The church was in trouble.
Even though some orders did much to keep the material away,
Its walls were being eaten by the white maggots of corruption.
Clergy lived in excess.
They would indulge.
The sinners they counseled would have to indulge with them.
A man came to stand up to the church.
He nailed his thoughts to the door
Not intending to start a new one.
Then a firestorm of reformation and counter-reformation began.
Churches broke from the main one.
Wars were fought on land and sea.
Internal and external persecution.
England shifted between religious alliances.
Both passed laws against the other.
Nostradamus made his predictions
As new bouts of Black Death took lives.
People traveled outward winning converts.
A Protestant war of thirty years came.
France emerged from the war.
Another civil war came to England
As Oliver Cromwell tried to unite the isles.
A glorious revolution for religious toleration.
Then a great fire scorched London
In the year with three sixes.
King Louis XIV
Ended his era with the building of Versailles,
A war against the Spanish Empire,
The expansion of his own,
And his death.