Chapter IX: Part 9

Thomas Wolsey was the son of a wealthy townsman of Ipswich, whose ability had raised him into notice at the close of the preceding reign, and who had been taken by Bishop Fox into the service of the crown. His extraordinary powers hardly, perhaps, required the songs, dances, and carouses with his indulgence in which he was taunted by his enemies, to aid him in winning the favor of the young sovereign. From the post of favorite he soon rose to that of minister. Henry’s resentment at Ferdinand’s perfidy enabled Wolsey to carry out a policy which reversed that of his predecessors. The war had freed England from the fear of French pressure. Wolsey was as resolute to free her from the dictation of Ferdinand, and saw in a French alliance the best security for English independence. In 1514 a treaty was concluded with Louis. The same friendship was continued to his successor, Francis I, whose march across the Alps for the reconquest of Lombardy was facilitated by Henry and Wolsey, in the hope that while the war lasted England would be free from all fear of attack, and that Francis himself might be brought to inevitable ruin. These hopes were defeated by his great victory at Marignano. But Francis, in the moment of triumph, saw himself confronted by a new rival. Master of Castile and Aragon, of Naples and the Netherlands, the new Spanish king, Charles V, rose into a check on the French monarchy such as the policy of Henry or Wolsey had never been able to construct before.

The alliance of England was eagerly sought by both sides, and the administration of Wolsey, amid all its ceaseless diplomacy, for seven years kept England out of war. The peace, as we have seen, restored the hopes of the New Learning; it enabled Colet to reform education, Erasmus to undertake the regeneration of the Church, More to set on foot a new science of politics. But peace, as Wolsey used it, was fatal to English freedom. In the political hints which lie scattered over the “Utopia,” More notes with bitter irony the advance of the new despotism. It was only in “Nowhere” that a sovereign was “removable on suspicion of a design to enslave his people.” In England the work of slavery was being quietly wrought, hints the great lawyer, through the law. “There will never be wanting some pretense for deciding in the king’s favor; as that equity is on his side, or the strict letter of the law, or some forced interpretation of it; or if none of these, that the royal prerogative ought, with conscientious judges, to outweigh all other considerations.”

We are startled at the precision with which More maps out the expedients by which the law courts were to lend themselves to the advance of tyranny till their crowning judgment in the case of ship-money. But behind these judicial expedients lay great principles of absolutism, which, partly from the example of foreign monarchies, partly from the sense of social and political insecurity, and yet more from the isolated position of the crown, were gradually winning their way in public opinion. “These notions,” he goes boldly on, “are fostered by the maxim that the king can do no wrong, however much he may wish to do it; that not only the property but the persons of his subjects are his own; and that a man has a right to no more than the king’s goodness thinks fit not to take from him.” In the hands of Wolsey these maxims were transformed into principles of state. The checks which had been imposed on the action of the sovereign by the presence of great prelates and nobles at his council were practically removed. All authority was concentrated in the hands of a single minister. Henry had munificently rewarded Wolsey’s services to the crown. He had been promoted to the See of Lincoln and thence to the Archbishopric of York. Henry procured his elevation to the rank of cardinal, and raised him to the post of chancellor. The revenues of two sees whose tenants were foreigners fell into his hands; he held the bishopric of Winchester and the abbacy of St. Albans; he was in receipt of pensions from France and Spain, while his official emoluments were enormous. His pomp was almost royal.

A train of prelates and nobles followed him wherever he moved; his household was composed of five hundred persons of noble birth, and its chief posts were held by knights and barons of the realm. He spent his vast wealth with princely ostentation. Two of his houses--Hampton Court and York House, the later Whitehall--were splendid enough to serve at his fall as royal palaces. His school at Ipswich was eclipsed by the glories of his foundation at Oxford, whose name of Cardinal College has been lost in its later title of Christ-church. Nor was this magnificence a mere show of power. The whole direction of home and foreign affairs rested with Wolsey alone; as chancellor he stood at the head of public justice; his elevation to the office of legate rendered him supreme in the Church. Enormous as was the mass of work which he undertook, it was thoroughly done; his administration of the royal treasury was economical; the number of his dispatches is hardly less remarkable than the care bestowed upon each; even More, an avowed enemy, confesses that as chancellor he surpassed all men’s expectations. The court of chancery, indeed, became so crowded through the character of expedition and justice which it gained under his rule that subordinate courts had to be created for its relief. It was this concentration of all secular and ecclesiastical power in a single hand which accustomed England to the personal government which began with Henry VIII; and it was, above all, Wolsey’s long tenure of the whole Papal authority within the realm, and the consequent suspension of appeals to Rome, that led men to acquiesce at a later time in Henry’s claim of religious supremacy; for, proud as was Wolsey’s bearing and high as were his natural powers, he stood before England as the mere creature of the king. Greatness, wealth, authority he held, and owned he held, simply at the royal will. In raising his low-born favorite to the head of Church and state, Henry was gathering all religious as well as all civil authority into his personal grasp. The nation which trembled before Wolsey learned to tremble before the king who could destroy Wolsey by a breath.

FRANCISCO PIZARRO.

BY WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT.

[One of the Spanish conquerors of America, born about 1471, died
1541. The illegitimate son of a Spanish general, his childhood was
spent in a peasant’s hut. Going as an adventurer to the New World,
he took part in several important expeditions, among them Balboa’s
settlement of Darien. In 1524, Pizarro, with a brother adventurer,
Almagro, in an attempt on New Grenada, got intelligence of the
great Peruvian empire of the Incas. It was not till 1531 that
Pizarro, having secured full commission and extraordinary
concessions from Charles V., was able to raise a force of two
hundred and fifty men to attempt the conquest, which was
brilliantly successful. He reigned as viceroy, and was finally
assassinated by a son of his old comrade Almagro, whom he had put
to death.]

Pizarro was tall in stature, well-proportioned, and with a countenance not unpleasing. Bred in camps, with nothing of the polish of a court, he had a soldier-like bearing, and the air of one accustomed to command. But, though not polished, there was no embarrassment or rusticity in his address, which, where it served his purpose, could be plausible and even insinuating. The proof of it is the favorable impression made by him, on presenting himself, after his second expedition--stranger as he was to all its forms and usages--at the punctilious court of Castile.

Unlike many of his countrymen, he had no passion for ostentatious dress, which he regarded as an incumbrance. The costume which he most affected on public occasions was a black cloak, with a white hat, and shoes of the same color; the last, it is said, being in imitation of the Great Captain, whose character he had early learned to admire in Italy, but to which his own, certainly, bore very faint resemblance.

He was temperate in eating, drank sparingly, and usually rose an hour before dawn. He was punctual in attendance to business, and shrank from no toil. He had, indeed, great powers of patient endurance. Like most of his nation, he was fond of play, and cared little for the quality of those with whom he played; though, when his antagonist could not afford to lose, he would allow himself, it is said, to be the loser--a mode of conferring an obligation much commended by a Castilian writer for its delicacy.

Though avaricious, it was in order to spend, and not to hoard. His ample treasure, more ample than those, probably, that ever before fell to the lot of an adventurer, were mostly dissipated in his enterprises, his architectural works, and schemes of public improvement, which, in a country where gold and silver might be said to have lost their value from their abundance, absorbed an incredible amount of money. While he regarded the whole country, in a manner, as his own, and distributed it freely among his captains, it is certain that the princely grant of territory, with twenty thousand vassals, made to him by the Crown, was never carried into effect; nor did his heirs ever reap the benefit of it.

Though bold in action and not easily turned from his purpose, Pizarro was slow in arriving at a decision. This gave him an appearance of irresolution foreign to his character. Perhaps the consciousness of this led him to adopt the custom of saying “No,” at first, to applicants for favor; and afterward, at leisure, to revise his judgment, and grant what seemed to him expedient. He took the opposite course from his comrade Almagro, who, it was observed, generally said “Yes,” but too often failed to keep his promise. This was characteristic of the careless and easy nature of the latter, governed by impulse rather than principle.

It is hardly necessary to speak of the courage of a man pledged to such a career as that of Pizarro. Courage, indeed, was a cheap quality among the Spanish adventurers, for danger was their element. But he possessed something higher than mere animal courage, in that constancy of purpose which was rooted too deeply in his nature to be shaken by the wildest storms of fortune. It was this inflexible constancy which formed the key to his character, and constituted the secret of his success. A remarkable evidence of it was given in his first expedition, among the mangroves and dreary marshes of Choco. He saw his followers pining around him under the blighting malaria, wasting before an invisible enemy, and unable to strike a stroke in their own defense. Yet his spirit did not yield, nor did he falter in his enterprise.

There is something oppressive to the imagination in this war against nature. In the struggle of man against man, the spirits are raised by a contest conducted on equal terms; but in a war with the elements we feel that, however bravely we may contend, we can have no power to control. Nor are we cheered on by the prospect of glory in such a contest; for, in the capricious estimate of human glory, the silent endurance of privations, however painful, is little, in comparison with the ostentatious trophies of victory. The laurel of the hero--alas for humanity that it should be so!--grows best on the battle-field.

This inflexible spirit of Pizarro was shown still more strongly when, in the little island of Gallo, he drew the line on the sand which was to separate him and his handful of followers from their country and from civilized man. He trusted that his own constancy would give strength to the feeble, and rally brave hearts around him for the prosecution of his enterprise. He looked with confidence to the future, and he did not miscalculate. This was heroic, and wanted only a nobler motive for its object to constitute the true moral sublime.

Yet the same feature in his character was displayed in a manner scarcely less remarkable when, landing on the coast, and ascertaining the real strength and civilization of the Incas, he persisted in marching into the interior at the head of a force of less than two hundred men. In this he undoubtedly proposed to himself the example of Cortés, so contagious to the adventurous spirits of that day, and especially to Pizarro, engaged as he was in a similar enterprise. Yet the hazard assumed by Pizarro was far greater than that of the conqueror of Mexico, whose force was nearly three times as large, while the terrors of the Inca name--however justified by the result--were as widely spread as those of the Aztecs.

It was, doubtless, in imitation of the same captivating model that Pizarro planned the seizure of Atahualpa. But the situations of the two Spanish captains were as dissimilar as the manner in which their acts of violence were conducted. The wanton massacre of the Peruvians resembled that perpetrated by Alvarado in Mexico, and might have been attended with consequences as disastrous if the Peruvian character had been as fierce as that of the Aztecs. But the blow which roused the latter to madness broke the tamer spirits of the Peruvians. It was a bold stroke, which left so much to chance that it scarcely merited the name of policy.

When Pizarro landed in the country, he found it distracted by a contest for the crown. It would seem to have been for his interest to play off one party against the other, throwing his own weight into the scale that suited him. Instead of this, he resorted to an act of audacious violence which crushed them both at a blow. His subsequent career afforded no scope for the profound policy displayed by Cortés, when he gathered conflicting nations under his banner and directed them against a common foe. Still less did he have the opportunity of displaying the tactics and admirable strategy of his rival. Cortés conducted his military operations on the scientific principles of a great captain at the head of a powerful host. Pizarro appears only as an adventurer, a fortunate knight-errant. By one bold stroke he broke the spell which had so long held the land under the dominion of the Incas. The spell was broken, and the airy fabric of their empire, built on the superstition of ages, vanished at a touch. This was good fortune, rather than the result of policy.

But, as no picture is without its lights, we must not, in justice to Pizarro, dwell exclusively on the darker features of his portrait. There was no one of her sons to whom Spain was under larger obligations for extent of empire, for his hand won for her the richest of the Indian jewels that once sparkled in her imperial diadem. When we contemplate the perils he braved, the sufferings he patiently endured, the incredible obstacles he overcame, the magnificent results he effected with his single arm, as it were, unaided by the government--though neither a good nor a great man, in the highest sense of that term--it is impossible not to regard him as a very extraordinary one.

HERNANDO CORTÉS.

BY WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT.

[The Spanish conqueror of Mexico, born 1485, died 1547. Born of a
noble race, he was educated at the University of Salamanca, but
soon devoted his attention to arms. He turned his eyes to America
in 1504, and sailing thither, held various minor offices of trust,
civic and military, till the discovery of Mexico. Cortés was
appointed by Velasquez, the governor-general, to the command of the
new expedition designed for Mexico in 1518. Though afterward
superseded by his jealous superior, he succeeded in evading the
enforcement of the decree, and landed at Tabasco, Mexico, on March
4, 1519. He burned his ships and committed himself to success or
death. His army contained only five hundred and fifty Spaniards,
but with these, and the native allies whom he seduced by his arts,
he conquered the Mexican Empire in little more than two years.
Though he was rewarded with titles and wealth, he was ungratefully
treated by the king--a common fate of the great servants of
Spain--and died in retirement, out of court favor.]

Cortés, at the time of the Mexican Conquest, was thirty-three or thirty-four years of age. In stature he was rather above the middle size. His countenance was pale, and his large dark eyes gave an expression of gravity to his countenance not to have been expected in one of his cheerful temperament. His figure was slender, at least till later life; but his chest was deep, his shoulders broad, his frame muscular and well proportioned. It presented the union of agility and vigor which qualified him to excel in fencing, horsemanship, and the other general exercises of chivalry. In his diet he was temperate, careless of what he ate, and drinking little; while to toil and privation he seemed perfectly indifferent. His dress--for he did not disdain the impression produced by such adventitious aids--was such as to set off his handsome figure to advantage, neither gaudy, nor striking, nor rich. He wore few ornaments, and usually the same, but those were of a great price. His manners, frank and soldier-like, concealed a most cool and calculating spirit. With his gayest humor there mingled a settled air of resolution which made those who approached him feel that they must obey; and which infused something like awe into the attachment of his most devoted followers. Such a combination, in which love was tempered by authority, was the one probably best calculated to inspire devotion in the rough and turbulent spirits among whom his lot was to be cast.

The history of the Conquest is necessarily that of Cortés, who is, if I may so say, not merely the soul but the body of the enterprise; present everywhere in person, out in the thick of the fight, or in the building of the works, with his sword or with his musket, sometimes leading his soldiers, and sometimes directing his little navy. The negotiations, intrigues, correspondence, are all conducted by him; and, like Cæsar, he wrote his own Commentaries in the heat of the stirring scenes which form the subject of them. His character is marked with the most opposite traits, embracing qualities apparently the most incompatible. He was avaricious, yet liberal; bold to desperation, yet cautious and calculating in his plans; magnanimous, yet very cunning; courteous and affable in his deportment, yet inexorably stern; lax in his notions of morality, yet (not uncommon) a sad bigot.

The great feature in his character was constancy of purpose; a constancy not to be daunted by danger, nor baffled by disappointment, nor wearied out by impediments and delays.

He was a knight-errant in the literal sense of the word. Of all the band of adventurous cavaliers whom Spain, in the sixteenth century, sent forth on the career of discovery and conquest, there was none more deeply filled with the spirit of romantic enterprise than Hernando Cortés. Dangers and difficulties, instead of deterring, seemed to have a charm in his eyes. They were necessary to rouse him to a full consciousness of his powers. He grappled with them at the outset, and, if I may so express myself, seemed to prefer to take his enterprises by the most difficult side. He conceived, at the first moment of his landing in Mexico, the design of its conquest. When he saw the strength of its civilization, he was not turned from his purpose. When he was assailed by the superior force of Narvaez, he still persisted in it; and when he was driven in ruin from the capital, he still cherished his original idea. How successfully he carried it into execution, we have seen. After the few years of repose which succeeded the Conquest, his adventurous spirit impelled him to that dreary march across the marshes of Chiapa; and, after another interval, to seek his fortunes on the stormy Californian gulf. When he found that no other continent remained for him to conquer, he made serious proposals to the emperor to equip a fleet at his own expense, with which he would sail to the Moluccas, and subdue the Spice Islands for the crown of Castile!

This spirit of knight-errantry might lead us to under-value his talents as a general, and to regard him merely in the light of a lucky adventurer. But this would be doing him injustice; for Cortés was certainly a great general, if that man be one who performs great achievements with the resources which his own genius has created. There is probably no instance in history where so vast an enterprise has been achieved by means apparently so inadequate. He may be truly said to have effected the conquest by his own resources. If he was indebted for his success to the co-operation of the Indian tribes, it was the force of his genius that obtained command of such materials. He arrested the arm that was lifted to smite him, and made it do battle in his behalf. He beat the Tlascalans, and made them his stanch allies. He beat the soldiers of Narvaez, and doubled his effective force by it. When his own men deserted him he did not desert himself. He drew them back by degrees, and compelled them to act by his will till they were all as one man. He brought together the most miscellaneous collection of mercenaries who ever fought under one standard--adventurers from Cuba and the isles, craving for gold; hidalgos, who came from the old country to win laurels; broken-down cavaliers, who hoped to mend their fortunes in the New World; vagabonds flying from justice; the grasping followers of Narvaez, and his own reckless veterans--men with hardly a common tie, and burning with the spirit of jealousy and faction; wild tribes of the natives from all parts of the country, who had been sworn enemies from their cradles, and who had met only to cut one another’s throats and to procure victims for sacrifice; men, in short, differing in race, in language, and in interests, with scarcely anything in common among them. Yet this motley congregation was assembled in one camp, compelled to bend to the will of one man, to consort together in harmony, to breathe, as it were, one spirit, and to move on a common principle of action! It is in this wonderful power over the discordant masses thus gathered under his banner that we recognize the genius of the great commander no less than in the skill of his military operations.

His power over the minds of his soldiers was a natural result of their confidence in his abilities. But it is also to be attributed to his popular manners--that happy union of authority and companionship which fitted him for the command of a band of roving adventurers. It would not have done for him to have fenced himself round with the stately reserve of a commander of regular forces. He was embarked with his men in a common adventure, and nearly on terms of equality, since he held his commission by no legal warrant. But while he indulged this freedom and familiarity with his soldiers, he never allowed it to interfere with their strict obedience, nor to impair the severity of discipline. When he had risen to higher consideration, although he affected more state, he still admitted his veterans to the same intimacy. “He preferred,” says Diaz, “to be called ‘Cortés’ by us, to being called by any title; and with good reason,” continues the enthusiastic old cavalier, “for the name of Cortés is as famous in our day as was that of Cæsar among the Romans, or of Hannibal among the Carthaginians.” He showed the same kind regard toward his ancient comrades in the very last act of his life; for he appropriated a sum by his will for the celebration of two thousand masses for the souls of those who had fought with him in the campaigns of Mexico.

His character has been unconsciously traced by the hand of a master--

“And oft the chieftain deigned to aid
And mingle in the mirth they made;
For though, with men of high degree,
The proudest of the proud was he,
Yet, trained in camps, he knew the art
To win the soldier’s hardy heart.
They love a captain to obey,
Boisterous as March, yet fresh as May;
With open hand, and brow as free,
Lover of wine and minstrelsy;
Ever the first to scale a tower,
As venturous in a lady’s bower;
Such buxom chief shall lead his host
From India’s fires to Zembla’s frost.”

Cortés, without much violence, might have sat for this portrait of Marmion.

Cortés was not a vulgar conqueror. He did not conquer from the mere ambition of conquest. If he destroyed the ancient capital of the Aztecs, it was to build up a more magnificent capital on its ruins. If he desolated the land and broke up its existing institutions, he employed the short period of his administration in digesting schemes for introducing there a more improved culture and a higher civilization. In all his expeditions he was careful to study the resources of the country, its social organization, and its physical capacities. He enjoined it on his captains to attend particularly to these objects. If he was greedy of gold, like most of the Spanish cavaliers in the New World, it was not to hoard it, nor merely to lavish it in the support of a princely establishment, but to secure funds for prosecuting his glorious discoveries. Witness his costly expeditions to the Gulf of California.

His enterprises were not undertaken solely for mercenary objects, as is shown by the various expeditions he set on foot for the discovery of a communication between the Atlantic and the Pacific. In his schemes of ambition he showed a respect for the interests of science, to be referred partly to the natural superiority of his mind, but partly, no doubt, to the influence of early education. It is, indeed, hardly possible that a person of his wayward and mercurial temper should have improved his advantages at the university, but he brought away from it a tincture of scholarship seldom found among the cavaliers of the period, and which had its influence in enlarging his own conceptions. His celebrated letters are written with a simple elegance that, as I have already had occasion to remark, have caused them to be compared to the military narrative of Cæsar. It will not be easy to find in the chronicles of the period a more concise yet comprehensive statement, not only of the events of his campaigns, but of the circumstances most worthy of notice in the character of the conquered countries.

Cortés was not cruel; at least, not cruel as compared with most of those who followed his iron trade. The path of the conqueror is necessarily marked with blood. He was not too scrupulous, indeed, in the execution of his plans. He swept away the obstacles which lay in his track; and his fame is darkened by the commission of more than one act which his boldest apologist will find it hard to vindicate. But he was not cruel. He allowed no outrage on his unresisting foes. This may seem small praise, but it is an exception to the usual conduct of his countrymen in their conquests, and it is something to be in advance of one’s time. He was severe, it may be added, in enforcing obedience to his orders for protecting their persons and their property. With his licentious crew, it was sometimes not without hazard that he was so. After the Conquest, he sanctioned the system of _repartimientos_; but so did Columbus. He endeavored to regulate it by the most humane laws, and continued to suggest many important changes for ameliorating the condition of the natives. The best commentary on his conduct, in this respect, is the deference that was shown him by the Indians, and the confidence with which they appealed to him for protection in all their subsequent distresses.

MARTIN LUTHER.

BY THOMAS CARLYLE.

[Leader of the German Reformation, born 1483, died 1546. Educated
at the University of Erfurt, and originally intending to become a
lawyer, he was carried by religious enthusiasm into an Augustinian
convent. After taking orders he became in a few years Professor of
Philosophy in the Wittenberg University, and Doctor of Theology. It
was not till the promulgation of indulgences for sin, issued by
Pope Leo V to raise funds for the building of the Cathedral of St.
Peter’s at Rome, that Luther took a stand antagonistic to the Roman
Church. He posted ninety-five Latin theses on the door of the
Wittenberg church as a protest, which contained the germ of the
Protestant doctrine. This bold act kindled a fire throughout
Europe. Luther’s celebrated disputation with Doctor Eck, and his
fierce pamphlets against Rome, which were scattered broadcast by
the press, added fuel to the flames, and he was soon supported by
the sympathy and adherence of many of the nobles, particularly
George of Saxony, the reformer’s own electoral prince, as well as
by the support of large masses of the people. Luther was
excommunicated in 1520, and in the same year was summoned to answer
before Charles V, the German emperor,

at the Diet of Worms. The reformer defended himself with great
eloquence and vigor, but was placed under the ban of the Empire,
and thenceforward became both a religious and political outlaw. The
Lutheran reformation rapidly spread to France, Switzerland, the
Scandinavian kingdoms, England, and Scotland, during the life of
its apostle, and shook the power of the Roman hierarchy to its very
center. Luther was protected in his work by a powerful band of
German princes, and when he died the larger part of North Germany
had accepted his doctrine. He was perhaps the most extraordinary
figure of an age prolific in great men.]

The Diet of Worms and Luther’s appearance there on the 17th of April, 1521, may be considered as the greatest scene in modern European history; the point, indeed, from which the whole subsequent history of civilization takes its rise. After multiplied negotiations and disputations, it had come to this. The young Emperor Charles V, with all the princes of Germany, papal nuncios, dignitaries, spiritual and temporal, are assembled there: Luther is to appear and answer for himself, whether he will recant or not. The world’s pomp and power sits there on this hand; on that, stands up for God’s truth one man, the poor miner, Hans Luther’s son. Friends had reminded him of Huss, advised him not to go; he would not be advised. A large company of friends rode out to meet him, with still more earnest warnings; he answered, “Were there as many devils in Worms as there are roof-tiles, I would on.” The people, on the morrow, as he went to the hall of the diet, crowded the windows and house-tops, some of them calling out to him, in solemn words, not to recant. “Whosoever denieth me before men!” they cried to him, as in a kind of solemn petition and adjuration. Was it not in reality a petition too--the petition of the whole world lying in dark bondage of soul, paralyzed under a black spectral nightmare and triple-hatted chimera, calling itself Father in God, and what not--“Free us; it rests with thee; desert us not!”

Luther did not desert us. His speech of two hours distinguished itself by its respectful, wise, and honest tone; submissive to whatsoever could lawfully claim submission, not submissive to any more than that. His writings, he said, were partly his own, partly derived from the Word of God. As to what was his own, human infirmity entered into it; unguarded anger, blindness, many things, doubtless, which it were a blessing for him could he abolish altogether. But as to what stood on sound truth and the Word of God, he could not recant it. How could he? “Confute me,” he concluded, “by proofs of Scripture, or else by plain, just arguments. I can not recant otherwise; for it is neither safe nor prudent to do aught against conscience. Here stand I; I can do no other. God assist me!” It is, as we say, the greatest moment in the modern history of men. English Puritanism, England and its Parliaments, Americas, and the vast work done in these two centuries; French Revolution, Europe and its work everywhere at present--the germ of it all lay there. Had Luther in that moment done other, it had all been otherwise! The European world was asking him: Am I to sink ever lower into falsehood, stagnant putrescence, loathsome, accursed death; or, with what paroxysm, to cast the falsehoods out of me, and be cured and live?

Great wars, contentions, and disunion followed out of this Reformation, which last down to our day, and are yet far from ended. Great talk and crimination has been made about these. They are lamentable, undeniable; but, after all, what has Luther or his cause to do with them? It seems strange reasoning to charge the Reformation with all this. When Hercules turned the purifying river into King Augeas’s stables, I have no doubt the confusion that resulted was considerable all around, but I think it was not Hercules’s blame; it was some other’s blame! The Reformation might bring what results it liked when it came, but the Reformation simply could not help coming.

Of Luther I will add now, in reference to all these wars and bloodshed, the noticeable fact that none of them began so long as he continued living. The controversy did not get to fighting so long as he was there. To me it is a proof of his greatness in all senses, this fact. How seldom do we find a man that has stirred up some vast commotion, who does not himself perish, swept away in it! Such is the usual course of revolutionists. Luther continued, in a good degree, sovereign of this greatest revolution; all Protestants, of what rank or function soever, looking much to him for guidance; and he held it peaceably, continued firm at the center of it. A man to do this must have a kingly faculty; he must have the gift to discern at all turns where the true heart of the matter lies, and to plant himself courageously on that, as a strong, true man, that other true men may rally round him there. He will not continue leader of men otherwise. Luther’s clear, deep force of judgment, his force of all sorts--of _silence_, of tolerance and moderation among others--are very notable in these circumstances.

Tolerance, I say; a very genuine kind of tolerance: he distinguishes what is essential, and what is not; the unessential may go very much as it will. A complaint comes to him that such and such a reformed preacher “will not preach without a cassock.” “Well,” answers Luther, “what harm will a cassock do the man? Let him have a cassock to preach in; let him have three cassocks, if he find benefit in them!” His conduct in the matter of Carlstadt’s wild image-breaking; of the Anabaptists; of the Peasants’ war, shows a noble strength, very different from spasmodic violence. With sure, prompt insight, he discriminates what is what; a strong, just man, he speaks forth what is the wise course, and all men follow him in that. Luther’s written works give similar testimony of him. The dialect of these speculations is now grown obsolete for us, but one still reads them with a singular attraction. And, indeed, the mere grammatical diction is still legible enough. Luther’s merit in literary history is of the greatest; his dialect became the language of all writing. They are not well written, these four-and-twenty quartos of his; written hastily, with quite other than literary objects. But in no books have I found a more robust, genuine, I will say noble, faculty of a man than in these. A rugged honesty, homeliness, simplicity; a rugged, sterling sense and strength. He flashes out illumination from him; his smiting idiomatic phrases seem to cleave into the very secret of the matter. Good humor too, nay, tender affection, nobleness, and depth. This man could have been a poet too! He had to _work_ an epic poem, and not write one. I call him a great thinker; as, indeed, his greatness of heart already betokens that.

Richter says of Luther’s words, “His words are half-battles.” They may be called so. The essential quality of him was, that he could fight and conquer--that he was a right piece of human valor. No more valiant man, no mortal heart to be called _braver_, that one has record of, ever lived in that Teutonic kindred whose character is valor. His defiance of the “devils” in Worms was not a mere boast, as the like might be if now spoken. It was a faith of Luther’s that there were devils, spiritual denizens of the pit, continually besetting men. Many times in his writings this turns up, and a most small sneer has been grounded on it by some.

In the room of the Wartburg, where he sat translating the Bible, they still show you a black spot on the wall, the strange memorial of one of these conflicts. Luther was translating one of the Psalms; he was worn down with long labor, with sickness, abstinence from food; there rose before him some hideous, indefinable image, which he took for the Evil One, to forbid his work. Luther started up with fiend-defiance, flung his inkstand at the specter, and it disappeared! The spot still remains there, a curious monument of several things. Any apothecary’s apprentice can now tell us what we are to think of this apparition in a scientific sense; but the man’s heart that dare rise defiant, face to face, against hell itself, can give no higher proof of fearlessness. The thing he will quail before exists not on this earth or under it. Fearless enough! “The devil is aware,” writes he on one occasion, “that this does not proceed out of fear in me. I have seen and defied innumerable devils.” Of Duke George, of Leipsic, a great enemy of his, he said, “Duke George is not equal to one devil--far short of a devil! If I had business at Leipsic, I would ride into Leipsic, though it rained Duke Georges for nine days running.” What a reservoir of dukes to ride into!

At the same time, they err greatly who imagine that this man’s courage was ferocity--mere coarse, disobedient obstinacy and savagery--as many do. Far from that. There may be an absence of fear, which arises from the absence of thought or affection, from the presence of hatred and stupid fury. We do not value the courage of the tiger highly. With Luther it was far otherwise; no accusation could be more unjust than this mere ferocious violence brought against him. A most gentle heart withal, full of pity and love, as, indeed, the truly valiant heart ever is. The tiger before a _stronger_ foe flies. The tiger is not what we call valiant, only fierce and cruel. I know few things more touching than those soft breathings of affection--soft as a child’s or a mother’s--in this great, wild heart of Luther. So honest, unadulterated with any cant; homely, rude in their utterance; pure as water welling from the rock. What, in fact, was all this downpressed mood of despair and reprobation which we saw in his youth but the outcome of pre-eminent, thoughtful gentleness, affections too keen and pure? It is the curse such men as the poor poet Cowper fall into. Luther, to a slight observer, might have seemed a timid, weak man; modesty, affectionate, shrinking tenderness the chief distinction of him. It is a noble valor which is roused in a heart like this, once stirred up into defiance, all kindled into a heavenly blaze.

In Luther’s “Table-Talk,” a posthumous book of anecdotes and sayings collected by his friends--the most interesting now of all the books proceeding from him--we have many beautiful, unconscious displays of the man and what sort of nature he had. His behavior at the death-bed of his little daughter--so still, so great and loving--is among the most affecting things. He is resigned that his little Magdalene should die, yet longs inexpressibly that she might live--follows, in awe-struck thought, the flight of her little soul through those unknown realms. Awestruck--most heartfelt, we can see; and sincere--for, after all dogmatic creeds and articles, he feels what nothing it is that we know or can know. His little Magdalene shall be with God, as God wills; for Luther, too, that is all.

Once he looks out from his solitary Patmos, the castle of Coburg, in the middle of the night. The great vault of immensity, long flights of clouds sailing through it--dumb, gaunt, huge--who supports all that? “None ever saw the pillars of it; yet it is supported.” God supports it. We must know that God is great, that God is good; and trust, where we can not see. Returning home from Leipsic once, he is struck by the beauty of the harvest-fields. How it stands, that golden yellow corn, on its fair taper stem, its golden head bent, all rich and waving there; the meek earth, at God’s kind bidding, has produced it once again--the bread of man! In the garden of Wittenberg, one evening at sunset, a little bird has perched for the night. That little bird, says Luther; above it are the stars and deep heaven of worlds; yet it has folded its little wings; gone trustfully to rest there as in its home. The maker of it has given it, too, a home! Neither are mirthful turns wanting--there is a great, free, human heart in this man.

The common speech of him has a rugged nobleness; idiomatic, expressive, genuine; gleams here and there with beautiful poetic tints. One feels him to be a great brother man. His love of music, indeed--is not this, as it were, the summary of all these affections in him? Many a wild unutterability he spoke forth from him in the tones of his flute. The devils fled from his flute, he says. Death-defiance on the one hand, and such love of music on the other--I could call these the two opposite poles of a great soul; between these two all great things had room.

Luther’s face is to me expressive of him. In Kranach’s best portraits I find the true Luther. A rude plebeian face, with its huge, crag-like brows and bones--the emblem of rugged energy--at first, almost a repulsive face. Yet in the eyes especially there is a wild, silent sorrow; an unnamable melancholy, the element of all gentle and fine affections; giving to the rest the true stamp of nobleness. Laughter was in this Luther, as we said; but tears also were there. Tears also were appointed him; tears and hard toil. The basis of his life was sadness, earnestness. In his latter days, after all triumphs and victories, he expresses himself heartily weary of living. He considers that God alone can and will regulate the course things are taking, and that perhaps the day of judgment is not far. As for him, he longs for one thing--that God would release him from his labor, and let him depart and be at rest. They understood little of the man who cite this in discredit of him! I will call this Luther a true great man; great in intellect, in courage, affection, and integrity; one of our most lovable and precious men. Great, not as a hewn obelisk, but as an Alpine mountain; so simple, honest, spontaneous; not setting up to be great at all; there for quite another purpose than being great! Ah, yes, unsubduable granite, piercing far and wide into the heavens; yet, in the clefts of its fountains, green, beautiful valleys with flowers! A right spiritual hero and prophet; once more, a true son of nature and fact, for whom these centuries, and many that are to come yet, will be thankful to Heaven.

IGNATIUS DE LOYOLA (SAINT), FOUNDER OF THE ORDER OF JESUS.

BY SIR JAMES STEPHEN.

[Don Inigo Lopez de Recalde de Loyola, born in 1491, died in 1556.
The scion of one of the noblest families in Spain, he was courtier
and soldier till he was severely wounded in defending the city of
Pampeluna against the French. A prisoner and a cripple, he became a
religious enthusiast and ascetic, and conceived the idea of forming
a body of religious soldiery for the defense of the Roman hierarchy
against the assaults of its foes. After studying for the priesthood
and taking orders, he went to Rome and with some difficulty
persuaded the pontiff Paul III, who dreaded the fanatical
discipline of such an order as much as he recognized its value, to
issue a bull in sanction of his plan. The Society of Jesus was thus
organized, and soon became, as it has continued to be, the most
powerful bulwark of Romanism, the most active center of aggression
and propagandism. The foundation of this order is recognized by
historians as an epoch in the history of religion.]

Descended from an illustrious family, Ignatius had in his youth been a courtier and a cavalier, and, if not a poet, at least a cultivator of poetry. At the siege of Pampeluna his leg was broken, and, after the failure of mere vulgar leeches, was set by a touch from the hand of the prince of apostles. Yet St. Peter’s therapeutic skill was less perfect than might have been expected from so exalted a chirurgeon; for a splinter still protruded through the skin, and the limb was shrunk and shortened. To regain his fair proportions, Ignatius had himself literally stretched upon the rack; and expiated by a long confinement to his couch this singular experiment to reduce his refractory bones and sinews. Books of knighthood relieved the lassitude of sickness, and when these were exhausted, he betook himself to a series of still more marvelous romances. In the legends of the Saints the disabled soldier discovered a new field of

emulation and glory. Compared with their self-conquests and high rewards, the achievements and the renown of Roland and of Amadis waxed dim. Compared with the peerless damsel for whose smiles Palladius had fought and died, how transcendently glorious the image of female loveliness and angelic purity which had irradiated the hermit’s cell and the path of the way-worn pilgrims!

Far as the heavens are above the earth would be the plighted fealty of the knight of the Virgin Mother beyond the noblest devotion of merely human chivalry. In her service he would cast his shield over the Church which ascribed to her more than celestial dignities, and bathe in the blood of her enemies the sword once desecrated to the mean ends of worldly ambition. Nor were these vows unheeded by her to whom they were addressed. Environed in light, and clasping her infant to her bosom, she revealed herself to the adoring gaze of her champion. At that heavenly vision all fantasies of worldly and sensual delight, like exorcised demons, fled from his soul into eternal exile. He rose, suspended at her shrine his secular weapons, performed there his nocturnal devotions, and with returning day retired to consecrate his future life to the glory of the _Virgo Deipara_.

To these erotic dreams succeeded stern realities; convulsive agonies of prayer, wailings of remorse, and self-inflicted bodily torments. Exchanging dresses with a beggar, he lined his gabardine with prickly thorns, fasted to the verge of starvation, assumed the demeanor of an idiot, became too loathsome for human contact, and then, plunging into a gloomy cavern, surrendered himself up to such wrestlings with the evil spirit, and to such vicissitudes of rapture and despair, that in the storm of turbid passions his reason had nearly given way.

At the verge of madness, Ignatius paused. That noble intellect was not to be whelmed beneath the tempest in which so many have sunk, nor was his deliverance to be accomplished by any vulgar methods. Standing on the steps of a Dominican church, he recited the office of Our Lady, when suddenly heaven itself was laid open to the eyes of the worshiper. That ineffable mystery which the author of the Athanasian creed has labored in vain to enunciate in words, was disclosed to him as an object, not of faith, but of actual sight. To his spiritualized sense was disclosed the actual process by which the host is transubstantiated, and the other Christian verities which it is permitted to common man to receive but as exercises of their belief, became to him the objects of immediate inspection and of direct consciousness. For eight successive days his body reposed in an unbroken trance, while his spirit thus imbibed disclosures for which the tongues of men have no appropriate language.

Ignatius returned to this sublunary sphere with a mission not unmeet for an envoy from the empyrean world, of which he had thus become a temporary denizen. He returned to earth to establish a theocracy, of which he should himself be the first administrator, and to which every tribe and kindred of men should be subject. He returned no longer a sordid, half-distracted anchorite, but, strange to tell, a man distinguished not more by the gigantic magnitude of his designs than by the clear good sense, the profound sagacity, the calm perseverance, and the flexible address with which he was to pursue them. History affords no more perfect illustration how readily delirious enthusiasm and the shrewdness of the exchange may combine and harmonize in minds of the heroic order. A Swedenborg-Franklin reconciling in himself these antagonist propensities is no monster of the fancy.

Of all the occupations to which man can devote the earlier years of his life, none probably leaves on the character an impress so deep and indelible as the profession of arms. In no other calling is the whole range of our sympathetic affections, whether kindly or the reverse, called into such habitual and active exercise, nor does any other stimulate the mere intellectual powers with a force so irresistible when once they are effectually aroused from their accustomed torpor. Loyola was a soldier to the last breath he drew, a general whose authority none might question, a comrade on whose cordiality all might rely, sustaining all the dangers and hardships he exacted from his followers, and in his religious campaigns a strategist of consummate skill and most comprehensive survey. It was his maxim that war ought to be aggressive, and that even an inadequate force might be wisely weakened by detachments on a distant service, if the prospect of success was such that the vague and perhaps exaggerated rumor of it would strike terror into nearer foes and animate the hopes of irresolute allies. To conquer Lutheranism by converting to the faith of Rome the barbarous or half-civilized nations of the earth was, therefore, among the earliest of his projects.

Though not in books, yet in the far nobler school of active and especially of military life, Loyola had learned the great secret of government--at least, of his government. It was that the social affections, if concentrated within a well-defined circle, possess an intensity and endurance unrivaled by those passions of which self is the immediate object. He had the sagacity to perceive that emotions like those with which a Spartan or a Jew had yearned over the land and the institutions of their fathers--emotions stronger than appetite, vanity, ambition, avarice, or death itself--might be kindled in the members of his order; if he could detect and grasp those mainsprings of human action of which the Greek and the Hebrew legislators had obtained the mastery. Nor did he seek them in vain.

Some unconscious love of power, a mind bewildered by many gross superstitions and theoretical errors, and perhaps some tinge of insanity, may be ascribed to Ignatius Loyola; but no dispassionate reader of his writings or of his life will question his integrity, or deny to him the praise of a devotion at once sincere, habitual, and profound. It is not to the glory of the reformers to depreciate the name of their greatest antagonist, or to think meanly of him to whom more than any other man it is owing that the Reformation was stayed and the Church of Rome rescued from her impending doom.