Charles, although a firm supporter of the authority of the Church of Rome, had done his best, by the publication of that "Interim" mentioned in the last chapter, and by a merciful treatment of the defeated Protestants, to bring the two parties together again. He failed; but he had made the effort. The character of Philip did not dispose him to follow his father in any attempts at peace-making. He was ardently jealous for the ecclesiastical authority of Rome and appears to have had much of the tyrant's spirit: he was very impatient of opposition, and showed no favour to any who differed from him in opinion. Heresy was, in his view, a sin against the Church, which it was his duty to put down by the most effective means in his power, wherever he might find it among his subjects. Wherever it was even so much as suspected, the strictest search should be made for its unmasking.
And to him, being in this mood, there was a machine ready to his hand—an institution of the Church known as the Inquisition. Inquisition means inquiry; and the particular object for which the Inquisition was instituted was to inquire into alleged instances of heresy—that is to say, of doctrines and practices of which the Church did not approve—and also into instances of the practice of magic and sorcery, which were deemed to be miracles performed by men with the aid of the devil.
The first institution of "Inquisitors," or officials appointed for such inquiry, dated back to the early centuries of the Church's existence, and in those early centuries the punishment which the Inquisitors were allowed to impose on persons convicted of heresy were very mild in comparison with later penalties. They were not allowed to inflict death, nor to use torture in order to extract confession.
In the time of Philip II., the Inquisition in Spain, under the name of the Holy Office, became largely independent of the Church of Rome. It actually brought before its Courts bishops of the Church. And it shrank from no cruelty of torture inflicted on suspected persons, in order to make them confess: it even tortured witnesses, to extract from them the testimony, true or false, which the Inquisitors desired. Convicted persons were publicly burnt. There was no appeal from its decisions. An accused person had scarcely a chance of escaping conviction. And the religious zeal of the Inquisitors was quickened by the circumstance that the estates of the convicted were confiscated and distributed to the Church, or partly to the Church and partly to the Crown.
Netherlands in revolt
It is no more than fair to the Church of Rome to say that though the severity and injustice of the Inquisition under the Church's direct authority were harsh enough, they were far less cruel than under the Holy Office of Spain, which became a veritable terror. The Netherlanders had largely accepted reformed doctrines. They had become Protestant, that is to say heretics, in the eyes of Philip. He had been their sovereign only a few years when he sent his Inquisitors among them to root the heresy out by torture, confiscation of estates, and by burning at the stake. The natives were brave and stubborn. They resisted with armed force.
It had all the aspect of a vain, even a ridiculous resistance—bound to fail, certain to be punished with relentless cruelty. To enforce obedience and to carry out measures of punishment, Philip sent an army under command of a general notorious for his harsh severity, the Duke of Alva. In such an outlined sketch as this the details cannot be given of the extraordinary struggle which the Netherlands, under that very great leader and statesman, William of Orange, surnamed the Silent, finally brought to a successful end against all the might of Spain. Again and again their endurance seemed on the point of being overcome. Once, at least, they were saved only by the desperate expedient of breaking chasms in the raised dykes which protect that low-lying land from the sea, and allowing the water to flood the country. They had a small naval force before this struggle began. Dutch ships had helped Charles in that attempt which he made to put down the Mahommedan pirates of the north coast of Africa. Now, as the fight with Spain went on, they added to their fleet. With but a few ships, they gained a victory, which meant much to them, over a far larger Spanish fleet. Some of the Spanish ships captured in that battle helped to increase their own naval forces.
England, under Mary, whom Philip had married in 1554, naturally would give Holland no help. She had, besides, her own religious troubles, for Mary, under her husband's direction, was doing all that she dared to bring England back under the authority of Rome. No tribunal with the name of Inquisition or of Holy Office was established, but the persecution of Protestants, with torture and burning, went forward almost as briskly as if there had been. A small force came to Holland's help from Germany, at one moment of the long struggle, but little could be expected from that country, in which the states were divided in their sympathies between Rome and the Reformation. The attitude of France was uncertain and varied. Her natural action would have been to oppose Spain, as in the days of Francis and Charles, but she was a Roman Catholic country. She was distracted, too, by her own troubles with her own Protestants, called Huguenots. The form of Protestantism which had made its way in France was somewhat different from that taught by Luther. It inclined to the doctrines taught by Calvin. But Calvin was a reformer as earnest and even more bitter than Luther himself in opposition to Rome. It was what has been called, after him, the Calvinistic form of Protestantism which prevailed in the Netherlands also, and, with some modification, in England and Scotland. The details of the difference we need not consider. The main feature which they had in common and which so affected this Greatest Story was their resistance to Rome.
The Huguenots