ABSTRACT
Although the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 was regarded as the end of religious war, Protestants in Western Europe were still living in an era riven by murderous ideological divisions between them and Roman Catholics. In that sense, a religious cold war prevailed in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Indeed, the Nine Years’ War and the War of the Spanish Succession were still regarded as religious conflicts. In common with Protestants in continental Europe, for many Englishmen, these wars were continuations of a long battle against Roman Catholicism waged since the late sixteenth century and as such reinforced in England a sense of the need for Protestant solidarity across Europe.
