As to Charles V., even had he not joined to his title of Emperor of Germany the crown of Spain, with all his possessions in the Low Countries and in the New World, one would have still found it strange to see him excluded from the cortége of sovereigns, politicians, and statesmen who gave lustre to the sixteenth century.
A sketch of the sixteenth century, then, is incomplete without these two princes, who represent the fierce struggle between the two most powerful Catholic nations at an epoch in which the religious revolutions of the European world should have made such an omission, so it would seem, impossible. Strange antagonism indeed that between these two nations, who would have been able by their accord to arrest the political progress of Protestantism, and to hinder the theology of Wittenberg and Geneva from becoming subsequently a preponderating influence in the direction of the affairs of Europe! Strange and restless antagonism, which occupies a large part of the political history of the sixteenth century; fills, again, the seventeenth with Richelieu and Louis XIV.; seemingly is quieted for an instant when Marie Antoinette shares the throne of Louis XIV. and Marie-Louise that of Napoleon the First; survives, however, three centuries of wars, of changes and revolutions of every sort, to place anew the two peoples in hostile array upon the fields of Magenta and Solferino, and only seems bound to disappear when it has arrived at one of its extreme but logical consequences, namely, the exaltation of the power which most fully represents upon the European continent the Protestant enthusiasm and the ancient grudges against France. It is, in fact, only since the battle of Sadowa that this antagonism between these two great Catholic nations has seemed to give place to mutual intelligence of a common danger, and to that sympathetic regard which a recent and distinguished visit has consecrated, so to speak, in the face of Europe, and commended to the intelligent applause of the people of Paris.
The exclusive glorification of Protestantism in the master-work of Kaulbach has also been an occasion of another lamentable omission. It is not enough—be it said without excessive and immoderate partiality toward our own country—it is not enough to have made France represented only by Calvin and by Coligny in the imposing cortége of all the glories of the sixteenth century. This systematic exclusion is explained even by itself. In such a composition the places of honor were to be reserved to the countries which welcomed Protestantism with an enthusiasm so ardent, or submitted themselves to its dictation with so strange a docility. One knows, on the other hand, what insurmountable resistance France opposed to the introduction and establishment of Protestantism. It cost her, it is true, more than forty years of continual wars. And what wars those terrible fratricidal and religious strifes of the sixteenth century were; stirred up and kept alive on both sides by the most violent passions, and which, after the unhappy and sanguinary convulsions in which were consumed the reigns of Henry II., Francis II., Charles IX., and Henry III., would have ended surely in the breaking up of the ancient national unity, if Providence had not, at the conclusion of those frightful dissensions, caused to intervene a prince pre-destined to pacify the minds, quiet the discords, and close up and heal the deep wounds of the country! Henry IV. arrives at the end of the sixteenth century, as it were in order to bring about union between Protestantism vanquished and Catholicity triumphant. He gives to the latter the pledge of a public conversion; to the former, the benefit of a legal existence; and, especially in rendering sacred the respect due to minorities, he demonstrates, better than by all arguments, and perhaps for the very reason that his conversion was less a work of devotion than of policy, how the genius of the French nation was opposed to the doctrines of the reformers.
Whatever may be said of the equivocal sincerity of his Catholicity and of the blemishes of his private life, Henry IV., who belongs to the sixteenth century by his birth, by his elevation to the throne and some of the most considerable transactions of his reign, worthily represents, at the close of an epoch so disturbed, some of the highest and most rightful aspirations of what may be called, right or wrong, the spirit of modern times. Great prince assuredly was he who could cause to triumph over passions envenomed by the civil and religious wars of half a century that love of common country, in which, despite of all that would divide them, the French people ought to feel themselves children of the same mother and defenders of the same flag.
The exclusion—almost entire—of France from a picture designed to glorify the sixteenth century, is not the only, nor even the gravest, reproach which historical criticism has the right to address to its author.
It is, still further, authorized to demand of him if it is strictly just to cause this grand composition, artistic, scientific, and literary, to do honor solely to Luther and Calvin—a composition which, from a certain and strictly proper point of view, would have sufficed to the glory of an epoch—and above all, if it does not do a strange violence to truth to enroll under the banner of Protestantism such men as Petrarch, Shakespeare, Christopher Columbus, Michael Angelo, and Raphael?
The name of Shakespeare, indeed, not long since stirred up quite a lively discussion upon this very subject In the eyes of a certain school it seemed to import absolutely that, to the honor of letters, the immortal author of Hamlet and of Othello did not belong to the Church of Rome—as if Corneille and Racine sparkled with any the less brilliancy because they were Catholics, or that the dramatic art had need to be ashamed of Polyeucte, Esther, and Athalie.
The question has been examined with all the attention which it merits, and the conclusion to which a conscientious inquiry seems to bring us is, that, if Shakespeare belonged by his birth to the time of the Reformation, it is not, nevertheless, necessary to ascribe, either to the gospel of Luther and Calvin or to the Draconian Protestantism of Queen Elizabeth, the masterly productions of his genius.
As to Christopher Columbus, who does not know, I will not say his obedience and filial devotion to the Church of Rome, but the profound piety of his soul and the tenderness of his religious sentiments? According to the chronicler who has preserved for us in Latin the admirable prayer made by that great man at that solemn hour of his life when, triumphant at last over so many distrusts and so many wrongs, over so many delays and so many obstacles, conqueror, so to speak, of the elements and of men, but always submissive to God, he cast himself upon his knees on the land of the New World, as if to take possession of it in the name of faith. "O God!" he said, "eternal and omnipotent, thou hast by thy holy Word created heaven and earth and sea. Blessed and glorified be thy name; praised be thy majesty which has deigned by thy humble servant to cause that thy holy name should be known and proclaimed in this other part of the world."