Books: The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555
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John Lothrop Motley >> The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555
The transfer of the other crowns and dignitaries to Philip, was
accomplished a month afterwards, in a quiet manner. Spain, Sicily, the
Balearic Islands, America, and other portions of the globe, were made
over without more display than an ordinary 'donatio inter vivos'. The
Empire occasioned some difficulty. It had been already signified to
Ferdinand, that his brother was to resign the imperial crown in his
favor, and the symbols of sovereignty were accordingly transmitted to him
by the hands of William of Orange. A deputation, moreover, of which that
nobleman, Vice-Chancellor Seld, and Dr. Wolfgang Haller were the chiefs,
was despatched to signify to the electors of the Empire the step which
had been thus resolved upon. A delay of more than two years, however,
intervened, occasioned partly by the deaths of three electors, partly by
the war which so soon broke out in Europe, before the matter was formally
acted upon. In February, 1553, however, the electors, having been
assembled in Frankfort, received the abdication of Charles, and proceeded
to the election of Ferdinand. That Emperor was crowned in March, and
immediately despatched a legation to the Pope to apprize him of the fact.
Nothing was less expected than any opposition on the part of the pontiff.
The querulous dotard, however, who then sat in St. Peter's chair, hated
Charles and all his race. He accordingly denied the validity of the
whole transaction, without sanction previously obtained from the Pope,
to whom all crowns belonged. Ferdinand, after listening, through his
envoys, to much ridiculous dogmatism on the part of the Pope, at last
withdrew from the discussion, with a formal protest, and was first
recognized by Caraffa's successor, Pius IV.
Charles had not deferred his retirement till the end of these disputes.
He occupied a private house in Brussels, near the gate of Louvain, until
August of the year 1556. On the 27th of that month, he addressed a
letter from Ghent to John of Osnabruck, president of the Chamber of
Spiers, stating his abdication in favor of Ferdinand, and requesting
that in the interim the same obedience might be rendered to Ferdinand,
as could have been yielded to himself. Ten days later; he addressed a
letter to the estates of the Empire, stating the same fact; and on the
17th September, 1556, he set sail from Zeland for Spain. These delays
and difficulties occasioned some misconceptions. Many persons who did
not admire an abdication, which others, on the contrary, esteemed as an
act of unexampled magnanimity, stoutly denied that it was the intention
of Charles to renounce the Empire. The Venetian envoy informed his
government that Ferdinand was only to be lieutenant for Charles, under
strict limitations, and that the Emperor was to resume the government so
soon as his health would allow. The Bishop of Arras and Don Juan de
Manrique had both assured him, he said, that Charles would not, on any
account, definitely abdicate. Manrique even asserted that it was a mere
farce to believe in any such intention. The Emperor ought to remain to
protect his son, by the resources of the Empire, against France, the
Turks, and the heretics. His very shadow was terrible to the Lutherans,
and his form might be expected to rise again in stern reality from its
temporary grave. Time has shown the falsity of all these imaginings,
but views thus maintained by those in the best condition to know the
truth, prove how difficult it was for men to believe in a transaction
which was then so extraordinary, and how little consonant it was in their
eyes with true propriety. It was necessary to ascend to the times of
Diocletian, to find an example of a similar abdication of empire, on so
deliberate and extensive a scale, and the great English historian of the
Roman Empire has compared the two acts with each other. But there seems
a vast difference between the cases. Both emperors were distinguished
soldiers; both were merciless persecutors of defenceless Christians; both
exchanged unbounded empire for absolute seclusion. But Diocletian was
born in the lowest abyss of human degradation--the slave and the son of
a slave. For such a man, after having reached the highest pinnacle of
human greatness, voluntarily to descend from power, seems an act of far
greater magnanimity than the retreat of Charles. 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 Landgraves of, Clever, 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 Frederic of Saxony, but it had been reserved for one
of that German race, which he characterized 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. The German lad who had learned both war and dissimulation
in the court and camp of him who was so profound a master of both arts,
was destined to eclipse his teacher on the most august theatre of
Christendom. Absorbed at Innspruck with the deliberations of the Trent
Council, Charles had not heeded the distant mutterings of the tempest
which was gathering around him. 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 Granvelle! Disguised as an old woman, the Emperor had attempted on
the 6th April, to escape in a peasant's wagon, from Innspruck 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 Fussen, again fled at midnight of the 22nd May, almost unattended,
sick in body and soul, in the midst of thunder, lightning, and rain,
along the difficult Alpine passes from Innspruck 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.
He had smitten the Protestants at Muhlberg for the last time. 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, Solyman 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. Ferdinand and
Maximilian had both stoutly resisted his arguments and his blandishments.
The father had represented the slender patrimony of their branch of the
family, compared with the enormous heritage of Philip; who, being after
all, but a man, and endowed with finite powers, might sink under so great
a pressure of empire as his father wished to provide for him. Maximilian,
also, assured his uncle that he had as good an appetite for the crown as
Philip, and could digest the dignity quite as easily. The son, too, for
whom the Emperor was thus solicitous, had already, before the abdication,
repaid his affection with ingratitude. He had turned out all his
father's old officials in Milan, and had refused to visit him at
Brussels, till assured as to the amount of ceremonial respect which the
new-made king was to receive at the hands of his father.
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 recognizing the fact that
neither his power nor his glory would be increased, should he lag
superfluous on the stage where 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. Moreover, it is well known that 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 had, when comparatively a young man, been
struck by the reply made to him by an aged officer, whose reasons he had
asked for, earnestly soliciting permission to retire from the imperial
service. It was, said the veteran, that he might put a little space of
religious contemplation between the active portion of his life and the
grave.
A similar determination, deferred from time to time, Charles had now
carried into execution. While he still lingered in Brussels, after his
abdication, a comet appeared, to warn him to the fulfilment of his
purpose. From first to last, comets and other heavenly bodies were much
connected with his evolutions and arrangements. There was no mistaking
the motives with which this luminary had presented itself. The Emperor
knew very well, says a contemporary German chronicler, that it portended
pestilence and war, together with the approaching death of mighty
princes. "My fates call out," he cried, and forthwith applied himself to
hasten the preparations for his departure.
The romantic picture of his philosophical retirement at Juste, painted
originally by Sandoval and Siguenza, reproduced by the fascinating pencil
of Strada, 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. 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 rigor and rude
chastisement;"--such explosions of savage bigotry as these, alternating
with exhibitions of revolting gluttony, with surfeits of sardine
omelettes, Estramadura 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 is the one which was painted from life.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Burned, strangled, beheaded, or buried alive (100,000)
Despot by birth and inclination (Charles V.)
Endure every hardship but hunger
Gallant and ill-fated Lamoral Egmont
He knew men, especially he knew their weaknesses
His imagination may have assisted his memory in the task
Little grievances would sometimes inflame more than vast
Often much tyranny in democracy
Planted the inquisition in the Netherlands