While he was preparing to crush, forever, the Protestant church, with the arms which a bench of bishops were forging, lo! the rapid and desperate Maurice, with long red beard streaming like a meteor in the wind, dashing through the mountain passes, at the head of his Lancers—arguments more convincing than all the dogmas of Granvella! Disguised as an old woman, the emperor had attempted on the 6th of April, 1552, to escape in a peasant’s wagon, from Innsbruck into Flanders. Saved for the time by the mediation of Ferdinand, he had, a few weeks later, after his troops had been defeated by Maurice at Füssen, again fled at midnight of the 22nd of May, almost unattended, sick in body and soul, in the midst of thunder, lightning, and rain, along the difficult Alpine passes from Innsbruck into Carinthia. His pupil had permitted his escape, only because, in his own language, “for such a bird he had no convenient cage.” The imprisoned princes now owed their liberation, not to the emperor’s clemency, but to his panic. The Peace of Passau, in the following August, crushed the whole fabric of the emperor’s toil, and laid the foundation of the Protestant church.
On the other hand, the man who had dealt with Rome as if the pope, not he, had been the vassal, was compelled to witness, before he departed, the insolence of a pontiff who took a special pride in insulting and humbling his house, and trampling upon the pride of Charles, Philip, and Ferdinand. In France, too, the disastrous siege of Metz had taught him that in the imperial zodiac the fatal sign of Cancer had been reached. The figure of a crab, with the words “plus citra,” instead of his proud motto of “plus ultra,” scrawled on the walls where he had resided during that dismal epoch, avenged more deeply, perhaps, than the jester thought, the previous misfortunes of France. The Grand Turk, too, Suleiman the Magnificent, possessed most of Hungary, and held at that moment a fleet ready to sail against Naples, in co-operation with the pope and France. Thus the infidel, the Protestant, and the holy church were all combined together to crush him. Towards all the great powers of the earth he stood, not in the attitude of a conqueror, but of a disappointed, baffled, defeated potentate. Moreover, he had been foiled long before in his earnest attempts to secure the imperial throne for Philip.
A Spanish Cavalier of the Sixteenth Century
[1556-1558 A.D.]
Had the emperor continued to live and reign, he would have found himself likewise engaged in mortal combat with that great religious movement in the Netherlands, which he would not have been able many years longer to suppress, and which he left as a legacy of blood and fire to his successor. Born in the same year with his century, Charles was a decrepit, exhausted man at fifty-five, while that glorious age, in which humanity was to burst forever the cerements in which it had so long been buried, was but awakening to a consciousness of its strength. Disappointed in his schemes, broken in his fortunes with income anticipated, estates mortgaged, all his affairs in confusion; failing in mental powers, and with a constitution hopelessly shattered—it was time for him to retire. He showed his keenness in recognising the fact that neither his power nor his glory would be increased, should he lag superfluous on the stage when mortification instead of applause was likely to be his portion. His frame was indeed but a wreck. Forty years of unexampled gluttony had done their work. He was a victim to gout, asthma, dyspepsia, gravel. He was crippled in the neck, arms, knees, and hands. He was troubled with chronic cutaneous eruptions. His appetite remained, while his stomach, unable longer to perform the task still imposed upon it, occasioned him constant suffering. Physiologists, who know how important a part this organ plays in the affairs of life, will perhaps see in this physical condition of the emperor a sufficient explanation, if explanation were required, of his descent from the throne. The resolution to abdicate before his death had been long a settled scheme with him. It had been formally agreed between himself and the empress that they should separate at the approach of old age, and pass the remainder of their lives in a convent and a monastery. He wished to put a little space of religious contemplation between the active portion of his life and the grave.
The romantic picture of his philosophical retirement at Yuste, painted originally by Sandoval[f] and Siguenza,[g] reproduced by the fascinating pencil of Strada,[o] and imitated in frequent succession by authors of every age and country, is unfortunately but a sketch of fancy. The investigations of modern writers have entirely thrown down the scaffolding on which the airy fabric, so delightful to poets and moralists, reposed. The departing emperor stands no longer in a transparency robed in shining garments. His transfiguration is at an end. Every action, almost every moment of his retirement, accurately chronicled by those who shared his solitude, have been placed before our eyes, in the most felicitous manner, by able and brilliant writers.[81] The emperor, shorn of the philosophical robe in which he had been conventionally arrayed for three centuries, shivers now in the cold air of reality.
So far from his having immersed himself in profound and pious contemplation, below the current of the world’s events, his thoughts, on the contrary, never were for a moment diverted from the political surface of the times. He read nothing but despatches; he wrote or dictated interminable ones in reply, as dull and prolix as any which ever came from his pen. He manifested a succession of emotions at the course of contemporary affairs, as intense and as varied as if the world still rested in his palm. He was, in truth, essentially a man of action. He had neither the taste nor talents which make a man great in retirement. Not a lofty thought, not a generous sentiment, not a profound or acute suggestion in his retreat has been recorded from his lips. The epigrams which had been invented for him by fabulists have been all taken away, and nothing has been substituted, save a few dull jests exchanged with stupid friars. So far from having entertained and even expressed that sentiment of religious toleration for which he was said to have been condemned as a heretic by the Inquisition, and for which Philip was ridiculously reported to have ordered his father’s body to be burned, and his ashes scattered to the winds, he became in retreat the bigot effectually, which during his reign he had only been conventionally. Bitter regrets that he should have kept his word to Luther, as if he had not broken faith enough to reflect upon in his retirement; stern self-reproach for omitting to put to death, while he had him in his power, the man who had caused all the mischief of the age; fierce instructions thundered from his retreat to the inquisitors to hasten the execution of all heretics—including particularly his ancient friends, preachers and almoners, Cazalla and Constantine de Fuente; furious exhortations to Philip—as if Philip needed a prompter in such a work—that he should set himself to “cutting out the root of heresy with rigour and rude chastisement”—such explosions of savage bigotry as these, alternating with exhibitions of revolting gluttony, with surfeits of sardine omelettes, Estremadura sausages, eel pies, pickled partridges, fat capons, quince syrups, iced beer, and flagons of Rhenish, relieved by copious draughts of senna and rhubarb, to which his horror-stricken doctor doomed him as he ate—compose a spectacle less attractive to the imagination than the ancient portrait of the cloistered Charles. Unfortunately it was the one which was painted from life.[m]
Charles died September 20th, 1558, not long after a rehearsal of his own obsequies which it was his whim to experience. He was buried in the monastery, but twelve years later his son Philip II removed the remains to the family tombs in the Escorial. Before leaving the reign of Charles V, the major part of which is left to the volume of German history, we may quote an estimate of his administration as it affected Spain.[a]