Short Studies on Great Subjects

by James Anthony Froude

And so, and only so, can truth make its way for us in any such matters. The form changes—the thing remains. Superstition, folly, and cunning will go on to the end of time, spinning their poison webs around the consciences of mankind. Courage and veracity—these qualities, and only these, avail to defeat them.

From the moment that Luther left the emperor's presence a free man, the spell of Absolutism was broken, and the victory of the Reformation secured. The ban of the Pope had fallen; the secular arm had been called to interfere; the machinery of authority strained as far as it would bear. The emperor himself was an unconscious convert to the higher creed. The Pope had urged him to break his word. The Pope had told him that honour was nothing, and morality was nothing, where the interests of orthodoxy were compromised. The emperor had refused to be tempted into perjury; and, in refusing, had admitted that there was a spiritual power upon the earth, above the Pope, and above him.

The party of the Church felt it so. A plot was formed to assassinate Luther on his return to Saxony. The insulted majesty of Rome could be vindicated at least by the dagger.

But this, too, failed. The elector heard what was intended. A party of horse, disguised as banditti, waylaid the Reformer upon the road, and carried him off to the castle of Wartburg, where he remained out of harm's way till the general rising of Germany placed him beyond the reach of danger.

At Wartburg for the present evening we leave him.

The Emperor Charles and Luther never met again. The monks of Yuste, who watched on the deathbed of Charles, reported that at the last hour he repented that he had kept his word, and reproached himself for having allowed the arch-heretic to escape from his hands.

It is possible that, when the candle of life was burning low, and spirit and flesh were failing together, and the air of the sick room was thick and close with the presence of the angel of death, the nobler nature of the emperor might have yielded to the influences which were around him. His confessor might have thrust into his lips the words which he so wished to hear.

But Charles the Fifth, though a Catholic always, was a Catholic of the old grand type, to whom creed and dogmas were but the robe of a regal humanity. Another story is told of Charles—an authentic story this one—which makes me think that the monks of Yuste mistook or maligned him. Six and twenty years after this scene at Worms, when the then dawning heresy had become broad day; when Luther had gone to his rest—and there had gathered about his name the hate which mean men feel for an enemy who has proved too strong for them—a passing vicissitude in the struggle brought the emperor at the head of his army to Wittenberg.

The vengeance which the monks could not inflict upon him in life, they proposed to wreak upon his bones.

The emperor desired to be conducted to Luther's tomb; and as he stood gazing at it, full of many thoughts, some one suggested that the body should be taken up and burnt at the stake in the Market Place.