In 1540 Loyola established in Spain the order of Jesuits, which subsequently came to have such influence in religious and political affairs. The French king in 1542 renewed hostilities, and after two years of warfare a peace was declared, in 1544. About this time it seemed to Charles that the occasion was ripe for a war of extermination against his Protestant subjects of Germany. At first he triumphed over their large and well-equipped armies, in 1547 defeating the Elector of Saxony and taking him prisoner. That year, also, Francis of France died, and thus the emperor was left freer to persecute those who differed from him in their religious beliefs. But a Protestant champion soon arose in the person of Prince Maurice of Saxony, whose vigorous action not only reduced the emperor to the humiliating necessity of signing a treaty of peace (August 2, 1552), but set in motion a train of events that forever made impossible his cherished project of the rooting out of Protestantism.
Three disastrous years of warfare followed the Peace of Passau, but nothing was gained for Charles, and in 1555, by the Peace of Augsburg, his hated enemy, Protestantism, scored a triumph through receiving legal recognition, by which its roots struck so deep into European soil that no efforts of the emperor’s could avail to extricate them. It is thought that the humiliation of this defeat of his lifelong scheme in behalf of the papists was the cause of his final determination to abdicate in favour of his son Philip, which he did in October of the same year, 1555. His mother, Juana, died this year, having passed the whole term of her son’s brilliant reign in the gloom of insanity.
In January, 1556, he formally ceded all his Spanish possessions to Philip, and retired to the monastery of Yuste, where he passed three years more in the quietude of peaceful scenes, and finally expired on the 21st of September, 1558.
After forty years of fighting, he found nothing so delightful as the seclusion of a monastery; after mingling in the stirring scenes of a world of which he was at times the most prominent figure and centre around which it moved, he found nothing so conducive to tranquillity and happiness as the domestic avocations of gardening and carving simple toys. He had crossed central and western Europe forty times, had visited England, carried war into Africa, had battled with the French, the British, the Italians, and Turks; while at the same time his great captains had subjugated the natives of the two Americas, and deluged the western isles and continents with blood. Mexico, Peru, and Chili were reduced to submission during his reign. In 1521 the great navigator, Magellan, had passed through the straits that now bear his name and circumnavigated South America, on that same voyage discovering the Philippine Islands, which were afterward named in honour of Philip II.
We should pause here to note that it was during Charles’s reign that Spain’s history became inextricably mingled with or touched upon that of every great division of the world, and that the emperor held possessions in Asia, Africa, Europe, North and South America.
CHAPTER XVI.
SPAIN’S RELIGIOUS WARS.
The keynote of Philip’s character was bigotry. Trained in diplomacy by his imperial father, brought up in the atmosphere of royal courts, born to intrigue and bred to dissimulation, he early gave promise of a great future which he never fulfilled.