ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a religious foreign policy for the generation of statesmen who dominated the European scene after the Treaties of Mnster and Osnabrck, known collectively as the Peace of Westphalia, brought the Thirty Years War to an end in 1648. It concentrates on the changes and transformations that took place in official and semi-official discourse about foreign policy in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth century, not least because they provide the foundations for understanding British thinking on foreign policy beyond 1713. It considers the role that religion played in the formulation and justification of foreign policy after the Glorious Revolution but it is worth pausing briefly to reinforce several themes. The Peace of Westphalia became such an important aspect of the status quo that by the middle of the eighteenth century German jurists listed it as part of the fundamental laws of the Empire.
