He was born in Ghent in 1500 to Philip, Duke of Burgundy, and Juana, who is commonly known as “Crazy Jane”; it is now generally believed that she was insane, though the Spaniards shrank from imputing insanity to a queen. From his father he inherited the principalities of the Netherlands and Burgundy; from his mother he inherited the kingships of Spain, Naples, and the Spanish colonies. When his grandfather, the Hapsburg Emperor Maximilian, died, Charles was elected Emperor in 1519; the other candidate was Francis I of France. The electors were the seven Kurfursten of Germany, and Charles bribed the harder of the two. What power on earth could summon before a magistrate the kings of France and Spain on a charge of improperly influencing the vote of a German princelet? Once having attained to the title of Roman Emperor, added to the enormous military power of King of Spain, Charles immediately became the greatest man in the world. He was strong, cautious, athletic, brave, and immeasurably sagacious; his reputation for wisdom long survived him.
Francis did not forgive him his victory, and for the next quarter of a century—until 1544—Europe resounded with the rival cries of the two monarchs, unhappy Italy being usually the actual scene of battle. At Pavia in 1525 Francis had to say “All is lost save honour”—the precise definition of “honour” in Francis’s mind being something very different from what it is to-day. Francis was captured and haled to Madrid to meet his grim conqueror, who kept him in prison until he consented to marry Charles’s favourite sister Eleanor of Austria, and to join with him in an alliance against the heretics. This Eleanor was a gentle and beautiful lady whom Charles treated with true brotherly contempt; yet she loved him. As soon as Francis was out of prison he forgot that he was married, and made love to every pretty girl that came his way.
Francis being safely out of the way, Charles turned to the great aim of his life—to reconcile Protestants with Catholics throughout his colossal Empire. He was a strong Catholic, and displayed immense energy in the reconciliation. According to Gibbon, who quotes the learned Grotius,[6] he burned 100,000 Netherlanders, and Gibbon dolefully remarks that this one Holy Roman Emperor slew more Christians than all the pagan Roman Emperors put together. Charles appears to have grown gradually into the habit of persecution; he began comparatively mildly, and it was not till 1550 that he began to see that there was really nothing else to do with these dull and obstinate Lutherans but to burn them. He could not understand it. He was sure he was right, and yet the more Netherlanders he burned the fewer seemed to attend mass. Moreover, it was impossible to believe that those things the miscreant Luther had said about the immoral conduct of the monks could be true; once upon a time he had met the fellow, and had him in his power; why had he not burned him once and for all and saved the world from this miserable holocaust which had now become necessary through the man’s pestilential teaching? So Charles went on with his conciliation, driven by conscience—the most terrible spur that can be applied to the flanks of a righteous man. No doubt Torquemada acted from conscience, and Robespierre; possibly even Nero could have raked up some sort of a conscientious motive for all he did—the love of pure art, perhaps. “Qualis artifex pereo!” said he in one of those terse untranslatable Latin phrases when he was summoning up his courage to fall upon his sword in the high Roman manner; surely there spoke the artist: “How artistically I die!”
The activities of Charles were so enormous that it is impossible in this short sketch even to mention them all. Besides his conquest of Francis and, through him, Italy, he saved Europe from the Turk. To Francis’s eternal dishonour he had made an alliance with the last great Turkish Sultan, Solyman the Magnificent. The baleful power which had conquered Constantinople less than a century before seemed to be sweeping on to spread its abominations over Western Europe; and history finds it difficult to forgive Francis for assisting its latest conqueror. Men remembered how Constantine Palæologus had fallen amidst smoke and carnage in his empurpled blazonry, heroic to the last; they forgot that the destruction of 1453 was probably the direct result of the Venetian and French attack under Dandolo in 1204, from which Constantinople never recovered. In talking of the “Terrible Turk” they forgot that Dandolo and his Venetians and Frenchmen had committed atrocities quite as terrible as the Turks’ during those days and nights when Constantinople was given over to rapine; and now the brilliant Francis appeared to be carrying on Dandolo’s war against civilization. So when Charles stepped forward as the great hero of Europe, and drove the Turks down the Danube with an army under his own leadership he was hailed as the saviour of Christendom; it is to this that he owes a good deal of his glory, and he nobly prepared the world for the still greater victory of Lepanto to be won by his son Don John of Austria.
Moreover, it was during his reign that the great American conquests of the Spanish armies occurred, and the name of Fernando Cortes attained to eternal glory; and the Portuguese voyager Maghellan made those wonderful discoveries which have so profoundly influenced the course of history. There had been no man so great and energetic as Charles since Charlemagne; since him his only rival for almost super-human energy has been Napoleon.
That pathetic and unhappy queen whom we call “Bloody Mary” had been betrothed to Charles for diplomatic reasons when she was an infant, but he had broken off the engagement and ultimately married Isabella of Portugal, whose fair face is immortalized by Titian in the portrait that still hangs in the Prado, Madrid. Auburn of hair, with blue eyes and delicate features, she looks the very type of what we used to call the tubercular diathesis; and there can be no doubt that Charles really loved her. Before he married her he had had an illegitimate daughter by a Flemish girl; ten years after she died Barbara Blomberg, a flighty German, bore him a son, the famous Don John of Austria. But while Isabella lived no scandal attached to his name. Unhappily his only legitimate son was Philip, afterwards Philip II of Spain.
When Mary came to the throne she was intensely unhappy. During the dreadful years that preceded the divorce of Catherine of Aragon, Charles had strongly supported Catherine’s cause; and Mary did not forget his aid when she found herself a monarch, lonely and friendless. She let him know that she would be quite prepared to marry him if he would take her.[7] Probably Charles was terrified by the advances of the plain-faced old maid, but the opportunity of strengthening the Catholic cause was too good to miss. The house of Austria was always famous for its matrimonial skill; the hexameter pasquinade went:
“Bella gerant alii—tu, felix Austria, nube!”
(“Others wage war for a throne—you, happy Austria, marry!”)
Charles, in his dilemma, turned to his son Philip, who nobly responded to the call of duty. Of him Gibbon might have said that “he sighed as a lover, but obeyed as a son” if he had not said it concerning himself; and Philip broke off his engagement to the Infanta of Portugal, and married the fair English bride himself.
Charles was still the greatest and most romantic figure in Europe—a mighty conqueror and famous Emperor; any woman would have preferred him to his mean-spirited son; and Mary was grateful to him for powerful support during years of anguish. She obeyed his wishes, and took the son instead of the father.