower Palatinate. Not only the wars which came in Luther's time and immediately following his death were caused by the Reformation but the Thirty Years' War and the wars in which the French King, Louis XIV, involved Europe during his long reign were also very largely incited by the same spirit of enmity that animated the earlier Counter Reformation. This interest was further increased since the cause had been compelled to fight for its life in Germany as well as in England. Interest in the German protestant situation was kept alive by pamphlets which gave information about the conditions of the Reformation in Germany and particularly in the Palatinate to which they felt related because of the marriage of Elizabeth, daughter of James I of England, to the Electro Frederick, better known as the Winter King. Public opinion, moreover, was, to a large degree, with her in this matter. It was Queen Anne, however, who took up Cromwell's work, and to the best of herĪbility carried out his program of national and protestant expansion. When William of Orange became King of England protestantism was again fully restored and there was even some relief given dissenters. During the reigns of Charles II and James II there was another reaction which, however, was not so violent as that in the reign of Mary. He conceived England to be the champion protector of protestantism, and by such a union, he hoped to make it a world power. He hoped to secure the ground gained, by a union of the protestant states against the Catholic Spanish world.
Under Elizabeth protestantism was again gradually restored, but there was no place for any who disagreed with the church as established by the state and dissenters were severely punished, but still the sentiment of protest grew until after the revolution of 1642, when Cromwell, having finally become a dictator, was able to introduce a second reformation, which led to a wider separation from Rome. Since the Protestant Reformation in England had come rather later than in Germany, and had not been so radical at the start, English reformers long looked upon Germany as the fatherland of the Reformation, and during the persecutions which accompanied the reaction under Mary (1553-1558) those who escaped over seas found refuge in Holland, Germany and Switzerland. The great stream of emigration from Germany to England and from thence to America, beginning rather feebly in the latter part of the seventeenth century, then suddenly swelling to such enormous proportions that more Germans had come to New York, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina in one year than had come to New England in the first ten years of the settlements about Massachusetts Bay, has as its fundamental cause the great intellectual movement of the Reformation, and the equally intense Counter Reformation which began in the latter part of the sixteenth century and extended far into the seventeenth century. THE GENERALLY ACCEPTED CAUSES OF THE PALATINE MIGRATION
HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION PART I THE PALATINATE MOVEMENT CHAPTER I
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