ABSTRACT
By 1559 Europe was entering a new era. Philip II faced both opportunities and challenges which differed from anything his father had confronted. Religious divisions were now a permanent and increasingly important force on the international scene. It was still possible for optimists to hope that discussion and some readiness to compromise might be enough to close the fissures of this kind that had been widening since the 1520s. The Emperor Ferdinand, for example, hoped for a time that Protestant representatives, including English ones, might take part in the last sessions of the Council of Trent in the early 1560s. But the legacy of four decades of increasingly bitter dissension could not be willed out of existence in this way. For both Catholics and Protestants the nature of the religious cleavage was changing. It was becoming sharper and more difficult to bridge, as on both sides attitudes hardened. In Germany, hitherto the main theatre of religious conflict, some kind of equilibrium had now been established. The religious Peace of Augsburg in 1555 marked the final defeat of the hopes and efforts of Charles V: its recognition of the Augsburg Confession of 1530 meant that henceforth Lutheranism in the German world had an official standing and permanence that could not be denied. But it was already losing much of its original impetus and ceasing to be the conquering and expanding force of the last four decades. Religious rivalry and ill-feeling were still very much alive in the Holy Roman Empire. From this as from most other points of view, however, Germany in the second half of the sixteenth century was a backwater. It was now the more violent and far-reaching religious conflicts in much of western Europe that took the centre of the stage.
