Books: The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555
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John Lothrop Motley >> The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555
The orations and replies having now been brought to a close, the ceremony
was terminated. The Emperor, leaning on the shoulders of the Prince of
Orange and of the Count de Buren, slowly left the hall, followed by
Philip, the Queen of Hungary, and the whole court; all in the same order
in which they had entered, and by the same passage into the chapel.
It is obvious that the drama had been completely successful. It had been
a scene where heroic self-sacrifice, touching confidence, ingenuous love
of duty, patriotism, and paternal affection upon one side; filial
reverence, with a solemn regard for public duty and the highest interests
of the people on the other, were supposed to be the predominant
sentiments. The happiness of the Netherlands was apparently the only
object contemplated in the great transaction. All had played well their
parts in the past, all hoped the best in the times which were to follow.
The abdicating Emperor was looked upon as a hero and a prophet. The
stage was drowned in tears. There is not the least doubt as to the
genuine and universal emotion which was excited throughout the assembly.
"Caesar's oration," says Secretary Godelaevus, who was present at the
ceremony, "deeply moved the nobility and gentry, many of whom burst into
tears; even the illustrious Knights of the Fleece were melted." The
historian, Pontus Heuterus, who, then twenty years of age, was likewise
among the audience, attests that "most of the assembly were dissolved in
tears; uttering the while such sonorous sobs that they compelled his
Caesarean Majesty and the Queen to cry with them. My own face," he adds,
"was certainly quite wet." The English envoy, Sir John Mason, describing
in a despatch to his government the scene which he had just witnessed,
paints the same picture. "The Emperor," he said, "begged the forgiveness
of his subjects if he had ever unwittingly omitted the performance of any
of his duties towards them. And here," continues the envoy, "he broke
into a weeping, whereunto, besides the dolefulness of the matter,
I think, he was moche provoked by seeing the whole company to do the lyke
before; there beyng in myne opinion not one man in the whole assemblie,
stranger or another, that dewring the time of a good piece of his oration
poured not out as abundantly teares, some more, some lesse. And yet he
prayed them to beare with his imperfections, proceeding of his sickly
age, and of the mentioning of so tender a matter as the departing from
such a sort of dere and loving subjects."
And yet what was the Emperor Charles to the inhabitants of the
Netherlands that they should weep for him? His conduct towards them
during his whole career had been one of unmitigated oppression. What to
them were all these forty voyages by sea and land, these journeyings back
and forth from Friesland to Tunis, from Madrid to Vienna. What was it to
them that the imperial shuttle was thus industriously flying to and fro?
The fabric wrought was but the daily growing grandeur and splendor of his
imperial house; the looms were kept moving at the expense of their
hardly-earned treasure, and the woof was often dyed red in the blood of
his bravest subjects. The interests of the Netherlands had never been
even a secondary consideration with their master. He had fulfilled no
duty towards them, he had committed the gravest crimes against them. He
had regarded them merely as a treasury upon which to draw; while the sums
which he extorted were spent upon ceaseless and senseless wars, which
were of no more interest to them than if they had been waged in another
planet. Of five millions of gold annually, which he derived from all his
realms, two millions came from these industrious and opulent provinces,
while but a half million came from Spain and another half from the
Indies. The mines of wealth which had been opened by the hand of
industry in that slender territory of ancient morass and thicket,
contributed four times as much income to the imperial exchequer as all
the boasted wealth of Mexico and Peru. Yet the artisans, the farmers and
the merchants, by whom these riches were produced, were consulted about
as much in the expenditure of the imposts upon their industry as were the
savages of America as to the distribution of the mineral treasures of
their soil. The rivalry of the houses of Habsburg and Valois, this was
the absorbing theme, during the greater part of the reign which had just
been so dramatically terminated. To gain the empire over Francis, to
leave to Don Philip a richer heritage than the Dauphin could expect, were
the great motives of the unparalleled energy displayed by Charles during
the longer and the more successful portion of his career. To crush the
Reformation throughout his dominions, was his occupation afterward, till
he abandoned the field in despair. It was certainly not desirable for
the Netherlanders that they should be thus controlled by a man who forced
them to contribute so largely to the success of schemes, some of which
were at best indifferent, and others entirely odious to them. They paid
1,200,000 crowns a year regularly; they paid in five years an
extraordinary subsidy of eight millions of ducats, and the States were
roundly rebuked by the courtly representatives of their despot, if they
presumed to inquire into the objects of the appropriations, or to express
an interest in their judicious administration. Yet it maybe supposed to
have been a matter of indifference to them whether Francis or Charles had
won the day at Pavia, and it certainly was not a cause of triumph to the
daily increasing thousands of religious reformers in Holland and Flanders
that their brethren had been crushed by the Emperor at Muhlberg. But it
was not alone that he drained their treasure, and hampered their
industry. He was in constant conflict with their ancient and dearly-
bought political liberties. Like his ancestor Charles the Bold, he was
desirous of constructing a kingdom out of the provinces. He was disposed
to place all their separate and individual charters on a procrustean bed,
and shape them all into uniformity simply by reducing the whole to a
nullity. The difficulties in the way, the stout opposition offered by
burghers, whose fathers had gained these charters with their blood, and
his want of leisure during the vast labors which devolved upon him as the
autocrat of so large a portion of the world, caused him to defer
indefinitely the execution of his plan. He found time only to crush some
of the foremost of the liberal institutions of the provinces, in detail.
He found the city of Tournay a happy, thriving, self-governed little
republic in all its local affairs; he destroyed its liberties, without a
tolerable pretext, and reduced it to the condition of a Spanish or
Italian provincial town.
His memorable chastisement of Ghent for having dared to assert its
ancient rights of self-taxation, is sufficiently known to the world, and
has been already narrated at length. Many other instances might be
adduced, if it were not a superfluous task, to prove that Charles was not
only a political despot, but most arbitrary and cruel in the exercise of
his despotism.
But if his sins against the Netherlands had been only those of financial
and political oppression, it would be at least conceivable, although
certainly not commendable, that the inhabitants should have regretted his
departure. But there are far darker crimes for which he stands arraigned
at the bar of history, and it is indeed strange that the man who had
committed them should have been permitted to speak his farewell amid
blended plaudits and tears. His hand planted the inquisition in the
Netherlands. Before his day it is idle to say that the diabolical
institution ever had a place there. The isolated cases in which
inquisitors had exercised functions proved the absence and not the
presence of the system, and will be discussed in a later chapter.
Charles introduced and organized a papal inquisition, side by side with
those terrible "placards" of his invention, which constituted a masked
inquisition even more cruel than that of Spain. The execution of the
system was never permitted to languish. The number of Netherlanders who
were burned, strangled, beheaded, or buried alive, in obedience to his
edicts, and for the offences of reading the Scriptures, of looking
askance at a graven image, or of ridiculing the actual presence of the
body and blood of Christ in a wafer, have been placed as high as one
hundred thousand by distinguished authorities, and have never been put at
a lower mark than fifty thousand. The Venetian envoy Navigero placed the
number of victims in the provinces of Holland and Friesland alone at
thirty thousand, and this in 1546, ten years before the abdication, and
five before the promulgation of the hideous edict of 1550!
The edicts and the inquisition were the gift 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 his
sacrilegious hands 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 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 for burning
the reformers 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
nonconformity. 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 crossbow 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 were 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 a 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 every where. 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 bedridden
man arose from his sick-bed to smite the Protestants at Muhlberg; the
grim stoicism with which he saw sixty thousand of his own soldiers perish
in the wintry siege of Metz; all ensured 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 marshalling and victualling 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 and 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 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 villany 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 the First, 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 Muhlberg,
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 any thing 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 specialities 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.
His personal habits during the greater part of his life were those of an
indefatigable soldier. He could remain in the saddle day and night, and
endure every hardship but hunger. He was addicted to vulgar and
miscellaneous incontinence. He was an enormous eater. He breakfasted at
five, on a fowl seethed in milk and dressed with sugar and spices. After
this he went to sleep again. He dined at twelve, partaking always of
twenty dishes. He supped twice; at first, soon after vespers, and the
second time at midnight or one o'clock, which meal was, perhaps, the most
solid of the four. After meat he ate a great quantity of pastry and
sweetmeats, and he irrigated every repast by vast draughts of beer and
wine. His stomach, originally a wonderful one, succumbed after forty
years of such labors. His taste, but not his appetite began to fail, and
he complained to his majordomo, that all his food was insipid. The reply
is, perhaps, among the most celebrated of facetia. The cook could do
nothing more unless he served his Majesty a pasty of watches. The
allusion to the Emperor's passion for horology was received with great
applause. Charles "laughed longer than he was ever known to laugh
before, and all the courtiers (of course) laughed as long as his
Majesty." [Badovaro] The success of so sorry a jest would lead one to
suppose that the fooling was less admirable at the imperial court than
some of the recorded quips of Tribaulet would lead us to suppose.