A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD BY H. G. WELLS
51.THE EMPEROR CHARLES V
The Holy Roman Empire came to a sort of climax in the reign of the Emperor Charles V. He was one of the most extraordinary monarchs that Europe has ever seen. For a time he had the air of being the greatest monarch since Charlemagne.
His greatness was not of his own making. It was largely the creation
of his grandfather, the Emperor Maximilian I (1459- 1519). Some
families have fought, others have intrigued their way to world power;
the Habsburgs married their way. Maximilian began his career with
Austria, Styria, part of Alsace and other districts, the original
Habsburg patrimony; he married—the lady’s name scarcely matters to
us—the Netherlands and Burgundy. Most of Burgundy slipped from him
after his first wife’s death, but the Netherlands he held. Then he
tried unsuccessfully to marry Brittany. He became Emperor in
succession to his father, Frederick III, in 1493, and married the duchy
of Milan. Finally he married his son to the weak-minded daughter of
Ferdinand and Isabella, the Ferdinand and Isabella of Columbus, who not
only reigned over a freshly united Spain and over Sardinia and the
kingdom of the two Sicilies, but over all America west of Brazil. So
it was that this Charles V, his grandson, inherited most of the
American continent and between a third and a half of what the Turks had
left of Europe. He succeeded to the Netherlands in 1506. When his
grandfather Ferdinand died in 1516, he became practically king of the
Spanish dominions, his mother being imbecile; and his grandfather
Maximilian dying in 1519, he was in 1520 elected Emperor at the still comparatively tender age of twenty.
He was a fair young man with a not very intelligent face, a thick upper
lip and a long clumsy chin. He found himself in a world of young and
vigorous personalities. It was an age of brilliant young monarchs.
Francis I had succeeded to the French throne in 1515 at the age of
twenty-one, Henry VIII had become King of England in 1509 at eighteen.
It was the age of Baber in India (1526-1530) and Suleiman the
Magnificent in Turkey (1520), both exceptionally capable monarchs, and
the Pope Leo X (1513) was also a very distinguished Pope. The Pope and
Francis I attempted to prevent the election of Charles as Emperor
because they dreaded the concentration of so much power in the hands of
one man. Both Francis I and Henry VIII offered themselves to the
imperial electors. But there was now a long established tradition of
Habsburg Emperors (since 1273), and some energetic bribery secured the election for Charles.
At first the young man was very much a magnificent puppet in the hands of his ministers. Then slowly he began to assert himself and take control. He began to realize something of the threatening complexities of his exalted position. It was a position as unsound as it was splendid.
From the very outset of his reign he was faced by the situation created
by Luther’s agitations in Germany. The Emperor had one reason for
siding with the reformers in the opposition of the Pope to his
election. But he had been brought up in Spain, that most Catholic of
countries, and he decided against Luther. So he came into conflict
with the Protestant princes and particularly the Elector of Saxony. He
found himself in the presence of an opening rift that was to split the
outworn fabric of Christendom into two contending camps. His attempts
to close that rift were strenuous and honest and ineffective. There
was an extensive peasant revolt in Germany which interwove with the
general political and religious disturbance. And these internal
troubles were complicated by attacks upon the Empire from east and west
alike. On the west of Charles was his spirited rival, Francis I; to
the east was the ever advancing Turk, who was now in Hungary, in
alliance with Francis and clamouring for certain arrears of tribute
from the Austrian dominions. Charles had the money and army of Spain
at his disposal, but it was extremely difficult to get any effective
support in money from Germany. His social and political troubles were complicated by financial distresses. He was forced to ruinous borrowing.
On the whole, Charles, in alliance with Henry VIII, was successful
against Francis I and the Turk. Their chief battlefield was North
Italy; the generalship was dull on both sides; their advances and
retreats depended mainly on the arrival of reinforcements. The German
army invaded France, failed to take Marseilles, fell back into Italy,
lost Milan, and was besieged in Pavia. Francis I made a long and
unsuccessful siege of Pavia, was caught by fresh German forces,
defeated, wounded and taken prisoner. But thereupon the Pope and Henry
VIII, still haunted by the fear of his attaining excessive power,
turned against Charles. The German troops in Milan, under the
Constable of Bourbon, being unpaid, forced rather than followed their
commander into a raid upon Rome. They stormed the city and pillaged it
(1527). The Pope took refuge in the Castle of St. Angelo while the
looting and slaughter went on. He bought off the German troops at last
by the payment of four hundred thousand ducats. Ten years of such
confused fighting impoverished all Europe. At last the Emperor found
himself triumphant in Italy. In 1530, he was crowned by the Pope—he
was the last German Emperor to be so crowned—at Bologna.
Meanwhile the Turks were making great headway in Hungary. They had
defeated and killed the king of Hungary in 1526, they held Buda-Pesth,
and in 1529 Suleiman the Magnificent very nearly took Vienna. The
Emperor was greatly concerned by these advances, and did his utmost to
drive back the Turks, but he found the greatest difficulty in getting
the German princes to unite even with this formidable enemy upon their
very borders. Francis I remained implacable for a time, and there was
a new French war; but in 1538 Charles won his rival over to a more
friendly attitude after ravaging the south of France. Francis and
Charles then formed an alliance against the Turk. But the Protestant
princes, the German princes who were resolved to break away from Rome,
had formed a league, the Schmalkaldic League, against the Emperor, and
in the place of a great campaign to recover Hungary for Christendom
Charles had to turn his mind to the gathering internal struggle in
Germany. Of that struggle he saw only the opening war. It was a
struggle, a sanguinary irrational bickering of princes, for ascendancy,
now flaming into war and destruction, now sinking back to intrigues and
diplomacies; it was a snake’s sack of princely policies that was to go
on writhing incurably right into the nineteenth century and to waste
and desolate Central Europe again and again.
The Emperor never seems to have grasped the true forces at work in
these gathering troubles. He was for his time and station an
exceptionally worthy man, and he seems to have taken the religious
dissensions that were tearing Europe into warring fragments as genuine
theological differences. He gathered diets and councils in futile
attempts at reconciliation. Formulæ and confessions were tried over.
The student of German history must struggle with the details of the
Religious Peace of Nuremberg, the settlement at the Diet of Ratisbon,
the Interim of Augsburg, and the like. Here we do but mention them as
details in the worried life of this culminating Emperor. As a matter
of fact, hardly one of the multifarious princes and rulers in Europe
seems to have been acting in good faith. The widespread religious
trouble of the world, the desire of the common people for truth and
social righteousness, the spreading knowledge of the time, all those
things were merely counters in the imaginations of princely diplomacy.
Henry VIII of England, who had begun his career with a book against
heresy, and who had been rewarded by the Pope with the title of
“Defender of the Faith,” being anxious to divorce his first wife in
favour of a young lady named Anne Boleyn, and wishing also to loot the
vast wealth of the church in England, joined the company of Protestant
princes in 1530. Sweden, Denmark and Norway had already gone over to the Protestant side.
The German religious war began in 1546, a few months after the death of
Martin Luther. We need not trouble about the incidents of the
campaign. The Protestant Saxon army was badly beaten at Lochau. By
something very like a breach of faith Philip of Hesse, the Emperor’s
chief remaining antagonist, was caught and imprisoned, and the Turks
were bought off by the promise of an annual tribute. In 1547, to the
great relief of the Emperor, Francis I died. So by 1547 Charles got to
a kind of settlement, and made his last efforts to effect peace where
there was no peace. In 1552 all Germany was at war again, only a
precipitate flight from Innsbruck saved Charles from capture, and in
1552, with the treaty of Passau, came another unstable equilibrium..
Such is the brief outline of the politics of the Empire for thirty-two
years. It is interesting to note how entirely the European mind was
concentrated upon the struggle for European ascendancy. Neither Turks,
French, English nor Germans had yet discovered any political interest
in the great continent of America, nor any significance in the new sea
routes to Asia. Great things were happening in America; Cortez with a
mere handful of men had conquered the great Neolithic empire of Mexico
for Spain, Pizarro had crossed the Isthmus of Panama (1530) and
subjugated another wonder-land, Peru. But as yet these events meant no
more to Europe than a useful and stimulating influx of silver to the
Spanish treasury.
It was after the treaty of Passau that Charles began to display his
distinctive originality of mind. He was now entirely bored and
disillusioned by his imperial greatness. A sense of the intolerable
futility of these European rivalries came upon him. He had never been
of a very sound constitution, he was naturally indolent and he was
suffering greatly from gout. He abdicated. He made over all his
sovereign rights in Germany to his brother Ferdinand, and Spain and the
Netherlands he resigned to his son Philip. Then in a sort of
magnificent dudgeon he retired to a monastery at Yuste, among the oak
and chestnut forests in the hills to the north of the Tagus valley.
There he died in 1558.
Much has been written in a sentimental vein of this retirement, this
renunciation of the world by this tired majestic Titan, world-weary,
seeking in an austere solitude his peace with God. But his retreat was
neither solitary nor austere; he had with him nearly a hundred and
fifty attendants: his establishment had all the splendour and
indulgences without the fatigues or a court, and Philip II was a
dutiful son to whom his father’s advice was a command.
And if Charles had lost his living interest in the administration of
European affairs, there were other motives of a more immediate sort to
stir him. Says Prescott: “In the almost daily correspondence between
Quixada, or Gaztelu, and the Secretary of State at Valladolid, there is
scarcely a letter that does not turn more or less on the Emperor’s
eating or his illness. The one seems naturally to follow, like a
running commentary, on the other. It is rare that such topics have
formed the burden of communications with the department of state. It
must have been no easy matter for the secretary to preserve his gravity
in the perusal of despatches in which politics and gastronomy were so
strangely mixed together. The courier from Valladolid to Lisbon was
ordered to make a detour, so as to take Jarandilla in his route, and
bring supplies to the royal table. On Thursdays he was to bring fish
to serve for the jour maigre that was to follow. The trout in the
neighbourhood Charles thought too small, so others of a larger size
were to be sent from Valladolid. Fish of every kind was to his taste,
as, indeed, was anything that in its nature or habits at all approached
to fish. Eels, frogs, oysters, occupied an important place in the
royal bill of fare. Potted fish, especially anchovies, found great
favour with him; and he regretted that he had not brought a better
supply of these from the Low Countries. On an eel-pasty he
particularly doted.”
In 1554 Charles had obtained a bull from Pope Julius III granting him a
dispensation from fasting, and allowing him to break his fast early in
the morning even when he was to take the sacrament.
Eating and doctoring! it was a return to elemental things. He had never
acquired the habit of reading, but he would be read aloud to at meals
after the fashion of Charlemagne, and would make what one narrator
describes as a “sweet and heavenly commentary.” He also amused himself
with mechanical toys, by listening to music or sermons, and by
attending to the imperial business that still came drifting in to him.
The death of the Empress, to whom he was greatly attached, had turned
his mind towards religion, which in his case took a punctilious and
ceremonial form; every Friday in Lent he scourged himself with the rest
of the monks with such good will as to draw blood. These exercises and
the gout released a bigotry in Charles that had hitherto been
restrained by considerations of policy. The appearance of Protestant
teaching close at hand in Valladolid roused him to fury. “Tell the
grand inquisitor and his council from me to be at their posts, and to
lay the axe at the root of the evil before it spreads further.” . .. He
expressed a doubt whether it would not be well, in so black an affair,
to dispense with the ordinary course of justice, and to show no mercy;
“lest the criminal, if pardoned, should have the opportunity of
repeating his crime.” He recommended, as an example, his own mode or
proceeding in the Netherlands, “where all who remained obstinate in
their errors were burned alive, and those who were admitted to
penitence were beheaded.”
And almost symbolical of his place and role in history was his
preoccupation with funerals. He seems to have had an intuition that
something great was dead in Europe and sorely needed burial, that there
was a need to write Finis, overdue. He not only attended every actual
funeral that was celebrated at Yuste, but he had services conducted for
the absent dead, he held a funeral service in memory of his wife on the
anniversary of her death, and finally he celebrated his own obsequies.
“The chapel was hung with black, and the blaze of hundreds of
wax-lights was scarcely sufficient to dispel the darkness. The
brethren in their conventual dress, and all the Emperor’s household
clad in deep mourning, gathered round a huge catafalque, shrouded also
in black, which had been raised in the centre of the chapel. The
service for the burial of the dead was then performed; and, amidst the
dismal wail of the monks, the prayers ascended for the departed spirit,
that it might be received into the mansions of the blessed. The
sorrowful attendants were melted to tears, as the image of their
master’s death was presented to their minds—or they were touched, it
may be, with compassion by this pitiable display of weakness. Charles,
muffled in a dark mantle, and bearing a lighted candle in his hand,
mingled with his household, the spectator of his own obsequies; and the
doleful ceremony was concluded by his placing the taper in the hands of
the priest, in sign of his surrendering up his soul to the Almighty.”
Within two months of this masquerade he was dead. And the brief
greatness of the Holy Roman Empire died with him. His realm was
already divided between his brother and his son. The Holy Roman Empire struggled on indeed to the days of Napoleon I but as an invalid and dying thing. To this day its unburied tradition still poisons the political air.