Chapter X: Part 10

From amid the controversies which then agitated the world had emerged two great truths, of which, after three hundred years’ debate, we are yet to find the reconcilement. It was true that the Christian commonwealth should be one consentient body, united under one supreme head, and bound together a community of law, of doctrine, and of worship. It was also true that each member of that body must for himself, on his own responsibility and at his own peril, render that worship, study that law, and seek the guidance of the Supreme Ruler. Here was a problem for the learned and wise, for schools, and presses, and pulpits. But it is not by sages nor in the spirit of philosophy that such problems receive their practical solution. Wisdom may be the ultimate arbiter, but it is seldom the immediate agent in human affairs. It is by antagonist passions, prejudices, and follies that the equipoise of this most belligerent planet of ours is chiefly preserved, and so it was in the sixteenth century. The German pointed the way to that sacred solitude where beside the worshiper himself none may enter; the Spaniard to that innumerable company which with one accord still chant the liturgies of remotest generations. Chieftains in the most momentous warfare of which this earth had been the theatre since the subversion of paganism, each was a rival worthy of the other in capacity, courage, disinterestedness, and love of the truth, and yet how marvelous the contrast!

Unalluring and, on the whole, unlovely as it is, the image of Loyola must ever command the homage of the world. No other uninspired man, unaided by military or civil power, and making no appeal to the passions of the multitude, has had the genius to conceive, the courage to attempt, and the success to establish a polity teeming with results at once so momentous and so distinctly foreseen. Amid his ascetic follies and his half-crazy visions, and despite all the coarse daubing with which the miracle-mongers of his church have defaced it, his character is destitute neither of sublimity nor of grace. Men felt that there had appeared among them one of those monarchs who reign in right of their own native supremacy, and to whom the feebler will of others must yield either a ready or a reluctant allegiance. It was a conviction recorded by his disciples on his tomb in these memorable and significant words: “Whoever thou mayst be who hast portrayed to thine own imagination Pompey nor Cæsar or Alexander, open thine eyes to the truth, and let this marble teach thee how much greater a conqueror than they was Ignatius.”

THOMAS CROMWELL, EARL OF ESSEX.

BY JOHN RICHARD GREEN.

[Born about 1498, executed 1540. Cromwell began his public career
as secretary of Cardinal Wolsey, and made a brilliant reputation
for administrative ability before his patron’s fall. He acquired
the notice of Henry VIII by his loyalty to the disgraced cardinal
when all other friends had deserted him. By the king’s favor he
received the highest offices of the state, and was made Prime
Minister, finally becoming earl of Essex. Cromwell was the
political leader of the English Reformation, and the most effective
instrument in concentrating power in the hands of the king. His
impeachment and execution for high treason, however he may have
deserved his fate for his cruelty and unscrupulousness, was gross
ingratitude on the part of Henry.]

The debate on the suppression of the monasteries was the first instance of opposition with which Cromwell had met, and for some time longer it was to remain the only one. While the great revolution which struck down the Church was in progress, England looked silently on. In all the earlier ecclesiastical changes, in the contest over the Papal jurisdiction and Papal exactions, in the reform of the Church courts, even in the curtailment of the legislative independence of the clergy, the nation as a whole had gone with the king. But from the enslavement of the clergy, from the gagging of the pulpits, from the suppression of the monasteries, the bulk of the nation stood aloof. It is only through the stray depositions of royal spies that we catch a glimpse of the wrath and hate which lay seething under this silence of a whole people. For the silence was a silence of terror. Before Cromwell’s rise and after his fall from power the reign of Henry VIII witnessed no more than the common tyranny and bloodshed of the time. But the years of Cromwell’s administration form the one period in our history which deserves the name which men have given to the rule of Robespierre. It was the English Terror. It was by terror that Cromwell mastered the king. Cranmer could plead for him at a later time with Henry as “one whose surety was only by your majesty, who loved your majesty, as I ever thought, no less than God.”

But the attitude of Cromwell toward the king was something more than that of absolute dependence and unquestioning devotion. He was “so vigilant to preserve your majesty from all treasons,” adds the primate, “that few could be so secretly conceived but he detected the same from the beginning.” Henry, like every Tudor, was fearless of open danger, but tremulously sensitive to the slightest breath of hidden disloyalty. It was on this inner dread that Cromwell based the fabric of his power. He was hardly secretary before a host of spies were scattered broadcast over the land. Secret denunciations poured into the open ear of the minister. The air was thick with tales of plots and conspiracies, and with the detection and suppression of each Cromwell tightened his hold on the king. And as it was by terror that he mastered the king, so it was by terror that he mastered the people. Men felt in England, to use the figure by which Erasmus paints the time, “as if a scorpion lay sleeping under every stone.” The confessional had no secrets for Cromwell. Men’s talk with their closest friends found its way to his ear. “Words idly spoken,” the murmurs of a petulant abbot, the ravings of a moon-struck nun, were, as the nobles cried passionately at his fall, “tortured into treason.” The only chance of safety lay in silence. “Friends who used to write and send me presents,” Erasmus tells us, “now send neither letter nor gifts, nor receive any from any one, and this through fear.”

But even the refuge of silence was closed by a law more infamous than any that has ever blotted the statute-book of England. Not only was thought made treason, but men were forced to reveal their thoughts on pain of their very silence being punished with the penalties of treason. All trust in the older bulwarks of liberty was destroyed by a policy as daring as it was unscrupulous. The noblest institutions were degraded into instruments of terror. Though Wolsey had strained the law to the utmost, he had made no open attack on the freedom of justice. If he had shrunk from assembling Parliaments, it was from his sense that they were the bulwarks of liberty. Under Cromwell the coercion of juries and the management of judges rendered the courts mere mouth-pieces of the royal will: and where even this shadow of justice proved an obstacle to bloodshed, Parliament was brought into play to pass bill after bill of attainder. “He shall be judged by the bloody laws he has himself made,” was the cry of the council at the moment of his fall, and, by a singular retribution, the crowning injustice which he sought to introduce even into the practice of attainder--the condemnation of a man without hearing his defense--was only practiced on himself.

But ruthless as was the Terror of Cromwell, it was of a nobler type than the Terror of France. He never struck uselessly or capriciously, or stooped to the meaner victims of the guillotine. His blows were effective just because he chose his victims from among the noblest and the best. If he struck at the Church, it was through the Carthusians, the holiest and the most renowned of English churchmen. If he struck at the baronage, it was through the Courtenays and the Poles, in whose veins flowed the blood of kings. If he struck at the New Learning, it was through the murder of Sir Thomas More. But no personal vindictiveness mingled with his crime. In temper, indeed, so far as we can judge from the few stories which lingered among his friends, he was a generous, kind-hearted man, with pleasant and winning manners which atoned for a certain awkwardness of person, and with a constancy of friendship which won him a host of devoted adherents. But no touch either of love or hate swayed him from his course.

The student of Macchiavelli had not studied the “Prince” in vain. He had reduced bloodshed to a system. Fragments of his papers still show us with what a business-like brevity he ticked off human lives among the casual “remembrances” of the day. “Item, the Abbot of Reading to be sent down to be tried and executed at Reading.” “Item, to know the king’s pleasure touching Master More.” “Item, when Master Fisher shall go to his execution, and the other.” It is indeed this utter absence of all passion, of all personal feeling, that makes the figure of Cromwell the most terrible in our history. He has an absolute faith in the end he is pursuing, and he simply hews his way to it as a woodman hews his way through the forest, axe in hand.

His single will forced on a scheme of foreign policy whose aim was to bind England to the cause of the Reformation while it bound Henry helplessly to his minister. The daring boast which his enemies laid afterward to his charge, whether uttered or not, is but the expression of his system. “In brief time he would bring things to such a pass that the king with all his power should not be able to hinder him.” His plans rested, like the plan which proved fatal to Wolsey, on a fresh marriage of his master. The short-lived royalty of Anne Boleyn had ended in charges of adultery and treason, and in her death in May, 1536. Her rival and successor in Henry’s affections, Jane Seymour, died the next year in childbirth; and Cromwell replaced her with a German consort, Anne of Cleves, a sister-in-law of the Lutheran elector of Saxony. He dared even to resist Henry’s caprice, when the king revolted on their first interview at the coarse features and unwieldy form of his new bride. For the moment Cromwell had brought matters “to such a pass” that it was impossible to recoil from the marriage.

The marriage of Anne of Cleves, however, was but the first step in a policy which, had it been carried out as he designed it, would have anticipated the triumphs of Richelieu. Charles and the house of Austria could alone bring about a Catholic reaction strong enough to arrest and roll back the Reformation; and Cromwell was no sooner united with the princes of North Germany than he sought to league them with France for the overthrow of the emperor. Had he succeeded, the whole face of Europe would have been changed, Southern Germany would have been secured for Protestantism, and the Thirty Years’ War averted. He failed as men fail who stand ahead of their age. The German princes shrank from a contest with the emperor, France from a struggle which would be fatal to Catholicism; and Henry, left alone to bear the resentment of the House of Austria, and chained to a wife he loathed, turned savagely on Cromwell. The nobles sprang on him with a fierceness that told of their long-hoarded hate. Taunts and execrations burst from the lords at the council table, as the Duke of Norfolk, who had been charged with the minister’s arrest, tore the ensign of the garter from his neck. At the charge of treason Cromwell flung his cap on the ground with a passionate cry of despair. “This, then,” he exclaimed, “is my guerdon for the services I have done! On your consciences, I ask you, am I a traitor?” Then, with a sudden sense that all was over, he bade his foes “make quick work, and not leave me to languish in prison.” Quick work was made, and a yet louder burst of popular applause than that which hailed the attainder of Cromwell hailed his execution.

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

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.

No man, however, could have been more observant of religious rites. He heard mass daily. He listened to a sermon every Sunday and holiday. He confessed and received the sacrament four times a year. He was sometimes to be seen in his tent at midnight on his knees before a crucifix, with eyes and hands uplifted. He ate no meat in Lent, and used extraordinary diligence to discover and to punish any man, whether courtier or plebeian, who failed to fast during the whole forty days. He was too good a politician not to know the value of broad phylacteries and long prayers. He was too nice an observer of human nature not to know how easily mint and cummin could still outweigh the “weightier matters of law, judgment, mercy, and faith”; as if the founder of the religion which he professed, and to maintain which he had established the inquisition and the edicts, had never cried “woe” upon the Pharisees.

Yet there is no doubt that the emperor was at times almost popular in the Netherlands, and that he was never as odious as his successor. There were some deep reasons for this, and some superficial ones; among others, a singularly fortunate manner. He spoke German, Spanish, Italian, French, and Flemish, and could assume the characteristics of each country as easily as he could use its language. He could be stately with Spaniards, familiar with Flemings, witty with Italians. He could strike down a bull in the ring like a matador at Madrid, or win the prize in the tourney like a knight of old; he could ride at the ring with the Flemish nobles, hit the popinjay with his cross-bow among Antwerp artisans, or drink beer and exchange rude jests with the boors of Brabant. For virtues such as these his grave crimes against God and man, against religion and chartered and solemnly-sworn rights, have been palliated, as if oppression became more tolerable because the oppressor was an accomplished linguist and a good marksman.

But the great reason for his popularity, no doubt, lay in his military genius. Charles was inferior to no general of his age. “When he was born into the world,” said Alva, “he was born a soldier”; and the emperor confirmed the statement and reciprocated the compliment, when he declared that “the three first captains of the age was himself first, and then the Duke of Alva and Constable Montmorency.” It is quite true that all his officers were not of the same opinion, and many were too apt to complain that his constant presence in the field did more harm than good, and “that his Majesty would do much better to stay at home.” There is, however, no doubt that he was both a good soldier and a good general. He was constitutionally fearless, and he possessed great energy and endurance. He was ever the first to arm when a battle was to be fought, and the last to take off his harness. He commanded in person and in chief, even when surrounded by veterans and crippled by the gout. He was calm in great reverses. It was said that he was never known to change color except upon two occasions--after the fatal destruction of his fleet at Algiers, and in the memorable flight from Innspruck.

He was of a phlegmatic, stoical temperament, until shattered by age and disease; a man without sentiment and without a tear. It was said by Spaniards that he was never seen to weep, even at the death of his nearest relatives and friends, except on the solitary occasion of the departure of Don Ferrante Gonzaga from court. Such a temperament was invaluable in the stormy career to which he had devoted his life. He was essentially a man of action, a military chieftain. “Pray only for my health and my life,” he was accustomed to say to the young officers who came to him from every part of his dominions to serve under his banners, “for so long as I have these I will never leave you idle--at least in France. I love peace no better than the rest of you. I was born and bred to arms, and must of necessity keep on my harness till I can bear it no longer.” The restless energy and the magnificent tranquillity of his character made him a hero among princes, an idol with his officers, a popular favorite everywhere. The promptness with which, at much personal hazard, he descended like a thunderbolt in the midst of the Ghent insurrection; the juvenile ardor with which the almost bed-ridden man arose from his sickbed to smite the Protestants at Mühlberg; the grim stoicism with which he saw sixty thousand of his own soldiers perish in the wintry siege of Metz--all insured him a large measure of that applause which ever follows military distinction, especially when the man who achieves it happens to wear a crown. He combined the personal prowess of a knight of old with the more modern accomplishments of a scientific tactician. He could charge the enemy in person like the most brilliant cavalry officer, and he thoroughly understood the arrangements of a campaign, the marshaling and victualing of troops, and the whole art of setting and maintaining an army in the field.

Yet, though brave and warlike as the most chivalrous of his ancestors--Gothic, Burgundian, or Suabian--he was entirely without chivalry. Fanaticism for the faith, protection for the oppressed, fidelity to friend or foe, knightly loyalty to a cause deemed sacred, the sacrifice of personal interests to great ideas, generosity of hand and heart--all those qualities which unite with courage and constancy to make up the ideal chevalier, Charles not only lacked but despised. He trampled on the weak antagonist, whether burgher or petty potentate. He was false as water. He inveigled his foes, who trusted to his imperial promises, by arts unworthy an emperor or a gentleman. He led about the unfortunate John Frederic, of Saxony, in his own language, “like a bear in a chain,” ready to be slipped upon Maurice should “the boy” prove ungrateful. He connived at the famous forgery of the prelate of Arras, to which the Landgrave Philip owed his long imprisonment--a villainy worse than many for which humbler rogues have suffered by thousands upon the gallows. The contemporary world knew well the history of his frauds, on scale both colossal and minute, and called him familiarly “Charles qui triche.”

The absolute master of realms on which the sun perpetually shone, he was not only greedy for additional dominion, but he was avaricious in small matters, and hated to part with a hundred dollars. To the soldier who brought him the sword and gauntlets of Francis I he gave a hundred crowns, when ten thousand would have been less than the customary present; so that the man left his presence full of desperation. The three soldiers who swam the Elbe, with their swords in their mouths, to bring him the boats with which he passed to the victory of Mühlberg, received from his imperial bounty a doublet, a pair of stockings, and four crowns apiece. His courtiers and ministers complained bitterly of his habitual niggardliness, and were fain to eke out their slender salaries by accepting bribes from every hand rich enough to bestow them. In truth, Charles was more than anything else a politician, notwithstanding his signal abilities as a soldier.

If to have founded institutions which could last be the test of statesmanship, he was even a statesman, for many of his institutions have resisted the pressure of three centuries; but those of Charlemagne fell as soon as his hand was cold, while the works of many ordinary legislators have attained to a perpetuity denied to the statutes of Solon or Lycurgus. Durability is not the test of merit in human institutions. Tried by the only touchstone applicable to governments, their capacity to insure the highest welfare of the governed, we shall not find his polity deserving of much admiration. It is not merely that he was a despot by birth and inclination, nor that he naturally substituted, as far as was practicable, the despotic for the republican element wherever his hand can be traced. There may be possible good in despotisms, as there is often much tyranny in democracy. Tried, however, according to the standard by which all governments may be measured, those laws of truth and divine justice which all Christian nations recognize, and which are perpetual, whether recognized or not, we shall find little to venerate in the life-work of the emperor. The interests of his family, the security of his dynasty--these were his end and aim. The happiness or the progress of his people never furnished even the indirect motives of his conduct, and the result was a baffled policy and a crippled and bankrupt empire at last.

He knew men--especially he knew their weaknesses, and he knew how to turn them to account. He knew how much they would bear, and that little grievances would sometimes inflame more than vast and deliberate injustice. Therefore he employed natives mainly in the subordinate offices of his various states, and he repeatedly warned his successor that the haughtiness of Spaniards and the incompatibility of their character with the Flemish would be productive of great difficulties and dangers. It was his opinion that men might be tyrannized more intelligently by their own kindred, and in this, perhaps, he was right. He was indefatigable in the discharge of business; and if it were possible that half a world could be administered as if it were the private property of an individual, the task would have been, perhaps, as well accomplished by Charles as by any man. He had not the absurdity of supposing it possible for him to attend to the details of every individual affair in every one of his realms, and he therefore intrusted the stewardship of all specialties to his various ministers and agents. It was his business to know men and to deal with affairs on a large scale, and in this he certainly was superior to his successor. His correspondence was mainly in the hands of Granvelle the elder, who analyzed letters received, and frequently wrote all but the signatures of the answers. The same minister usually possessed the imperial ear, and farmed it out for his own benefit. In all this there was, of course, room for vast deception; but the emperor was quite aware of what was going on, and took a philosophic view of the matter as an inevitable part of his system. Granvelle grew enormously rich under his eye by trading on the imperial favor and sparing his Majesty much trouble.

Charles saw it all, ridiculed his peculations, but called him his “bed of down.” His knowledge of human nature was, however, derived from a contemplation mainly of its weaknesses, and was therefore one-sided. He was often deceived and made many a fatal blunder, shrewd politician though he was. He involved himself often in enterprises which could not be honorable or profitable, and which inflicted damage on his greatest interests. He often offended men who might have been useful friends, and converted allies into enemies. “His Majesty,” said a keen observer who knew him well, “has not in his career shown the prudence which was necessary to him. He has often offended those whose love he might have conciliated, converted friends into enemies, and let those perish who were his most faithful partisans.” Thus it must be acknowledged that even his boasted knowledge of human nature and his power of dealing with men was rather superficial and empirical than the real gift of genius.

WILLIAM OF NASSAU, PRINCE OF ORANGE.

BY JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY.

[Surnamed “the Silent,” founder of the independence of the
Netherlands, born 1533, assassinated 1584. Though the scion of a
Protestant family, the Prince of Orange was educated to arms and
diplomacy at the court of Charles V, by whom he was greatly beloved
and trusted. On the accession of Philip he was made a Councilor of
State to assist Margaret of Parma in her regency over the
Netherlands. All ties of loyalty were gradually destroyed by his
love of country, so terribly outraged by the cruelties of a bigoted
king and his no less bigoted agents. On Alva’s arrival with Spanish
troops the prince returned to Germany, and thus saved himself from
the headsman, the fate which befell counts Egmont and Horn, two of
the most eminent Flemish patriots. In the uprising of the
Netherlands, which followed, the Prince of Orange was the most
eminent figure, and to the consummate skill with which he guided
the fate of his people their ultimate success was due. William, at
the head of his brave Flemings, and with the capricious assistance
of France and England, wore out three of the greatest generals of
the age, the Duke of Alva, Don John of Austria, and Prince
Alexander Farnese. The price put on his assassination by the King
of Spain was finally earned by Baltazar Gérard, a Burgundian
fanatic.]

In person, Orange was above the middle height, perfectly well made and sinewy, but rather spare than stout. His eyes, hair, beard, and complexion were brown; his head was small, symmetrically shaped, combining the alertness and compactness characteristic of the soldier, with the capacious brow furrowed prematurely with the horizontal lines of

thought, denoting the statesman and the sage. His physical appearance was, therefore, in harmony with his organization, which was of antique model. Of his moral qualities, the most prominent was his piety. He was more than anything else a religious man. From his trust in God he ever derived support and consolation in the darkest hours. Implicitly relying upon Almighty wisdom and goodness, he looked danger in the face with a constant smile, and endured incessant labors and trials with a serenity which seemed more than human. While, however, his soul was full of piety, it was tolerant of error.

Sincerely and deliberately himself a convert to the Reformed Church, he was ready to extend freedom of worship to Catholics on the one hand, and to Anabaptists on the other; for no man ever felt more keenly than he, that the reformer who becomes in his turn a bigot is doubly odious.

His firmness was allied to his piety. His constancy in bearing the whole weight of as unequal a struggle as men have ever undertaken, was the theme of admiration even to his enemies. The rock in the ocean, “tranquil amid raging billows,” was the favorite emblem by which his friends expressed their sense of his firmness. From the time when, as a hostage in France, he first discovered the plan of Philip to plant the Inquisition in the Netherlands, up to the last moment of his life, he never faltered in his determination to resist that iniquitous scheme. This resistance was the labor of his life. To exclude the Inquisition, to maintain the ancient liberties of his country, was the task which he appointed to himself when a youth of three-and-twenty. Never speaking a word concerning a heavenly mission, never deluding himself or others with the usual phraseology of enthusiasts, he accomplished the task, through danger, amid toils, and with sacrifices such as few men have ever been able to make on their country’s altar; for the disinterested benevolence of the man was as prominent as his fortitude.

A prince of high rank and with royal revenues, he stripped himself of station, wealth, almost, at times, of the common necessaries of life, and became, in his country’s cause, nearly a beggar as well as an outlaw. Nor was he forced into his career by an accidental impulse from which there was no recovery. Retreat was ever open to him. Not only pardon but advancement was urged upon him again and again. Officially and privately, directly and circuitously, his confiscated estates, together with indefinite and boundless favors in addition, were offered to him on every great occasion. On the arrival of Don John at the Breda negotiations, at the Cologne conferences, we have seen how calmly these offers were waved aside, as if their rejection was so simple that it hardly required many words for its signification; yet he had mortgaged his estate so deeply that his heirs hesitated at accepting their inheritance, for fear it should involve them in debt. Ten years after his death, the account between his executors and his brother John amounted to one million four hundred thousand florins due to the Count, secured by various pledges of real and personal property, and it was finally settled upon this basis.

He was, besides, largely indebted to every one of his powerful relatives, so that the payment of the incumbrances upon his estate very nearly justified the fears of his children. While on the one hand, therefore, he poured out these enormous sums like water, and firmly refused a hearing to the tempting offers of the royal government, upon the other hand he proved the disinterested nature of his services by declining, year after year, the sovereignty over the provinces, and by only accepting in the last days of his life, when refusal had become almost impossible, the limited, constitutional supremacy over that portion of them which now makes the realm of his descendants. He lived and died, not for himself, but for his country. “God pity this poor people!” were his dying words.

His intellectual faculties were various and of the highest order. He had the exact, practical, and combining qualities which make the great commander, and his friends claimed that, in military genius, he was second to no captain in Europe. This was, no doubt, an exaggeration of partial attachment, but it is certain that the Emperor Charles had an exalted opinion of his capacity for the field. His fortification of Philippeville and Charlemont, in the face of the enemy; his passage of the Meuse in Alva’s sight; his unfortunate but well-ordered campaign against that general; his sublime plan of relief, projected and successfully directed at last from his sick bed, for the besieged city of Leyden, will always remain monuments of his practical military skill.

Of the soldier’s great virtues--constancy in disaster, devotion to duty, hopefulness in defeat--no man ever possessed a larger share. He arrived, through a series of reverses, at a perfect victory. He planted a free commonwealth under the very battery of the Inquisition, in defiance of the most powerful empire existing. He was, therefore, a conqueror in the loftiest sense, for he conquered liberty and a national existence for a whole people. The contest was long, and he fell in the struggle, but the victory was to the dead hero, not to the living monarch.

It is to be remembered, too, that he always wrought with inferior instruments. His troops were usually mercenaries, who were but too apt to mutiny upon the eve of battle, while he was opposed by the most formidable veterans of Europe, commanded successively by the first captains of the age. That, with no lieutenant of eminent valor or experience save only his brother Louis, and with none at all after that chieftain’s death, William of Orange should succeed in baffling the efforts of Alva, Requescens, Don John of Austria, and Alexander Farnese--men whose names are among the most brilliant in the military annals of the world--is in itself sufficient evidence of his warlike capacity. At the period of his death, he had reduced the number of obedient provinces to two--only Artois and Hainault acknowledging Philip--while the other fifteen were in open revolt, the greater part having solemnly forsworn their sovereign.

The supremacy of his political genius was entirely beyond question. He was the first statesman of the age. The quickness of his perception was only equaled by the caution which enabled him to mature the results of his observations. His knowledge of human nature was profound. He governed the passions and sentiments of a great nation as if they had been but the keys and chords of one vast instrument; and his hand rarely failed to evoke harmony even out of the wildest storms. The turbulent city of Ghent, which could obey no other master, which even the haughty emperor could only crush without controlling, was ever responsive to the master-hand of Orange. His presence scared away Imbize and his bat-like crew, confounded the schemes of John Casimir, frustrated the wiles of Prince Chimay, and while he lived, Ghent was what it ought always to have remained, the bulwark, as it had been the cradle, of popular liberty. After his death it became its tomb.

Ghent, saved twice by the policy, the eloquence, the self-sacrifices of Orange, fell within three months of his murder into the hands of Parma. The loss of this most important city, followed in the next year by the downfall of Antwerp, sealed the fate of the southern Netherlands. Had the prince lived, how different might have been the country’s fate! If seven provinces could dilate, in so brief a space, into the powerful commonwealth which the republic soon became, what might not have been achieved by the united seventeen--a confederacy which would have united the adamantine vigor of the Batavian and Frisian races with the subtler, more delicate, and more graceful national elements in which the genius of the Frank, the Roman, and the Romanized Celt were so intimately blended. As long as the father of the country lived, such a union was possible. His power of managing men was so unquestionable that there was always a hope, even in the darkest hour; for men felt implicit reliance as well on his intellectual resources as on his integrity.

This power of dealing with his fellow-men he manifested in the various ways in which it has been usually exhibited by statesmen. He possessed a ready eloquence--sometimes impassioned, oftener argumentative, always rational. His influence over his audience was unexampled in the annals of that country or age; yet he never condescended to flatter the people. He never followed the nation, but always led her in the path of duty and of honor, and was much more prone to rebuke the vices than to pander to the passions of his hearers. He never failed to administer ample chastisement to parsimony, to jealousy, to insubordination, to intolerance, to infidelity, wherever it was due, nor feared to confront the states or the people in their most angry hours, and to tell them the truth to their faces. This commanding position he alone could stand upon, for his countrymen knew the generosity which had sacrificed his all for them, the self-denial which had eluded rather than sought political advancement, whether from king or people, and the untiring devotion which had consecrated a whole life to toil and danger in the cause of their emancipation.

While, therefore, he was ever ready to rebuke, and always too honest to flatter, he at the same time possessed the eloquence which could convince or persuade. He knew how to reach both the mind and the heart of his hearers. His orations, whether extemporaneous or prepared; his written messages to the states-general, to the provincial authorities, to the municipal bodies; his private correspondence with men of all ranks, from emperors and kings down to secretaries, and even children, all show an easy flow of language, a fullness of thought, a power of expression rare in that age, a fund of historical allusion, a considerable power of imagination, a warmth of sentiment, a breadth of view, a directness of purpose, a range of qualities, in short, which would in themselves have stamped him as one of the master-minds of his century, had there been no other monument to his memory than the remains of his spoken or written eloquence.

The bulk of his performances in this department was prodigious. Not even Philip was more industrious in the cabinet. Not even Granvelle held a more facile pen. He wrote and spoke equally well in French, German, or Flemish; and he possessed, besides, Spanish, Italian, Latin. The weight of his correspondence alone would have almost sufficed for the common industry of a lifetime; and although many volumes of his speeches and letters have been published, there remain in the various archives of the Netherlands and Germany many documents from his hand which will probably never see the light. If the capacity for unremitted intellectual labor in an honorable cause be the measure of human greatness, few minds could be compared to the “large composition” of this man. The efforts made to destroy the Netherlands by the most laborious and painstaking of tyrants were counteracted by the industry of the most indefatigable of patriots.

He went through life bearing the load of a people’s sorrows upon his shoulders with a smiling face. Their name was the last word upon his lips, save the simple affirmative, with which the soldier who had been battling for the right all his lifetime commended his soul in dying “to his great captain, Christ.” The people were grateful and affectionate, for they trusted the character of their “Father Wiliam,” and not all the clouds which calumny could collect ever dimmed to their eyes the radiance of that lofty mind to which they were accustomed, in their darkest calamities, to look for light. As long as he lived he was the guiding star of a whole brave nation, and when he died the little children cried in the streets.

JOHN KNOX.

BY JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE.

[The greatest of the Scotch religious reformers, born in 1505, died
1572, distinguished for a stern fanaticism as intolerant as that of
the Roman Church, against which he battled. He had suffered
bitterly from persecution during his earlier life, and for
lengthened periods been an exile from Scotland, but remained always
the head and front of the new propaganda till the establishment of
the Reformed religion in 1560, which carried with it the
interdiction of Roman Catholicism. On the arrival of the young
queen Mary Stuart from France, in 1561, Knox soon became the
sharpest critic of her life and policy. His unsparing antagonism
and influence with the Protestant lords did much to make Mary’s
position a very difficult one, and to precipitate the events which
finally drove her from Scotland and made her an English prisoner.
Knox was known to have been an ardent advocate of Mary’s death long
prior to the queen’s execution at Fotheringay.]

Our primary characteristic of a hero, that he is sincere, applies emphatically to Knox. It is not denied anywhere that this, whatever might be his other qualities or faults, is among the truest of men. With a singular instinct he holds to the truth and fact; the truth alone is there for him, the rest a mere shadow and a deceptive nonentity. However feeble, forlorn the reality may seem, on that and that only _can_ he take his stand. In the galleys of the river Loire--whither Knox and the others, after their castle of St. Andrews was taken, had been sent as galley-slaves--some officer or priest one day presented them an image of the Virgin Mother, requiring that they, the blasphemous heretics, should do it reverence. “Mother? Mother of God?” said Knox, when the turn came to him: “This is no Mother of God; this is a _pented bredd_--a piece of wood, I tell you, with paint on it! She is fitter for swimming, I think, than for being worshiped,” added Knox, and flung the thing into the river. It was not very cheap jesting there; but come of it what might, this thing to Knox was and must continue nothing other than the real truth; it was a _pented bredd_: worship it he would not.

He told his fellow-prisoners, in this darkest time, to be of courage; the cause they had was a true one, and must and would prosper; the whole world could not put it down. Reality is of God’s making; it is alone strong. How many _pented bredds_, pretending to be real, are fitter to swim than to be worshiped! This Knox can not live but by fact: he clings to reality as the shipwrecked sailor to the cliff. He is an instance to us how a man by sincerity itself becomes heroic; it is the grand gift he has. We find in Knox a good, honest, intellectual talent, no transcendent one; a narrow, inconsiderable man as compared with Luther, but in heartfelt, instinctive adherence to truth, in _sincerity_, as we say, he has no superior; nay, one might ask, What equal he has? The heart of him is of the true prophet cast. “He lies there,” said the Earl of Morton at his grave, “who never feared the face of man.” He resembles, more than any of the moderns, an old Hebrew prophet. The same inflexibility, intolerance, rigid, narrow-looking adherence to God’s truth, stern rebuke in the name of God to all that forsake truth; an old Hebrew prophet in the guise of an Edinburgh minister of the sixteenth century. We are to take him for that; not require him to be other.

Knox’s conduct to Queen Mary, the harsh visits he used to make in her own palace to reprove her there, have been much commented upon. Such cruelty, such coarseness fill us with indifference. On reading the actual narrative of the business, what Knox said and what Knox meant, I must say one’s tragic feeling is rather disappointed. They are not so coarse, these speeches; they seem to me about as fine as the circumstances would permit. Knox was not there to do the courtier; he came on another errand. Whoever, reading these colloquies of his with the queen, thinks they are vulgar insolences of a plebeian priest to a delicate high lady, mistakes the purport and essence of them altogether. It was unfortunately not possible to be polite with the Queen of Scotland, unless one proved untrue to the nation and cause of Scotland.

A man who did not wish to see the land of his birth made a hunting-field for intriguing, ambitious Guises, and the cause of God trampled under foot of falsehoods, formulas, and the devil’s cause, had no method of making himself agreeable. “Better that women weep,” said Morton, “than that bearded men be forced to weep.” Knox was the constitutional opposition party in Scotland; the nobles of the country, called by their station to take that post, were not found in it; Knox had to go, or no one. The hapless queen--but still the more hapless country, if _she_ were made happy! Mary herself was not without sharpness enough, among her other qualities. “Who are you,” said she once, “that presume to school the nobles and sovereign of this realm?” “Madam, a subject born within the same,” answered he. Reasonably answered! If the “subject” have truth to speak, it is not the “subject’s” footing that will fail him here.

We blame Knox for his intolerance. Well, surely it is good that each of us be as tolerant as possible. Yet, at bottom, after all the talk there is and has been about it, what is tolerance? Tolerance is to tolerate the unessential, and to see well what that is. Tolerance has to be noble, measured, just in its very wrath, when it can tolerate no longer. But, on the whole, we are not altogether here to tolerate. We are here to resist, to control, and vanquish withal. We do not “tolerate” falsehoods, thieveries, iniquities, when they fasten on us; we say to them, Thou art false! thou art not tolerable! We are here to extinguish falsehoods, and to put an end to them in some wise way. I will not quarrel so much with the way; the doing of the thing is our great concern. In this sense Knox was, full surely, intolerant.

A man sent to row in the French galleys, and such like, for teaching the truth in his own land, can not always be in the mildest humor. I am not prepared to say that Knox had a soft temper, nor do I know that he had what we call an ill temper. An ill nature he decidedly had not. Kind, honest affections dwell in the much-enduring, hard-worn, ever-battling man. That he _could_ rebuke queens, and had such weight among those proud, turbulent nobles--proud enough, whatever else they were--and could maintain to the end a kind of virtual presidency and sovereignty over that wild realm, he who was only “a subject born within the same”; this of itself will prove to us that he was found, close at hand, to be no mean, acrid man, but at heart a healthful, strong, sagacious man. Such alone can bear rule in that kind. They blame him for pulling down cathedrals, and so forth, as if he were a seditious, rioting demagogue; precisely the reverse is seen to be the fact in regard to cathedrals and the rest of it, if we examine. Knox wanted no pulling down of stone edifices; he wanted leprosy and darkness thrown out of the lives of men. Tumult was not his element. It was the tragic feature of his life that he was forced to dwell so much in that. Every such man is the born enemy of disorder--hates to be in it; but what then? Smooth falsehood is not order. It is the general sum-total of _dis_order. Order is _truth_--each thing standing on the basis that belongs to it. Order and falsehood can not subsist together.

Withal, unexpectedly enough, this Knox has a vein of drollery in him, which I like much, in combination with his other qualities. He has a true eye for the ridiculous. His history, with its rough earnestness, is curiously enlivened with this. When the two prelates, entering Glasgow Cathedral, quarrel about precedence, march rapidly up, take to hustling one another, twitching one another’s rochets, and at last flourishing their crosiers like quarter-staves, it is a great sight for him every way. Not mockery, scorn, bitterness alone, though there is enough of that too; but a true, loving, illuminating laugh mounts up over the earnest visage; not a loud laugh; you would say a laugh in the _eyes_ most of all. An honest-hearted, brotherly man; brother to the high, brother also to the low; sincere in his sympathy with both. He had his pipe of Bordeaux too, we find, in that old Edinburgh house of his--a cheery, social man, with faces that loved him. They go far wrong who think this Knox was a gloomy, spasmodic, shrieking fanatic. Not at all; he is one of the solidest of men. Practical, cautious, hopeful, patient; a most shrewd, observing, quietly discerning man. In fact, he has very much the type of character we assign to the Scotch at present. A certain sardonic taciturnity is in him; insight enough, and a stouter heart than he himself knows of. He has the power of holding his peace over many things which do not vitally concern him--“They, what are they?” But the thing which does vitally concern him, that thing he will speak of, and in a tone the whole world shall be made to hear, all the more emphatic for his long silence.

This prophet of the Scotch is to me no hateful man. He had a sore fight of an existence; wrestling with popes and principalities; in defeat, contention, life-long struggle; rowing as a galley-slave, wandering as an exile. A sore fight; but he won it. “Have you hope?” they asked him in his last moment, when he could no longer speak. He lifted his finger, “pointed upward with his finger,” and so died. Honor to him. His works have not died. The letter of his work dies, as of all men’s, but the spirit of it never.

DUKE OF ALVA.

BY JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY.