measure of conviction is the measure of intolerance, and persecution the evidence of zeal. The
burning of heretics became in the land of the Inquisition a sacred festival, an "act of faith;"^306 and
such horrid spectacles were in the reign of Philip II. as popular as the bull-fights which still flourish
in Spain, and administer to the savage taste for blood.
Charles heard the mass daily, listened to a sermon on Sunday and holy days, confessed and
communed four times a year, and was sometimes seen in his tent at midnight on his knees before
the crucifix. He never had any other conception of Christianity than the Roman-Catholic, and took
no time to investigate theological questions.
He fully approved of the Pope’s bull against Luther, and ordered it to be executed in the
Netherlands. In his retreat at Yuste, he expressed regret that he had kept his promise of safe-conduct;
in other words, that he had not burned the heretic at Worms, as Sigismund had burned Hus at
Constance. He never showed the least sympathy with the liberal tendencies of the age, and regarded
Protestantism as a rebellion against Church and State. He would have crushed it out if he had had
the power; but it was too strong for him, and he needed the Protestant support for his wars against
France, and against the Turks. He began in the Netherlands that fearful persecution which was
carried on by his more bigoted son, Philip II., but it provoked the uprising of the people, and ended
in the establishment of the Dutch Republic.^307 He subdued the Lutheran league in the Schmalkaldian
war; pale as death, but trusting in God, he rushed into the hottest of the fight at Mühlberg, and
greeted the decisive victory of 1547 with the words: "I came, I saw, and God conquered."^308 But
the height of his power was the beginning of his decline. The same Saxon Elector, Moritz, who
had aided him against the Protestant princes, turned against him in 1552, and secured in the treaty
of Passau, for the first time, some degree of legal toleration to the Lutherans in Germany.
But while Charles was a strict Roman Catholic from the beginning to the end of his life, he
was, nevertheless, by no means a blind and slavish papist. Like his predecessors on the German
throne, be maintained the dignity and the sovereignty of the state against the claims of hierarchical
supremacy. He hated the French, or neutral, politics of the papal court. His troops even captured
Rome, and imprisoned Clement VII., who had formed a league with Francis I. against him (1527).
He quarreled with Pope Paul III., who in turn severely protested against his tolerant or hesitating
policy towards the Protestants in Germany. He says, in his Autobiography,^309 that "the Pope’s
emissaries, and some ecclesiastics, were incessantly endeavoring to induce him to take up arms
against the Protestants (tomar as armas contra os protestantes)," but that he "hesitated on account
of the greatness and difficulty of such an enterprise."
(^306) Actus fidei; auto-de-fé in Spanish; auto-da-fé
(^307) Motley (Dutch Republic, I. 80) says: "Thousands and tens of thousands of virtuous, well-disposed men and women, who had as little
sympathy with anabaptistical as with Roman depravity, were butchered in cold blood, under the sanguinary rule of Charles, in the
Netherlands. In 1533, Queen Dowager Mary of Hungary, sister of the Emperor, Regent of the provinces, the ’Christian widow’ admired
by Erasmus, wrote to her brother, that ’in her opinion, all heretics, whether repentant or not, should be prosecuted with such severity as
that error might be at once extinguished, care being only taken that the provinces were not entirely depopulated.’ With this humane
limitation, the ’Christian widow’ cheerfully set herself to superintend as foul and wholesale a system of murder as was ever organized.
In 1535, an imperial edict was issued at Brussels, condemning all heretics to death; repentant males to be executed with the sword,
repentant females to be buried alive, the obstinate, of both sexes, to be burned. This and similar edicts were the law of the land for twenty
years, and rigidly enforced."
(^308) "Vine, y vi, y Dios vencio." But it was hardly a battle. Ranke (vol. IV. 377): "Es war keine Schlacht, sondern ein Ansprengen auf
der einen, ein Auseinanderstieben auf der anderen Seite; in einem Augenblicke war alles vollendet." He says of the Emperor (p. 376):
"Wie ein einbalsamirter Leichnam, wie ein Gespenst rückte er gegen sie [die Protestanten) an."
(^309) Ch. VI., in Simpson’s translation, p. 91 sq.