There can be no doubt that the emperor gave the true reasons of his act, when, panting for breath, and unable to stand alone, he told the states of Flanders that he resigned the government because it was a burden which his shattered frame could no longer bear. It was to no sudden impulse, however, that he yielded; but he calmly fulfilled a resolve which he had cherished for many years. Indeed, he seems to have determined to abdicate, almost at the time when he determined to reign. For so powerful a mind has rarely been so tardy in giving evidence of power. Until he appeared in Italy in 1530, the thirtieth year of his age, his strong will had been as wax in the hands of other men. Up to that time the most laborious, reserved, and inflexible of princes was the most docile subject of his ministers. But if his mind was slow to ripen, his body was no less premature in its decay. By nature and hereditary habit a keen sportsman, and in youth unwearied in tracking the wolf and the bear over the hills of Toledo and Granada, he was reduced, ere he had turned fifty, to content himself with shooting crows and daws amongst the trees of his gardens. Familiarized by feeble health with images of death, he had determined twenty years before his abdication to interpose some interval of rest between the council and the grave. He had agreed with his empress, who died in 1538, that as soon as the state affairs and the age of their children should permit, they should retire into religious seclusion: he into a cloister of friars, and she into a nunnery. In 1542, he spoke of his design to the duke of Gandia; and in 1546 it was whispered at court, and was mentioned by the sharp-eared envoy of Venice, in a dispatch to the Doge. Since then, decaying health and declining fortune had maintained him in that general vexation of spirit which he shared with king Solomon. His later schemes of conquest and policy had resulted in disaster and disgrace. The Pope, the great Turk, the Protestant princes, and the king of France, were once more arrayed against the potentate who in the bright morning of his career had imposed laws upon them all. The flight from Innsbruck had avenged the cause which seemed lost at Muhlberg; Guise and the gallant townsmen of Metz had enabled the French wits to turn the emperor's proud motto, Plus ultra, into Non ultra metas. Whilst the Protestant faith was spreading even in the dominions of the house of Hapsburg, the doctors of the church assembled in that council which had cost so much treasure and intrigue, continued to quibble, for the sole benefit of the tavern-keepers of Trent. The finances both of Spain and the other Austrian states were in the utmost disorder, and the lord of Mexico and Peru had been forced to borrow from the duke of Florence. It is no wonder, therefore, that he seized the first gleam of sunshine and returning calm to make for the long-desired harbor of refuge; and that he relieved his brow of its thorny crowns as soon as he had attained an object dear to him as a father, a politician, and a devotee, by placing his son Philip on the rival throne of the heretic Tudors.
His habits and turn of mind, as well as his Spanish blood, and the spirit of his age, made a convent the natural place of his retreat. Monachism seems to have had for him the charm, vague, yet powerful, which soldiership has for most boys; and he was ever fond of catching glimpses of the life which he had resolved, sooner or later, to embrace. When the empress died, he retired to indulge his grief in the cloisters of La Sisla, at Toledo. After his return from one of his African campaigns, he paid a visit to the noble convent of Mejorada, near Olmedo, and spent two days in familiar converse with the Benedictines, sharing their refectory fare, and walking for hours in their garden alleys of venerable cypress. When he held his court at Brussels, he was frequently a guest at the convent of Groenendael; and the monks commemorated his condescensions, as well as his skill as a marksman, by placing a bronze statue of him on the banks of their fish-pond, into which he had brought down a heron, from an amazing altitude, with his gun. Though unable at Yuste to indulge the love of sport, which may have had its influence in drawing him to the chestnut woods of the Vera, we have seen that he continued to the last to take his pleasure in the converse and companionship of the Jeromites.
In the cloister, Charles was no less popular than he had been in the world; for in spite of his feeble health and phlegmatic temperament, in spite of his caution, which amounted to distrust, and his selfishness, which frequently took the form of treachery, in spite of his love of power, and the unsparing severity with which he punished the assertion of popular rights, there was still that in his conduct and bearing which gained the favor of the multitude. A little book, of no literary value, but frequently printed both in French and Flemish, sufficiently indicates in its title the qualities which colored the popular view of his character. "The Life and Actions, Heroic and Pleasant, of the invincible Emperor Charles V." was long a favorite chap-book in the Low Countries. It relates how he defeated Solyman the magnificent, and how he permitted a Walloon boor to obtain judgment against him for the value of a sheep, killed by the wheels of his coach; how he charged the Moorish horsemen at Tunis; and how he jested incognito with the woodmen of Soigne. A similar impression, deepened by his reputation for sanctity, he seems to have left behind him amongst the sylvan hamlets of Estremadura.
In one point alone did Charles in the cell differ widely from Charles on the throne. In the world, fanaticism had not been one of his vices; he feared the keys no more than his cousin of England; and he confronted the successor of St. Peter no less boldly than he made head against the heir of St. Louis. When he held Clement VII. prisoner in Rome, he permitted at Madrid the mockery of masses for that pontiff's speedy deliverance. Against the Protestants he fought rather as rebels than as heretics; and he frequently stayed the hand of the triumphant zealots of the church. At Wittenberg, he set a fine example of moderation, in forbidding the destruction of the tomb of Luther—saying, that he contended with the living, and not with the dead. But once within the walls of Yuste, and he assumed all the passions, and prejudices, and superstitions of a friar. Looking back on his past life, he thanked God for the evil that he had done in the matter of religious persecution, and repented him, in sackcloth and ashes, of having kept his plighted word to a heretic. Religion was the enchanted ground whereon that strong will was paralyzed, and that keen intellect fell groveling in the dust. Protestant and philosophic historians love to relate how Charles, finding that no two of his time-pieces could be made to go alike, remarked that he had perhaps erred in spending so much blood and treasure in the hope of compelling men to uniformity in the more difficult matter of religion. We fear the anecdote must have been invented by some manufacturer of libels or panegyrics, such as Sleidan and Jovius, whom Charles was wont to call his liars. No remark of equal wisdom can be brought home to the lips of the Spanish Diocletian; nor was the philosophy "of him who walked in the Salonian garden's noble shade" ever heard amongst the litanies and the scourges which resounded through the cloisters of Yuste.
To those who have perused this brief record of the recluse and his little court, it may be agreeable to know the subsequent fortunes of the personages who acted upon that miniature stage.
Queen Mary of Hungary died at Cigales on the 28th of October, 1558, four weeks after the death of her brother. So passed away, in the same year, and within a few months of one another, the royal group who landed at Laredo.
From Yuste, Luis Quixada and his wife returned to their house at Villagarcia, near Valladolid, taking Don Juan with them. When Philip II. arrived in Spain, in 1559, he received his brother and his guardian at the neighboring convent of San Pedro de la Espina. They afterwards followed the court to Madrid, where Quixada had an opportunity of signalizing his devotion to his master's son, by rescuing him from a fire, which burnt down their house in the night, before he attended to the safety of Doña Magdalena. This, and his other services, were not neglected by the king, who made him master of the horse to the heir-apparent, and president of the council of the Indies, and gave him several commanderies in the order of Calatrava. When Don Juan was sent to command against the Moriscos, whom Christian persecution and bad faith had driven to revolt in the Alpuxarras, the old major-domo went with him as a military tutor. They were reconnoitring the strong mountain fortress of Seron, when a bold sally from the place threw the Castilians into disorder bordering on flight, in the course of which a bullet from an infidel gun finished the campaigns of the comrade of Charles V. He fell, shot through the shoulder, by the side of his pupil; and he died of the wound at Canilles, on the 25th of February, 1570, in the arms of his wife, who had hurried from Madrid to nurse him. Don Juan buried him with military honors, and mourned for him as for a father.
The good Doña Magdalena retired to Villagarcia, and employed her childless widowhood in works of charity and piety, in prayers for the soul of her husband, and for the success of her darling young prince. For the latter she also engaged in a work of a more practical and secular kind; for the hero of Lepanto wore no linen but what was wrought by her loving hands. His sad and early death severed her chief tie to the world, and left religion no rival in her heart. The companions of Francis Borja, who had first kindled the holy flames of her devotion at Yuste, became her guides and counsellors; and she built and endowed no less than three Jesuit colleges at Villagarcia, Santander, and Oviedo. Her life of gentle and blameless enthusiasm ended in 1598, when she was laid beside her lord in the collegiate church of Villagarcia. Amongst the relics of that temple, two crucifixes were held in peculiar veneration,—one being that which she had pressed to her dying lips, the other a trophy rescued by Luis Quixada from a church burned by the Moors in the war of the Alpuxarras.
William Van Male, the gentle and literary chamberlain, returned to Flanders, with a slender annual pension of 150 florins, which was to be reduced one half on his becoming keeper of the palace at Brussels, an office of which the king had given him the reversion. He died in 1560, and was buried in the church of St. Gudule, at Brussels, where his widow, Hippolyta Reynen, was laid by his side in 1579.
Father Borja continued to teach and to travel with unflagging zeal. Soon after preaching the emperor's funeral sermon, he was again in Portugal, visiting the colleges at Evora, Coimbra, and Braga, and aiding in the foundation of the college of Porto. Called to Rome by Pope Pius IV., to advise on affairs of the church, he was twice chosen vicar-general of the company; and finally, in 1565, he received the staff of Loyola. During his rule of seven years, the order lengthened its cords and strengthened its stakes in every part of the world, and in every condition of mankind. Its astute politicians gained the ear of princes and prelates who had hitherto been cold, or adverse; its colleges rose amid the snows of Poland, and the forests of Peru; Barbary, Florida, and Brazil, were watered with the blood of its martyrs; and its ministers of mercy moved amongst the roar of battle, on the bastions of Malta and the decks at Lepanto. The general of this great army visited his native Spain, for the last time, in 1571, when he was sent by Pope Pius V. to fan the anti-Turkish flame in the bosom of Philip II., and to add a morsel of the true cross to the relics of the Escorial. Of the offers to build houses for the company, which now poured in, the last that he accepted was Doña Magdalena de Ulloa's college at Villagarcia, thus finding, after many days, the bread which he had cast upon the waters at Yuste. From Spain, he went to preach the crusade at the courts of Portugal and France—an arduous journey, which proved fruitful of royal caresses, but fatal to his enfeebled frame. Falling ill by the way, he had barely strength to reach Rome to die. In the year 1572, the sixty-second of his age, he was laid beside his companions in toil and glory, and his predecessors in power, Loyola and Laynez.