CHARLES I AND PHILIP II.
Charles, elder son of Juana, and grandson of Isabella and Ferdinand,
was born in the year 1500, at Ghent, and all his life held an affection
for the people of his native land, which the Spaniards never shared.
Still, he was virtually King of Spain at the death of his grandfather
Ferdinand, and his mother, owing to her lunacy, only nominally queen.
Henceforth, for more than half a century, this grandson of the King of
Aragon and Queen of Castile appears the dominant figure, the greatest
ruler, in Europe. “It has been said that Charles had more power for
good or ill in Europe than has been exercised by any man since the
reign of Augustus; and that, on the whole, he did as much harm with it
as could possibly be done.”
This is the verdict of an impartial historian, and seems borne out
by the facts, for his long reign was chiefly one of war, and waged
more for personal aggrandizement than for reasons of state. He was
seventeen years of age when he first entered Spain, the year following
Ferdinand’s death, and eighteen when proclaimed king at Valladolid.
The interregnum had been skilfully bridged by Cardinal Ximenes,
who had vigorously suppressed various insurrections caused by the
dissatisfaction of the nobles and the people at the introduction of a
host of foreigners, greedy and rapacious, from the Flemish country.
Notwithstanding the great services of the octogenarian Ximenes, who
had so faithfully served not alone the young prince, but before him
his mother and grandparents, he sent him a frivolous letter containing
implied reproof, which reached the cardinal either just before or just
after his demise, which occurred in November, 1517. Adrian of Utrecht,
subsequently Pope, succeeded Ximenes, under whom Charles’s forces met
and overcame the rebels, headed by Juan de Padilla, in 1522.
In January, 1519, another great personage departed this life, in the
death of Maximilian, Emperor of Germany, paternal grandfather of the
young King of Spain, upon whom, in June of the same year, was bestowed
the imperial crown. He was thus at nineteen years of age, as Charles
V of Germany and Charles I of Spain, sovereign over a vastly wider
realm than any Castilian king had ever dreamed of conquering. From
his father, Philip, he had inherited dominion over the Netherlands
and Franche–Comté; through his mother and from Ferdinand the kingdoms
of Spain; and now, by the Diet of Frankfort, he was made Emperor of
Germany. It may be said that with his coronation at Aix–la–Chapelle, in
October, 1520, his troubles really began; for Francis, the French king,
also young and powerful, urged a right to the crown; and henceforth,
until the death of the latter, in 1547, there was enmity between them.
That same year occurred the famous meeting on the Field of the Cloth of
Gold, between French Francis and Henry VIII of England; but not long
after Henry was fighting as an ally of Charles against the King of
France. To recount their quarrels and battles would be too wearisome
as well as fruitless a task; but they culminated at the famous battle
of Pavia, when the French king’s army was routed, and Francis himself
taken prisoner by the Spaniards, in 1524. He was not released until he
had forfeited his claims to Charles’s possessions in Burgundy, etc.,
and returned to France in January, 1526, after signing the Treaty of
Madrid, and leaving as hostages two of his sons.
But Francis did not respect his promises, and soon there was war again
between the two, more battles, more signing of treaties, more shedding
of blood and devastation of territories, until the war–worn subjects
of both sovereigns were weary of a conflict in which they obtained no
gains and shared no profits. Especially were the Spaniards wroth at
being repeatedly called upon to donate funds and men, men and funds,
for the carrying on of foreign wars. Yet they rarely rebelled, and only
grumbled and protested when the Cortes was called, knowing that it
meant only more money for the king and his favourites, more sacrifices
at the feet of Moloch the insatiate. Through all the years of his reign
Charles was carrying on war of another kind, also, with the enemies
of the Romish Church. Simultaneously with his coronation as Emperor
of Germany rose the apparition of Protestantism in the person of the
redoubtable Luther; and the assembling of the Diet of Worms, for the
discussion and extermination of Lutheranism, was one of the first acts
of the young sovereign, in January, 1521. It was an unequal fight, that
between the poor peasant–priest Luther and the mighty emperor; yet,
though the former died in 1541, his cause eventually won—as all the
world knows—and not all Charles’s efforts could strangle in its cradle
the young giant of Reformation.
At the age of twenty–six Charles married Isabella of Portugal, a
beautiful princess, to whom he was much attached, and who became the
mother of his only legitimate son, Philip II, who was born in 1527.
That same year Charles was called upon to wage another little war with
Francis, who had broken his pledges and formed a league with Henry of
England and the Pope. The Spanish armies, under lead of the recreant
Constable of Bourbon, overran Italian territories, took and sacked the
city of Rome, committing every imaginable excess, and ending by making
the Pope himself a prisoner. Although his own army had committed this
sacrilege, Charles pretended to be grieved at the event, particularly
at the indignity offered to the person of the Pope; but only three
years later he had the imperial crown set upon his brow by this same
Pope Clement, who had only regained his liberty by the payment of a
heavy ransom.
The treaty then signed by the hitherto hostile belligerents, called the
Peace of Cambrai, was probably hastened by the threatened invasion
of western Europe by the Mohammedans under Soleyman the Magnificent;
and it was this fear also that caused Charles to treat his Protestant
subjects so leniently in Germany, when in Spain they would all have
been burned at the stake or put to the sword. But he needed their
valiant arms in opposing the Moslems of Turkey in their victorious
progress; hence they were temporarily spared, to grow eventually into a
body politic of such proportions that, to his sorrow, they eventually
overcame him. He, however, vindicated his claim to be considered the
champion of Christendom, in 1535, by organizing an expedition against
Barbarossa, the pirate king, and liberating hundreds of Christians
confined in the dungeons of Tunis. Another attempt upon Algiers, in
1541, resulted in the dispersion of the Spanish fleet by a storm, and
disastrous defeat. The year 1536 was made memorable to the citizens of
Ghent because, having refused to furnish their quota for carrying on
the wars in France, they were treated by Charles as rebels and punished
with terrible severity.
In 1540 Loyola established in Spain the order of Jesuits, which
subsequently came to have such influence in religious and political
affairs. The French king in 1542 renewed hostilities, and after two
years of warfare a peace was declared, in 1544. About this time it
seemed to Charles that the occasion was ripe for a war of extermination
against his Protestant subjects of Germany. At first he triumphed over
their large and well–equipped armies, in 1547 defeating the Elector
of Saxony and taking him prisoner. That year, also, Francis of France
died, and thus the emperor was left freer to persecute those who
differed from him in their religious beliefs. But a Protestant champion
soon arose in the person of Prince Maurice of Saxony, whose vigorous
action not only reduced the emperor to the humiliating necessity of
signing a treaty of peace (August 2, 1552), but set in motion a train
of events that forever made impossible his cherished project of the
rooting out of Protestantism.
Three disastrous years of warfare followed the Peace of Passau, but
nothing was gained for Charles, and in 1555, by the Peace of Augsburg,
his hated enemy, Protestantism, scored a triumph through receiving
legal recognition, by which its roots struck so deep into European soil
that no efforts of the emperor’s could avail to extricate them. It is
thought that the humiliation of this defeat of his lifelong scheme in
behalf of the papists was the cause of his final determination to
abdicate in favour of his son Philip, which he did in October of the
same year, 1555. His mother, Juana, died this year, having passed the
whole term of her son’s brilliant reign in the gloom of insanity.
In January, 1556, he formally ceded all his Spanish possessions to
Philip, and retired to the monastery of Yuste, where he passed three
years more in the quietude of peaceful scenes, and finally expired on
the 21st of September, 1558.
After forty years of fighting, he found nothing so delightful as the
seclusion of a monastery; after mingling in the stirring scenes of a
world of which he was at times the most prominent figure and centre
around which it moved, he found nothing so conducive to tranquillity
and happiness as the domestic avocations of gardening and carving
simple toys. He had crossed central and western Europe forty times,
had visited England, carried war into Africa, had battled with the
French, the British, the Italians, and Turks; while at the same time
his great captains had subjugated the natives of the two Americas, and
deluged the western isles and continents with blood. Mexico, Peru, and
Chili were reduced to submission during his reign. In 1521 the great
navigator, Magellan, had passed through the straits that now bear his
name and circumnavigated South America, on that same voyage discovering
the Philippine Islands, which were afterward named in honour of Philip
II.
We should pause here to note that it was during Charles’s reign that
Spain’s history became inextricably mingled with or touched upon
that of every great division of the world, and that the emperor held
possessions in Asia, Africa, Europe, North and South America.
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