Distinguished Men.
Leonardo Da Vinci, Michael Angelo, Raffaelle, Correggio, Titian, (Painters,) Sir Philip Sydney, Raleigh, Spenser, Shakspeare, (1564-1616,) Ariosto, Tasso, Lope de Vega, Calderon, Cervantes, Scaliger, (1484-1558,) Copernicus, (1473-1543,) Knox, (1505-1572,) Calvin, (1509-1564,) Beza, (1519-1605,) Bellarmine, (1542-1621,) Tycho Brahe, (1546-1601.)
[THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY.]
THE REFORMATION — THE JESUITS — POLICY OF ELIZABETH
In the last two years of the preceding century the course of maritime discovery had been accelerated by fresh success. To balance the glories of Columbus in the West, the “regions of the rising sun” had been explored by Vasco da Gama, a Portuguese. This great navigator sailed back into the harbour of Lisbon on the 16th of September, 1499, with the astonishing news that he had doubled the Cape of Storms, which had so alarmed Bartholomew Diaz, and established relations of amity and commerce with the vast continent of India, having traded with a civilized and industrious people at Calicut, a great city on the coast of Malabar. Under these reiterated widenings of men’s knowledge of the globe, the human mind itself expanded. Familiar names meet us from henceforth in the most distant quarters of the world. All national or domestic history becomes mixed up with elements hitherto unknown. The balance of power, which is the new constitution of the European States, depends on circumstances and places of the most heterogeneous character. A treaty between France and Spain, or between England and either, is regulated by events occurring on the Amazon or Ganges. The whole world gets more closely connected than ever it was before, and we can look back on the proceedings of previous ages as filling a very narrow theatre, and regulated by very contracted interests, when compared with the universal policies on which public affairs have now to rest. At first, however, the great results of these stupendous discoveries were naturally not observed. Contemporaries are justly accused of magnifying the small affairs of life of which they are witnesses; but this observation does not hold good with respect to the really momentous incidents of human history. A man who saw Columbus return from his voyage, or Guttenberg pulling at his press, could not rise to the contemplation of the prodigious consequences of these two events. He thought, perhaps, a quarrel between two neighbouring potentates, or a battle between France and Spain, the greatest incident of his time. His son forgot all about the quarrel; his grandson had no recollection of the battle; but widening in a still increasing circle, expanding into still more wonderful proportions, were the Discovery of America and the Art of Printing,—showing themselves in combinations of events and changes of circumstances where they were never expected to appear,—the one threatening to overthrow the freedom of every State in Europe by the supremacy of the Spanish crown, the other in reality preventing the chance of that consummation by raising up the indomitable spirit of spiritual liberty. For there now came to the aid of national independence the far more elevating feelings of religious emancipation. Protestantism was not limited in this century to denial of the spiritual authority of popes, but embodied itself also in resistance to the political ambition of kings. America might have enabled Charles the Fifth to conquer all Europe, if the Reformation had not strengthened men’s minds with a determination to stand up against oppression.
But the commencement of this century gave no intimation of its tempestuous course. The first few years saw the peaceable accession to the thrones of Spain and France and England of the three sovereigns whose contemporaneous reigns, and also whose personal characters, had the most preponderating influence on the succeeding current of events. We have left Spain for a long time out of these general views of a century’s condition and special notices of individual incidents which affected the condition of the world; for Spain for a long time lay obscurely between the ocean and the Pyrenees and carried on wars and policies which were limited by its territorial bounds. But, if we take a hurried retrospect of the last few years, we shall see that the different nations contained in the Peninsula had amalgamated into one mighty and strongly-cemented State. |A.D. 1497.|Ferdinand of Aragon, by marriage with Isabella of Castile, united the various nationalities under one homogeneous government, and by wisdom and magnanimity—the wisdom being the man’s and the magnanimity the woman’s—had rendered forever famous the joint reign of husband and wife, had reconciled the jarring factions of their respective subjects, and seen with the triumphant faith of believers and the satisfaction of sagacious rulers the reunion of the last Mohammedan State to the dominion of the Cross and of the crown. They watched the long, slow march of the Moorish king and his cavaliers as they took their way in poverty and despair from the towers and meadows of Granada, which a possession of seven hundred years had failed to make their own. This—the conquest of Granada—took place in 1491; and 1516 saw the supreme power over all united Spain descend on the head of the grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella,—inheriting, along with their royal dignity, the cautious wisdom of the one and the wider intelligence of the other. In three years from that time—it will be easy to remember that Charles’s age is the same as the century’s—he was elected to the Imperial crown, so that the greatest dominion ever held by one man since the days of Charlemagne now fell to the rule of a youth of nineteen years of age. Germany, the Netherlands, Naples, Sicily, and Spain, more than equalled the extent and power of Charlemagne’s empire. |A.D. 1520.|But ere Charles was a year older, vaster dominions than Charlemagne had ever dreamt of acknowledged his royal sway; for Montezuma, the Emperor of Mexico, whose realm was without appreciable limit either in size or wealth, professed himself the subject and servant of the Spanish king.
Henry the Eighth of England had also succeeded at an early age, being but eighteen in 1509, when the death of his father, the politic and successful founder of the Tudor dynasty, left him with a people silent if not quite satisfied, and an exchequer overflowing with what would now amount to ten or twelve millions of gold. This treasure had been accumulated by the infamous exactions of the late sovereign, who was aided in the ignoble service by two men of the names of Empson and Dudley. These were spies and informers, not, as in other climes and countries, about the religious or political sentiments of the people, but about their titles to their estates, the fines they were disposed to pay, or the bribes they would advance to the royal extortioner to avoid litigation and injustice. Henry had an admirable opportunity of showing his hatred of these practices, and availed himself of it at once. Before he had been four months on the throne, Empson and Dudley were ignominiously hanged; and with safe conscience, after this sacrifice at the shrine of legality, he entered into possession of the pilfered store. The people applauded the rapid decision of his character in both these instances, and scarcely grudged him the money when the subordinates were given up to their revenge. They could not, indeed, grudge their young king any thing; his manners were so open and sincere, his laugh so ready, and his teeth so white; for we are not to forget, in compliment to what is facetiously called the dignity of history, the immense advantages a ruler gains by the fact of being good-looking. Nobody feels inclined to find fault with a lad of eighteen, if moderately endowed with health and features; but when that lad is eminently handsome, rioting in strength and spirits, open in disposition, and, above all, a king, you need not wonder at the universal inclination to overlook his faults, to exaggerate his virtues, and even, after an interval of two hundred and fifty years, to hear the greatest tyrant of our history, and the worst man perhaps of his time, talked of by the ordinary title of Bluff King Hal. If he had been as ugly and hump-backed as his grand-uncle Richard the Third, he would have been detested from the first.
But in the neighbouring land of France there reigned at the same time a prince almost as handsome as Henry, and nearly as popular with his people, with as little real cause. In 1515, Francis the First was twenty years of age, a perfect specimen of manly strength,—accomplished in all knightly exercises,—generous and magnificent in his intercourse with his nobility,—and the greatest roué and debauchee in all the kingdom of France. Here, then, at the beginning of the age we have now to examine, were the three mightiest sovereigns of Europe, all arriving at their crowns before attaining their majority; and with so many years before them, and such powerful nations obeying their commands, great prospects for good or evil were opening on the world. But in the early years of the century no human eye perceived in what direction the future was going to pursue its course. People were all watching for the first indication of what was to come, and kept their eyes on the courts of Paris and London and Madrid; but nobody suspected that the real champions of the time were already marshalling their forces in far different situations. There was a thoughtful monk in a convent in Germany, and a Spanish soldier before the walls of Pampeluna. These were the true movers of men’s minds, of the great thoughts by which events are created; and their names were soon to sound louder than those of Henry or Charles or Francis; for one was Martin Luther, the hero of the Reformation, and the other was Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits. Take note of them here as mere accessories to the march of general history: we shall return to them again as characteristics of the century on which they placed their indelible mark. At this time, in the gay young days of the three crowned striplings, these future combatants are totally unknown. Brother Martin is singing charming hymns to the Virgin, in a voice which it was delightful to hear; and Don Ignacio is also singing to his guitar the praises of one of the beautiful maidens of his native land. Public opinion was still stagnant with regard to home-affairs, in spite of the efforts of the infant press. People, bowed down by the claims of implicit obedience exacted from them by the Church, accepted with wondering submission the pontificate of such an atrocious murderer as Alexander the Sixth; and some even ingeniously founded an argument of the divine institution of the Papacy upon its having survived the eleven years’ desecration of that monster of cruelty and unbelief. Yet now it happened by a strange coincidence that the chair of St. Peter was to be filled by a gayer and more accomplished ruler than any of the earthly thrones we have mentioned. In 1513, Leo the Tenth, the most celebrated of the family of the Medicis of Florence, put on the tiara at the age of thirty-six, a period of life which was considered as youthful for the father of Christendom as even the boyish years of the temporal kings. And Leo did not belie the promise of his juvenility. None of the dulness of age, or even the caution of maturity, was perceived in his public or private conduct. He was a patron of arts and sciences, and buffoonery, and infidelity; and it is curious to observe how the pretensions of Rome were more shaken by the frivolous magnificence of a good-hearted, graceful voluptuary than they had been by the crimes of his two immediate predecessors, the truculent Borgia and the warlike Julius the Second.
This latter pontiff was intended by nature for a leader of Free Lances, to live forever in “the joy of battle,” and must have felt a little out of his element as the head of the Christian Church. However, he rapidly discovered that he was a secular prince as well as a spiritual teacher, and cast his eyes in the former capacity with ominous ill will on the industrious Republic of Venice. The fishermen and fugitives of many centuries before, who had settled among the Adriatic lagoons, had risen into the position of princes and treasurers of Europe. By their possessions in the East, and their trading-factories established along the whole route from India to the Mediterranean, they had made themselves the intermediaries between the barbaric pearls and gold, the silks and spices, of the Oriental regions, and the requirements of the West. Their galleys were daily bringing them the commodities of the Levant, which they distributed at an exorbitant profit among the nations beyond the Straits of Gibraltar. Mercantile wealth and maritime enterprise elevated the taste and confidence of those Venetian traffickers, till their whole territory, amid the lifeless waters of their canals, was covered with stately palaces, and their fleets assumed the dominion of the inland seas. On the mainland they had stretched their power over Dalmatia and Trieste, and in their own peninsula over Rimini and Ferrara and a great part of the Romagna. Two ruling passions agitated the soul of Julius the Second: one was to recover whatever territory or influence had once belonged to the Holy See; the other was to expel the hated barbarian, whether Frenchman, or Swiss, or Austrian, from the soil of Italy. To achieve this last object he would sacrifice any thing except the first; and to unite the two was difficult. He made his approaches to Venice in a gentle manner at first. He asked her to restore the lands she had lately won, which he claimed as appendages of his chair, because they had been torn unjustly from the original holders by Cæsar Borgia, the son of Alexander the Infamous; and if she had agreed to this he would no doubt have proceeded with his further scheme of banishing all ultramontane invaders. But as the commercial council of the great emporium hesitated at giving up what they had entered in their books as fairly their own, he altered his note in a moment, put on the insignia of his holy office, and, denouncing the astonished republic as rebellious and ungrateful to Mother Church, he called in the aid of the very French whom he was so anxious to get quit of, to execute his judgment upon the offending State. Venice was rich, and France at that time was poor and at all times is greedy. So preparations were made for an assault with the readiness and glee with which a party of freebooters would make a descent on the Bank of England. The temptation also was too great to be resisted by other kings and princes, who were as hungry for spoil and as attached to religion as the French. So in an incredibly short space of time the league of Cambrai was joined by Maximilian, the Emperor of Germany, and Ferdinand of Spain, and dukes and marquesses of less note. There were few of the Southern potentates, indeed, who had not some cause of complaint against the haughty Venetians. |A.D. 1508.|Some (as the German Maximilian) they had humbled by defeat; others they had insulted by their purse-proud insolence; others, again, by superiority in commercial skill; and all, by the fact of being wealthy and, as they fancied, weak.