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.
INTERIOR OF ST. PETER’S, ROME, SHOWING THE HIGH ALTAR
INTERIOR OF ST. PETER’S, ROME, SHOWING THE HIGH ALTAR
_Photo: Alinari_
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.” ... [1]
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.
[1] Prescott’s Appendix to Robertson’s _History of Charles V_.
LII
THE AGE OF POLITICAL EXPERIMENTS; OF GRAND MONARCHY AND PARLIAMENTS AND
REPUBLICANISM IN EUROPE
The Latin Church was broken, the Holy Roman Empire was in extreme
decay; the history of Europe from the opening of the sixteenth century
onward is a story of peoples feeling their way darkly to some new
method of government, better adapted to the new conditions that were
arising. In the Ancient World, over long periods of time, there had
been changes of dynasty and even changes of ruling race and language,
but the form of government through monarch and temple remained fairly
stable, and still more stable was the ordinary way of living. In this
modern Europe since the sixteenth century the dynastic changes are
unimportant, and the interest of history lies in the wide and
increasing variety of experiments in political and social organization.
The political history of the world from the sixteenth century onward
was, we have said, an effort, a largely unconscious effort, of mankind
to adapt its political and social methods to certain new conditions
that had now arisen. The effort to adapt was complicated by the fad
that the conditions themselves were changing with a steadily increasing
rapidity. The adaptation, mainly unconscious and almost always
unwilling (for man in general hates voluntary change), has lagged more
and more behind the alterations in conditions. From the sixteenth
century onward the history of mankind is a story of political and
social institutions becoming more and more plainly misfits, less
comfortable and more vexatious, and of the slow reluctant realization
of the need for a conscious and deliberate reconstruction of the whole
scheme of human societies in the face of needs and possibilities new to
all the former experiences of life.
What are these changes in the conditions of human life that have
disorganized that balance of empire, priest, peasant and trader, with
periodic refreshment by barbaric conquest, that has held human affairs
in the Old World in a sort of working rhythm for more than a hundred
centuries?
They are manifold and various, for human affairs are multitudinously
complex; but the main changes seem all to turn upon one cause, namely
the growth and extension of a knowledge of the nature of things,
beginning first of all in small groups of intelligent people and
spreading at first slowly, and in the last five hundred years very
rapidly, to larger and larger proportions of the general population.
But there has also been a great change in human conditions due to a
change in the spirit of human life. This change has gone on side by
side with the increase and extension of knowledge, and is subtly
connected with it. There has been an increasing disposition to treat a
life based on the common and more elementary desires and gratifications
as unsatisfactory, and to seek relationship with and service and
participation in a larger life. This is the common characteristic of
all the great religions that have spread throughout the world in the
last twenty odd centuries, Buddhism, Christianity and Islam alike.
They have had to do with the spirit of man in a way that the older
religions did not have to do. They are forces quite different in their
nature and effect from the old fetishistic blood-sacrifice religions of
priest and temple that they have in part modified and in part replaced.
They have gradually evolved a self-respect in the individual and a
sense of participation and responsibility in the common concerns of
mankind that did not exist among the populations of the earlier
civilizations.
The first considerable change in the conditions of political and social
life was the simplification and extended use of writing in the ancient
civilizations which made larger empires and wider political
understandings practicable and inevitable. The next movement forward
came with the introduction of the horse, and later on of the camel as a
means of transport, the use of wheeled vehicles, the extension of roads
and the increased military efficiency due to the discovery of
terrestrial iron. Then followed the profound economic disturbances due
to the device of coined money and the change in the nature of debt,
proprietorship and trade due to this convenient but dangerous
convention. The empires grew in size and range, and men’s ideas grew
likewise to correspond with these things. Came the disappearance of
local gods, the age of theocrasia, and the teaching of the great world
religions. Came also the beginnings of reasoned and recorded history
and geography, the first realization by man of his profound ignorance,
and the first systematic search for knowledge.
For a time the scientific process which began so brilliantly in Greece
and Alexandria was interrupted. The raids of the Teutonic barbarians,
the westward drive of the Mongolian peoples, convulsive religious
reconstruction and great pestilences put enormous strains upon
political and social order. When civilization emerged again from this
phase of conflict and confusion, slavery was no longer the basis of
economic life; and the first paper-mills were preparing a new medium
for collective information and co-operation in printed matter.
Gradually at this point and that, the search for knowledge, the
systematic scientific process, was resumed.
And now from the sixteenth century onward, as an inevitable by-product
of systematic thought, appeared a steadily increasing series of
inventions and devices affecting the intercommunication and interaction
of men with one another. They all tended towards wider range of action,
greater mutual benefits or injuries, and increased co-operation, and
they came faster and faster. Men’s minds had not been prepared for
anything of the sort, and until the great catastrophes at the beginning
of the twentieth century quickened men’s minds, the historian has very
little to tell of any intelligently planned attempts to meet the new
conditions this increasing flow of inventions was creating. The history
of mankind for the last four centuries is rather like that of an
imprisoned sleeper, stirring clumsily and uneasily while the prison
that restrains and shelters him catches fire, not waking but
incorporating the crackling and warmth of the fire with ancient and
incongruous dreams, than like that of a man consciously awake to danger
and opportunity.
Since history is the story not of individual lives but of communities,
it is inevitable that the inventions that figure most in the historical
record are inventions affecting communications. In the sixteenth
century the chief new things that we have to note are the appearance of
printed paper and the sea-worthy, ocean-going sailing ship using the
new device of the mariner’s compass. The former cheapened, spread, and
revolutionized teaching, public information and discussion, and the
fundamental operations of political activity. The latter made the
round world one. But almost equally important was the increased
utilization and improvement of guns and gunpowder which the Mongols had
first brought westward in the thirteenth century. This destroyed the
practical immunity of barons in their castles and of walled cities.
Guns swept away feudalism. Constantinople fell to guns. Mexico and
Peru fell before the terror of the Spanish guns.
CROMWELL DISSOLVES THE LONG PARLIAMENT AND SO BECOMES AUTOCRAT OF THE
ENGLISH REPUBLIC
CROMWELL DISSOLVES THE LONG PARLIAMENT AND SO BECOMES AUTOCRAT OF THE
ENGLISH REPUBLIC
_(From a contemporary satirical print in the British Museum)_
The seventeenth century saw the development of systematic scientific
publication, a less conspicuous but ultimately far more pregnant
innovation. Conspicuous among the leaders in this great forward step
was Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) afterwards Lord Verulam, Lord
Chancellor of England. He was the pupil and perhaps the mouthpiece of
another Englishman; Dr. Gilbert, the experimental philosopher of
Colchester (1540-1603). This second Bacon, like the first, preached
observation and experiment, and he used the inspiring and fruitful form
of a Utopian story, _The New Atlantis_, to express his dream of a great
service of scientific research.
Presently arose the Royal Society of London, the Florentine Society,
and later other national bodies for the encouragement of research and
the publication and exchange of knowledge. These European scientific
societies became fountains not only of countless inventions but also of
a destructive criticism of the grotesque theological history of the
world that had dominated and crippled human thought for many centuries.
Neither the seventeenth nor the eighteenth century witnessed any
innovations so immediately revolutionary in human conditions as printed
paper and the ocean-going ship, but there was a steady accumulation of
knowledge and scientific energy that was to bear its full fruits in the
nineteenth century. The exploration and mapping of the world went on.
Tasmania, Australia, New Zealand appeared on the map. In Great Britain
in the eighteenth century coal coke began to be used for metallurgical
purposes, leading to a considerable cheapening of iron and to the
possibility of casting and using it in larger pieces than had been
possible before, when it had been smelted with wood charcoal. Modern
machinery dawned.
Like the trees of the celestial city, science bears bud and flower and
fruit at the same time and continuously. With the onset of the
nineteenth century the real fruition of science—which indeed henceforth
may never cease—began. First came steam and steel, the railway, the
great liner, vast bridges and buildings, machinery of almost limitless
power, the possibility of a bountiful satisfaction of every material
human need, and then, still more wonderful, the hidden treasures of
electrical science were opened to men ....
We have compared the political and social life of man from the
sixteenth century onward to that of a sleeping prisoner who lies and
dreams while his prison burns about him. In the sixteenth century the
European mind was still going on with its Latin Imperial dream, its
dream of a Holy Roman Empire, united under a Catholic Church. But just
as some uncontrollable element in our composition will insist at times
upon introducing into our dreams the most absurd and destructive
comments, so thrust into this dream we find the sleeping face and
craving stomach of the Emperor Charles V, while Henry VIII of England
and Luther tear the unity of Catholicism to shreds.
THE COURT AT VERSAILLES
THE COURT AT VERSAILLES
_(From the print after Watteau in the British Museum)_
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the dream turned to
personal monarchy. The history of nearly all Europe during this period
tells with variations the story of an attempt to consolidate a
monarchy, to make it absolute and to extend its power over weaker
adjacent regions, and of the steady resistance, first of the landowners
and then with the increase of foreign trade and home industry, of the
growing trading and moneyed class, to the exaction and interference of
the crown. There is no universal victory of either side; here it is
the King who gets the upper hand while there it is the man of private
property who beats the King. In one case we find a King becoming the
sun and centre of his national world, while just over his borders a
sturdy mercantile class maintains a republic. So wide a range of
variation shows how entirely experimental, what local accidents, were
all the various governments of this period.
A very common figure in these national dramas is the King’s minister,
often in the still Catholic countries a prelate, who stands behind the
King, serves him and dominates him by his indispensable services.
Here in the limits set to us it is impossible to tell these various
national dramas in detail. The trading folk of Holland went Protestant
and republican, and cast off the rule of Philip II of Spain, the son of
the Emperor Charles V. In England Henry VIII and his minister Wolsey,
Queen Elizabeth and her minister Burleigh, prepared the foundations of
an absolutism that was wrecked by the folly of James I and Charles I.
Charles I was beheaded for treason to his people (1649), a new turn in
the political thought of Europe. For a dozen years (until 1660)
Britain was a republic; and the crown was an unstable power, much
overshadowed by Parliament, until George III (1760-1820) made a
strenuous and partly successful effort to restore its predominance.
The King of France, on the other hand, was the most successful of all
the European Kings in perfecting monarchy. Two great ministers,
Richelieu (1585-1642) and Mazarin (1602-1661), built up the power of
the crown in that country, and the process was aided by the long reign
and very considerable abilities of King Louis XIV, “the Grand Monarque”
(1643-1715).
Louis XIV was indeed the pattern King of Europe. He was, within his
limitations, an exceptionally capable King; his ambition was stronger
than his baser passions, and he guided his country towards bankruptcy
through the complication of a spirited foreign policy with an elaborate
dignity that still extorts our admiration. His immediate desire was to
consolidate and extend France to the Rhine and Pyrenees, and to absorb
the Spanish Netherlands; his remoter view saw the French Kings as the
possible successors of Charlemagne in a recast Holy Roman Empire. He
made bribery a state method almost more important than warfare.
Charles II of England was in his pay, and so were most of the Polish
nobility, presently to be described. His money, or rather the money of
the tax- paying classes in France, went everywhere. But his prevailing
occupation was splendour. His great palace at Versailles with its
salons, its corridors, its mirrors, its terraces and fountains and
parks and prospects, was the envy and admiration of the world.
THE SACK OF A VILLAGE DURING THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
THE SACK OF A VILLAGE DURING THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
_(From Callot’s “Miseres de la Guerre”) _
He provoked a universal imitation. Every king and princelet in Europe
was building his own Versailles as much beyond his means as his
subjects and credits would permit. Everywhere the nobility rebuilt or
extended their chateaux to the new pattern. A great industry of
beautiful and elaborate fabrics and furnishings developed. The
luxurious arts flourished everywhere; sculpture in alabaster, faience,
gilt woodwork, metal work, stamped leather, much music, magnificent
painting, beautiful printing and bindings, fine crockery, fine
vintages. Amidst the mirrors and fine furniture went a strange race of
“gentlemen” in tall powdered wigs, silks and laces, poised upon high
red heels, supported by amazing canes; and still more wonderful
“ladies,” under towers of powdered hair and wearing vast expansions of
silk and satin sustained on wire. Through it all postured the great
Louis, the sun of his world, unaware of the meagre and sulky and bitter
faces that watched him from those lower darknesses to which his
sunshine did not penetrate.
Map: Central Europe after the Peace of Westphalia, 1648