For both Catholics and Protestants, the Peace of Westphalia was a bitter disappointment. Recourse to the sword, instead of bringing final victory as the extremists of each confession had hoped, had merely ensured the perpetuation of religious division; and now Catholics, Lutherans and Calvinists had to accept co-existence in a Europe where ideas, and the institutions embodying those ideas, were markedly changing. But the forty years after the peace were not characterised only by interdenominational hatred and attempts to end it; they were also years of tension between Church and State in several countries of western and southern Europe. In some the conflict was a simple one between the secular authority and one officially recognised Church; in others the situation was complicated by the existence of religious minorities, either Catholic, or Protestant, or both.

At first sight there might appear to be little reason in this period for an intensification of, or even a notable alteration in, this endemic problem of the relationship of Church and State. The mid-seventeenth century was not shaken by an acute and general crisis, such as the Reformation. Yet important if not spectacular changes were taking place. One of the most significant was the tendency in several countries, Protestant as well as Catholic, for government to become more absolute and thus less inclined to tolerate rival or extraneous authorities, of which the churches, with their claim to men's deepest loyalties, were the most important. Louis XIV put the case for the State thus: ‘Kings are absolute seigneurs, and from their nature have full and free disposal of all property both secular and ecclesiastical, to use it as wise dispensers, that is to say, in accordance with the requirements of their State’; and again, ‘those mysterious names, the Franchises and Liberties of the Church… have equal reference to all the faithful whether they be laymen or tonsured, who are all equally sons of this common Mother; but… they exempt neither the one nor the other from subjection to Sovereigns, to whom the Gospel itself precisely enjoins that they should submit themselves’.