The emperor had made his will at Brussels, on the 6th of June, 1554. The codocil is dated at Yuste, the 9th of September, 1558. From the great length of this document, its minuteness, and the frequent recurrence of provisions in case of his death before he should see his son, an event which now was beyond hope, it seems to have been prepared some time before. But as it must have been read to him before his trembling hand affixed the necessary signature, it remains as a proof that one of his last acts was to urge Philip II., by his love and allegiance, and his hope of salvation, to take care that "the heretics were repressed and chastised, with all publicity and rigor, as their faults deserved, without respect of persons, and without regard to any plea in their favor." The rest of the paper is filled with directions for his funeral, and with a list of legacies to forty-eight servants, and many thoughtful arrangements for the comfort of those who had followed him from Flanders. Though willing to send all his Protestant subjects to martyrdom, he watched with fatherly kindness over the fortunes of his grooms and scullions. It is said that Fray Juan de Regla proposed that Don Juan of Austria should be named in the will as next heir to the crown after Philip, his sister, and his children; but if this incredible advice were given by the confessor, the dying man had energy enough left to reject it with indignation.
Day by day the tide of life continued to ebb with visible fall. The sick man, however, was still able to attend to his devotions, to confess, and to receive the sacrament. He would not allow his confessor, Regla, to be absent from his bedside, and the poor man, who could hardly find a moment for his repasts, was nearly worn out with incessant watching. On every Sunday and feast day, at half-past three in the afternoon, the chaplain, Villalva, preached in the church, the window of the sick-room being left open, and the doors being shut to all but the friars. The patient likewise frequently caused passages of Scripture to be read to him, and was never weary of hearing the psalm which begins, Domine! refugium factum es nobis. On the 19th of September, towards evening, the patient asked for the rite of extreme unction. By the desire of the prior, Luis Quixada, who was ever at his pillow, inquired whether he would have it administered according to the form for friars, or after the briefer fashion of the laity. He chose the former, in which the seven penitential psalms were read, as well as a litany and sundry prayers and verses of scripture. During the reading of the psalms, it was observed that he joined in the responses of the monks with an audible voice. When the ceremony was over, instead of being exhausted, he seemed to have been revived by it. His appetite for food having entirely failed him for some days, Quixada seized the opportunity of urging him to take some. "Trouble me not, Luis Quixada," said he; "my life is going out of me, and I cannot eat." The next morning, the 20th, he asked for the eucharist. His confessor told him that having received extreme unction, the other sacrament was unnecessary. "It may not be necessary," said the dying man; "yet it is good company on so long a journey." His wish was accordingly complied with; the wafer was brought to his bedside, followed by the whole community in solemn procession, and he received it from the hands of his confessor with tears of devotion, incessantly repeating the words of our Saviour, "In me manes, ego in te maneam." In spite of his extreme weakness, he remained for a quarter of an hour kneeling in his bed, and uttering devout ejaculations, in praise of the blessed sacrament, which the simple friars attributed to divine inspiration.
On the evening of the 19th of September, a remarkable visitor knocked at the gate of Yuste. It was the new Archbishop of Toledo, Bartolomè Carranza de Miranda—a name which stands high on the list of the Wolseys of the world, of men remembered less for their splendid success than for their signal fall. From a simple Dominican, he had risen to be a professor at Valladolid, a leading doctor of Trent, prior of Palencia, provincial of Spain, and prime adviser of Philip II. in that movement which Spanish churchmen loved to call the reduction of England. During Mary's reign, the ruthless black friar had been a mark for popular vengeance; and Oxford, Cambridge, and Lambeth, long remembered how he had preached the sacrifice of the mass, dug up the bones of Bucer, and presided at the burning of Cranmer. For these services he had been rewarded by Philip II. with the richest see in Christendom; and he was now on his way to take possession of the throne of Toledo, little thinking that his enemy, the inquisitor Valdes, was already preparing the indictment which was to make his reign a long disgrace.
The archbishop was expected at Yuste. He had been long known to the Emperor, who had paved the way for his success by sending him to display his lore at the council of Trent. Charles had afterwards offered him the Peruvian bishopric of Cuzco, the post of confessor to the heir-apparent of Spain, and lastly, the bishopric of the Canaries. His refusal of all these pieces of preferment caused his patron some surprise, which was changed into displeasure by his acceptance of the see of Toledo. Reports had also got abroad, which cast a doubt on the orthodoxy of the new prelate,—of all doubts, as Charles thought, the gravest. He was anxious for an opportunity of conversing with him, partly, it seems, to upbraid him with his new honors, and partly in order to ascertain how far these reports were well founded. William, one of his barbers, related that he had heard his majesty say, "When I gave Carranza the bishopric of the Canaries, he refused it; now he accepts Toledo. We shall see what we are to think of his virtue." In this frame of mind, he had been expecting the unconscious prelate for some time; these feelings of dislike being, no doubt, strengthened by his confessor, father Regla, a bitter enemy, and one of the foremost accusers of Carranza.
There can be no doubt that the ruin of this celebrated man was decreed on evidence which would have been listened to only by a secret tribunal of unscrupulous enemies. It may be that some of his printed theology contained—what theology does not?—passages capable of interpretations neither intended nor foreseen by the writer; it may be that he had pillaged the writings of reformers, whose persons he would willingly have given to the flames. But it is certain that he was a man of unambitious nature, of active benevolence, and, according to the notions of that age, of exemplary life; that he was a scholar and theologian of practised and consummate skill, a wary shepherd of the faithful, a relentless butcher of heretics; that he carried his reluctance to the mitre so far beyond the bounds of decent clerical coyness, as to recommend three eminent rivals to Philip II., as more fit and proper than himself for the primacy; and that one of his first acts, as archbishop, was to advise the king to appropriate the revenues of a canonry in every cathedral in Spain to the use of the Inquisition. Setting aside, therefore, the palpable personal hatred which betrayed itself in all the proceedings against him, it seems probable that he spoke the plain truth, when he made his dying declaration, that he had never held any of the heretical opinions of which he had been accused.
In after days, when enduring the sickness of deferred hope in his prison at Valladolid or at Rome, the archbishop perhaps regarded it as one of the mischances which marked the ebb of his fortunes, that he reached Yuste too late either to explain to the emperor the circumstances of his promotion, or to remove the suspicion which had been cast on his faith. On the evening of his arrival, Charles was too ill to receive him, and the day following, although he was thrice admitted into the sick room, he found occasion to utter only a few words. Those words, few and simple as they were, were some weeks after reported to the Holy Office, with, as it seems, gross exaggeration, by the confessor, father Regla.
On the 20th of September, it was evident that the end was approaching. The few friends of the emperor who lived in the neighborhood had assembled at the convent. The count of Oropesa was there from Xarandilla, with several of the family of Toledo, and Don Luis de Avila had come from Plasencia. They, and the prior and some of the monks, were frequently in the sick-room, in which Quixada kept constant watch. The patient had hardly spoken during the whole day. In the afternoon, when Oropesa introduced the archbishop, he merely told him to be seated, but was unable to hold any conversation. Towards night he grew hourly worse. The physicians, Mathesio and Cornelio, at last announced to the group around the bed, that the resources of their art were exhausted, and that all hope was over. Cornelio, the court doctor from Valladolid, then retired; Mathesio remained, feeling the pulse of the dying man, and saying at intervals, "His majesty has only two hours to live—only one hour—only half an hour." Charles meanwhile lay in a stupor, seemingly unconscious of what was going on around him, but now and then mumbling a prayer, and turning his eyes to heaven. At last he roused himself, and pronounced the name of William Van Male. On the man's coming to his support, he leaned towards him, as if to obtain ease by a change of posture; at the same time uttering a groan of agony. The physician now looked towards the door, and said to the archbishop, who was standing there in the shade, "Domine! jam moritur." The prelate approached, and knelt down by the bed, holding a crucifix in his hand, and saying in a loud tone, "Behold him who answers for sin; sin is no more; all is forgiven!" Sad and swarthy of visage, Carranza had also a hoarse, disagreeable voice. On hearing it, the emperor gave signs of impatience so distinct, that the faithful Quixada thought it right to interfere and say, "Hark, my lord, you are disturbing his majesty." The archbishop took the hint, and retired.
It was near two o'clock on the morning of the 21st of September, St. Matthew's day. Fray Francisco de Villalva, the favorite chaplain, now presented himself at the bedside. Addressing the dying man, he told him how blessed a privilege he enjoyed in having been born on the day of St. Matthias, the apostle, who had been chosen by lot to complete the number of the twelve, and in being about to die on the day of St. Matthew, the evangelist, who, for Christ's sake, had forsaken wealth, as his majesty had forsaken imperial power. For some time he continued to hold forth in the same edifying strain. At length, Charles, rousing himself, said, "The time is come, bring me the candle and the crucifix." These were cherished relics, which he had kept in reserve for this supreme hour. The one was a taper from Our Lady's shrine at Monserrat; the other, a crucifix of beautiful workmanship, which before had been taken from the dead hand of his mother Juana, in the convent of Tordesillas, and which afterwards comforted the last moments of his son Philip, in the convent of the Escorial. When brought by the attendant, he turned eagerly to receive them; and taking one into each hand, he remained silent for some minutes, with his eyes fixed upon the figure of the Saviour. Those who stood nearest the bed then heard him say, quickly, as if replying to a sudden call, "Ya voy, Señor—Now, Lord, I go." A few moments of death-wrestle between soul and body followed; and then, with a voice loud and clear enough to be heard in the other apartments, he cried three times, "Ay, Jesus!" and expired.
In or near the chamber of death were assembled the prior and the chaplains, and the household; the count of Oropesa, his brother Don Francisco, his cousin, Don Juan Pacheco, and his uncle Diego abbot of Cabañas, Don Luis de Avila, and archbishop Carranza. Don Juan of Austria, too, in the quality of page to Quixada, stood by the death-bed of him he was afterwards so proud to call his sire.
On the day of the death, and part of the day following, the physicians and attendants were engaged in embalming the body, and arranging it for the grave. Meanwhile, a leaden coffin was prepared, and likewise a massive outer case of chestnut wood, and a black velvet pall to cover the whole. Sandoval had heard, but gave no credit to the story, of the coffin which the emperor was said to have brought with him to Yuste, and to have kept under his bed. Another version of the tale, he says, made the coffin a winding-sheet, but no mention of either was found in the minute account drawn up by the prior Angulo. When all was ready, the coffin was lowered, by ten or twelve men, through the window which opened from the bedchamber into the church, and placed upon a stage erected in the middle of the isle. These preparations were hardly completed, when the corregidor of Plasencia arrived with his clerks and constables, and asserted that, as the emperor had died within his jurisdiction, it was his duty to see that the remains had been deposited in a place of safety. In spite, therefore, of the remonstrances of the prior, he caused the coffins to be opened, that he might identify the body.