Chapter VIII: The Emperor Charles V (2)

Born in the purple, having exercised unlimited authority from his boyhood, and having worn from his cradle so many crowns and coronets, the German emperor might well be supposed to have learned to estimate them at their proper value. Contemporary minds were busy, however, to discover the hidden motives which could have influenced him, and the world, even yet, has hardly ceased to wonder. Yet it would have been more wonderful, considering the emperor’s character, had he remained. The end had not crowned the work; it not unreasonably discrowned the workman. The earlier, and indeed the greater part of his career, had been one unbroken procession of triumphs. The cherished dream of his grandfather, and of his own youth, to add the pope’s triple crown to the rest of the hereditary possessions of his family, he had indeed been obliged to resign. He had too much practical Flemish sense to indulge long in chimeras, but he had achieved the empire over formidable rivals, and he had successively not only conquered, but captured almost every potentate who had arrayed himself in arms against him. Clement and Francis, the dukes and landgrafs of Cleves, Hesse, Saxony, and Brunswick, he had bound to his chariot wheels; forcing many to eat the bread of humiliation and captivity, during long and weary years. But the concluding portion of his reign had reversed all its previous glories. His whole career had been a failure. He had been defeated, after all, in most of his projects. He had humbled Francis, but Henry had most signally avenged his father. He had trampled upon Philip of Hesse and Frederick of Saxony; but it had been reserved for one of that German race, which he characterised as “dreamy, drunken, and incapable of intrigue,” to outwit the man who had outwitted all the world, and to drive before him, in ignominious flight, the conqueror of the nations.

While he was preparing to crush, forever, the Protestant church, with the arms which a bench of bishops were forging, lo! the rapid and desperate Maurice, with long red beard streaming like a meteor in the wind, dashing through the mountain passes, at the head of his Lancers--arguments more convincing than all the dogmas of Granvella! Disguised as an old woman, the emperor had attempted on the 6th of April, 1552, to escape in a peasant’s wagon, from Innsbruck into Flanders. Saved for the time by the mediation of Ferdinand, he had, a few weeks later, after his troops had been defeated by Maurice at Füssen, again fled at midnight of the 22nd of May, almost unattended, sick in body and soul, in the midst of thunder, lightning, and rain, along the difficult Alpine passes from Innsbruck into Carinthia. His pupil had permitted his escape, only because, in his own language, “for such a bird he had no convenient cage.” The imprisoned princes now owed their liberation, not to the emperor’s clemency, but to his panic. The Peace of Passau, in the following August, crushed the whole fabric of the emperor’s toil, and laid the foundation of the Protestant church.

On the other hand, the man who had dealt with Rome as if the pope, not he, had been the vassal, was compelled to witness, before he departed, the insolence of a pontiff who took a special pride in insulting and humbling his house, and trampling upon the pride of Charles, Philip, and Ferdinand. In France, too, the disastrous siege of Metz had taught him that in the imperial zodiac the fatal sign of Cancer had been reached. The figure of a crab, with the words “_plus citra_,” instead of his proud motto of “_plus ultra_,” scrawled on the walls where he had resided during that dismal epoch, avenged more deeply, perhaps, than the jester thought, the previous misfortunes of France. The Grand Turk, too, Suleiman the Magnificent, possessed most of Hungary, and held at that moment a fleet ready to sail against Naples, in co-operation with the pope and France. Thus the infidel, the Protestant, and the holy church were all combined together to crush him. Towards all the great powers of the earth he stood, not in the attitude of a conqueror, but of a disappointed, baffled, defeated potentate. Moreover, he had been foiled long before in his earnest attempts to secure the imperial throne for Philip.

[Sidenote: [1556-1558 A.D.]]

Had the emperor continued to live and reign, he would have found himself likewise engaged in mortal combat with that great religious movement in the Netherlands, which he would not have been able many years longer to suppress, and which he left as a legacy of blood and fire to his successor. Born in the same year with his century, Charles was a decrepit, exhausted man at fifty-five, while that glorious age, in which humanity was to burst forever the cerements in which it had so long been buried, was but awakening to a consciousness of its strength. Disappointed in his schemes, broken in his fortunes with income anticipated, estates mortgaged, all his affairs in confusion; failing in mental powers, and with a constitution hopelessly shattered--it was time for him to retire. He showed his keenness in recognising the fact that neither his power nor his glory would be increased, should he lag superfluous on the stage when mortification instead of applause was likely to be his portion. His frame was indeed but a wreck. Forty years of unexampled gluttony had done their work. He was a victim to gout, asthma, dyspepsia, gravel. He was crippled in the neck, arms, knees, and hands. He was troubled with chronic cutaneous eruptions. His appetite remained, while his stomach, unable longer to perform the task still imposed upon it, occasioned him constant suffering. Physiologists, who know how important a part this organ plays in the affairs of life, will perhaps see in this physical condition of the emperor a sufficient explanation, if explanation were required, of his descent from the throne. The resolution to abdicate before his death had been long a settled scheme with him. It had been formally agreed between himself and the empress that they should separate at the approach of old age, and pass the remainder of their lives in a convent and a monastery. He wished to put a little space of religious contemplation between the active portion of his life and the grave.

The romantic picture of his philosophical retirement at Yuste, painted originally by Sandoval[f] and Siguenza,[g] reproduced by the fascinating pencil of Strada,[o] and imitated in frequent succession by authors of every age and country, is unfortunately but a sketch of fancy. The investigations of modern writers have entirely thrown down the scaffolding on which the airy fabric, so delightful to poets and moralists, reposed. The departing emperor stands no longer in a transparency robed in shining garments. His transfiguration is at an end. Every action, almost every moment of his retirement, accurately chronicled by those who shared his solitude, have been placed before our eyes, in the most felicitous manner, by able and brilliant writers.[81] The emperor, shorn of the philosophical robe in which he had been conventionally arrayed for three centuries, shivers now in the cold air of reality.

So far from his having immersed himself in profound and pious contemplation, below the current of the world’s events, his thoughts, on the contrary, never were for a moment diverted from the political surface of the times. He read nothing but despatches; he wrote or dictated interminable ones in reply, as dull and prolix as any which ever came from his pen. He manifested a succession of emotions at the course of contemporary affairs, as intense and as varied as if the world still rested in his palm. He was, in truth, essentially a man of action. He had neither the taste nor talents which make a man great in retirement. Not a lofty thought, not a generous sentiment, not a profound or acute suggestion in his retreat has been recorded from his lips. The epigrams which had been invented for him by fabulists have been all taken away, and nothing has been substituted, save a few dull jests exchanged with stupid friars. So far from having entertained and even expressed that sentiment of religious toleration for which he was said to have been condemned as a heretic by the Inquisition, and for which Philip was ridiculously reported to have ordered his father’s body to be burned, and his ashes scattered to the winds, he became in retreat the bigot effectually, which during his reign he had only been conventionally. Bitter regrets that he should have kept his word to Luther, as if he had not broken faith enough to reflect upon in his retirement; stern self-reproach for omitting to put to death, while he had him in his power, the man who had caused all the mischief of the age; fierce instructions thundered from his retreat to the inquisitors to hasten the execution of all heretics--including particularly his ancient friends, preachers and almoners, Cazalla and Constantine de Fuente; furious exhortations to Philip--as if Philip needed a prompter in such a work--that he should set himself to “cutting out the root of heresy with rigour and rude chastisement”--such explosions of savage bigotry as these, alternating with exhibitions of revolting gluttony, with surfeits of sardine omelettes, Estremadura sausages, eel pies, pickled partridges, fat capons, quince syrups, iced beer, and flagons of Rhenish, relieved by copious draughts of senna and rhubarb, to which his horror-stricken doctor doomed him as he ate--compose a spectacle less attractive to the imagination than the ancient portrait of the cloistered Charles. Unfortunately it was the one which was painted from life.[m]

Charles died September 20th, 1558, not long after a rehearsal of his own obsequies which it was his whim to experience. He was buried in the monastery, but twelve years later his son Philip II removed the remains to the family tombs in the Escorial. Before leaving the reign of Charles V, the major part of which is left to the volume of German history, we may quote an estimate of his administration as it affected Spain.[a]

DE MARIANI’S REVIEW OF THE INFLUENCE OF CHARLES V ON SPAIN

[Sidenote: [1517-1556 A.D.]]

Charles had been brought up by Adrian of Utrecht, later on inquisitor-general and afterwards pope. His first minister was Cardinal Ximenes de Cisneros, also inquisitor-general, the same who condemned 52,552 Spaniards, of whom 3,554 were burned. Thus Charles, by his upbringing and the counsels he received as soon as he became king, was imbued wholly with religious fanaticism and political tyranny. He was not long in showing himself an apt pupil of the two inquisitors.

In spite of the inquisitorial hecatombs which spread terror through Europe, there still existed men who defended public liberty. The last accents of a perishing liberty echoed in the words addressed by the cortes to Charles: “Remember, seigneur,” said they to the haughty prince, “that a king is servant to his subjects.”

Charles hearkened to this and vowed silently never to forget it, but he refrained from throwing it back into the face of this proud plebiscite, and contented himself with sowing corruption as much as terror. He succeeded in enervating popular energy, and gradually drew away into Flanders the vital part of the nation, there to destroy by force municipal liberties, while he confided the task of annihilating those of Spain to the grand inquisitor-general Adrian and the regent.

What astonishing activity, what wonderful audacity were the Spaniards now possessed with! Rest seemed impossible to these impetuous organisations; and not being able to fight at home, they hastened after Columbus. In 1510 the Castilian banner was hoisted at Darien by Vasco Nuñez Balboa, in 1519 it was planted in Mexico by Ferdinand Cortes, and in 1524 in Peru by Pizarro. Intrepid warriors, their audacity, their religious yet cruel fanaticism strike us with astonishment, and even their crimes cannot wholly suppress our admiration. In those far-off lands whose limits were yet unknown, the first conquerors lacked space. They seemed to be condemned by heaven to cut one another’s throats in expiation of their crimes.

The forced humility which Charles V had shown before the cortes of Valladolid weighed on his despotic heart. In haste to give the lie to those words, “The king is the servant of his people,” he threw aside his mask as soon as he felt strong enough to aim a blow at liberty. However, the Spaniards were not yet accustomed to his attempted tyranny. They rose in protest against this audacious violation of the oath. The perjured deputies were the first victims to popular justice.

A civil war seemed inevitable, the future of Spanish public liberty to hang on the fate of arms. Padilla put himself at the head of the members of the communes, but the isolation of the provinces, the want of a bond of communication between the various parties in the nation made this sublime attempt ineffectual. The privileged classes, save the bishop of Zamora, followed the orders of the Inquisition. Padilla, martyr to liberty, lost his head on the scaffold, and with him perished Castilian liberty.

In that very hour when Charles V was stifling resistance to despotism in the blood of the last representative of popular power, a new adversary was springing up in Germany. Luther lifted up his already powerful voice in the Diet of Worms, braved both pope and emperor, shook the Catholic faith, and developed that principle of reform which would, later on, separate the empire from the Roman church. In that same year then (1521) liberty, perishing in Spain, was reborn in Germany. So these two great figures in history, fighting sternly in Germany, appeared at the appointed day in the world’s theatre--one to destroy, the other to found liberty. One, emperor and king, a great warrior, an eminent politician, exercising most incontestable preponderance, conqueror at Pavia, master of Italy, feared by the Turks whom he had crushed, gave himself up to every despotic inspiration. He fulfilled the execrable mission of overthrowing liberty wherever his arm could reach. After thirty years of warfare, in which cunning, hypocrisy, and courage were alternately employed, Charles fell under the burden of sterile glory. His star had paled before Maurice of Saxony at Innsbruck, and before Henry II in the bishoprics. Reduced in 1552 to treat with his enemies at Passau, he whom the Diet of Frankfort had elected leader of Christianity militant ruined Spain, ravished her liberty and ended by hiding his discouragement and ennui in the depths of a cloister. He abdicated the Spanish throne in favour of his son, the imperial sceptre was committed to his brother, and Charles left nothing to posterity but the germ of all the evils developed by his successors.

Charles V filled the world with his glory, his name, and colossal power, yet never thought of creating a Spanish administration. If he wished to concentrate supreme power in his own hands, it was certainly not with any thought of improving the lot of his people, but only to wield a stronger instrument of tyranny. Surrounded by strangers, he never knew the needs of Spain nor cared to. All was sterile under his iron hand; slow to act, Charles never revoked a decision. Neither force nor danger could draw from him any concession. “I am naturally inclined to persist obstinately in my good ideas,” he said one day to Contarini. “Sire,” answered the other, “to persist in good ideas is not obstinacy, but firmness.” The emperor interrupted him, “But I also persist in bad ones.” In 1520, the taxes were so exorbitant that the towns declared they would have to increase the crown revenues without fixing new contributions, and without burdening, as they put it, the king’s conscience. This result, added the towns, would easily be attained if the prince would regulate his expenses by his revenue. The Catholic king spent 12,000 maravedis each day. Charles spent 150,000. Ordinary contributions did not suffice, but the cortes were opposed to new exactions. They would only vote subsidies after the redress of wrongs. In the cortes of Corunna of 1520, Charles found an obstinate resistance to voting for taxes. He triumphed, however, and soon rid himself of this embarrassing obstacle, and in 1528 forced the cortes to vote for subsidies before answering their demands. He dismissed the cortes of 1529 which opposed the fixing of new taxes; and again at Toledo, in 1538, he encountered opposition to his inroads.

Charles obtained an order from the pope to raise taxes on church goods. Among other concessions made to him by Rome was the Cruzada bull (authorising consumption of bacon and eggs on fast days). Commerce and industry were terribly crippled. In 1526, Charles had recourse to his wife’s portion to defray war expenses; in 1527, his army not having received its pay, set out to ask the pope for that which the emperor did not give. In 1529, Charles, not being able to go to Italy for want of funds, ceded to Portugal for a large sum the Castilian rights in the Moluccas. He sold the fortresses of Florence and Leghorn for 150,000 ducats to Cosmo de’ Medici. In a little more he would have sold the pope the states of Milan and Siena. When all these resources were exhausted he had recourse to foreign loans. The uncertainty of public credit, the urgency of present needs obliged him to pay interest of ten, twenty, and fifty per cent. Is not this like the Spain of to-day--swallowing up the state revenues in advance?

By 1550, Charles had mortgaged the whole of his revenues--those of Castile for 800,000 ducats on the 920,000 they yielded; those of Naples and Sicily for 700,000 on the 800,000 which formed the revenue. Those of Milan, amounting to 400,000 ducats, were entirely mortgaged, also a large part of the Flemish revenues. All this without counting the sums coming from America, the amount of which has been so disputed that it is difficult to fix the value, but which must have been very considerable.

These usurious transactions ruined the country; their insufficiency compelled the emperor to make fresh demands for money, but no one would take his bond. Then foreigners, the only ones who would do so, acquired privileges which killed native commerce and industry. Thus the lenders had permission to export articles that Spaniards were forbidden to send abroad. They held also a monopoly for importations. Nearly all the home and Indian commerce came by these means into the hands of foreigners. All appeals were useless, the growing necessities of the prince made him deaf to the just complaints of his people. Thus there was no interior organisation, no real government under the military despotism of the first prince of the house of Habsburg. Charles V destroyed public liberty, corrupted the nobility, tyrannised, oppressed the people, destroyed industry and commerce, and lived only by expedients and usurious contracts. A strong, intelligent administration would have augmented the state revenue, by promoting general prosperity. Charles V abandoned Spain to all the vice, all the excess of avaricious despotism which dried up the sources of national prosperity.[n]

FOOTNOTES

[77] [The ducat may be taken as valuing approximately at 9_s._ 6_d._ or $2.30; it being remembered that gold purchased then much more than now--the usual theory being that it had seven times its present purchasing power.]

[78] [The name _germaneros_ was given to the rebels of Valencia who were organised into a “brotherhood” or _germania_, a word closely allied in sound and meaning to the Castilian _hermandad_ or “brotherhood.” The name _comuneros_ is simply the Castilian for “commoners.”]

[79] In the defence of Pamplona the celebrated Ignatius de Loyola received a wound in his leg. During his illness he resolved, if his life were spared, to found the order of Jesuits, both for the destruction of Lutheranism, and for the propagation of the Catholic religion among distant nations. See in an earlier volume the chapter on Monasticism.

[80] The warlike bishop of Zamora was confined to the prison of Simancas; there he committed a murder, and was hanged for it--a fit ending for so stormy and unprincipled a life.

[81] See Stirling,[h] Bakhuyzen van den Brink,[i] the works of Mignet[j] and Pichot,[k] and particularly the publication of M. Gachard,[l] in which last work the subject may be considered to have been fairly exhausted, and in which the text of Siguenza[g] and of the anonymous manuscript discovered by M. Bakhuyzen, in the _greffe_ of the court of appeals at Brussels, are placed in full before the reader, so far as they bear on the vexed question as to the celebration by the emperor of his own obsequies.