CHARLES V, EMPEROR OF GERMANY.
By JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY.
[Charles V, of Germany, and king of Spain under title of Charles I, born 1500, died 1558. This fortunate monarch inherited from his father, Archduke Philip of Austria, the Hapsburg dominion in Germany; through his grandmother, the dukedom of Burgundy, which included the Netherlands; and through his maternal grandfather, Ferdinand of Spain, the magnificent dominion of the latter country in both the New and Old Worlds. He was elected Emperor of Germany by the diet in 1519, and was the most rich and powerful prince in Christendom. Among the notable events of his reign were the outbreak of Luther’s reformation, the defeat and capture of Francis I of France, the capture and sack of Rome by his generalissimo, the Constable de Bourbon, the two defeats of the Turkish power in Hungary, and the severe punishment of the Mohammedan pirates of Africa. Though Charles could turn his arms against the pontiff when policy dictated, and was not a religious bigot, he strained every nerve to suppress the Lutheran reformation for political reasons. He was at last, however, obliged to assent to a certain degree of religious toleration, fixed by the Nuremburg agreement in 1532, and that of Augsburg in 1548. He abdicated in favor of his son Philip in 1556, and spent the last two years of his life in the convent of Yuste in Spain.]
The edicts and the Inquisition were the gifts of Charles to the Netherlands, in return for their wasted treasure and their constant obedience. For this his name deserves to be handed down to eternal infamy, not only throughout the Netherlands but in every land where a single heart beats for political or religious freedom. To eradicate these institutions after they had been watered and watched by the care of his successor, was the work of an eighty years’ war, in the course of which millions of lives were sacrificed. Yet
CHARLES THE FIFTH.
the abdicating emperor had summoned his faithful estates around him, and stood up before them in his imperial robes for the last time, to tell them of the affectionate regard which he had always borne them, and to mingle his tears with theirs.
Could a single phantom have risen from one of the many thousand graves where human beings had been thrust alive by his decree, perhaps there might have been an answer to the question propounded by the emperor amid all that piteous weeping. Perhaps it might have told the man, who asked his hearers to be forgiven if he had ever unwittingly offended them, that there was a world where it was deemed an offence to torture, strangle, burn, and drown one’s innocent fellow-creatures. The usual but trifling excuse for such enormities can not be pleaded for the emperor. Charles was no fanatic. The man whose armies sacked Rome, who laid sacrilegious hand on Christ’s vicegerent, and kept the infallible head of the Church a prisoner to serve his own political ends, was then no bigot. He believed in nothing, save that when the course of his imperial will was impeded and the interests of his imperial house in jeopardy, pontiffs were wont to succumb as well as anabaptists. It was the political heresy which lurked in the restiveness of the religious reformers under dogma, tradition, and supernatural sanction to temporal power, which he was disposed to combat to the death. He was too shrewd a politician not to recognize the connection between aspirations for religious and for political freedom. His hand was ever ready to crush both heresies in one. Had he been a true son of the Church, a faithful champion of her infallibility, he would not have submitted to the peace of Passau so long as he could bring a soldier to the field.
Yet he acquiesced in the Reformation for Germany, while the fires were burning for the reformers and were ever blazing in the Netherlands, where it was death even to allude to the existence of the peace of Passau. Nor did he acquiesce only from compulsion, for, long before his memorable defeat by Maurice, he had permitted the German troops, with whose services he could not dispense, regularly to attend Protestant worship performed by their own Protestant chaplains. Lutheran preachers marched from city to city of the Netherlands under the imperial banner, while the subjects of those patrimonial provinces were daily suffering on the scaffold for their non-conformity.
The influence of this garrison-preaching upon the progress of the Reformation in the Netherlands is well known. Charles hated Lutherans, but he required soldiers, and he thus helped by his own policy to disseminate what, had he been the fanatic which he perhaps became in retirement, he would have sacrificed his life to crush. It is quite true that the growing Calvinism of the provinces was more dangerous, both religiously and politically, than the Protestantism of the German princes, which had not yet been formally pronounced heresy; but it is thus the more evident that it was political rather than religious heterodoxy which the despot wished to suppress.