Protestantism in Spain, and turned that beautiful country into a graveyard adorned by somber
cathedrals, and disfigured by bull-rings.
His Death.
The Emperor’s health failed rapidly in consequence of a new attack of gout, and the excessive
heat of the summer, which cost the life of several of his Flemish companions. He died Sept. 21,
1558, a consistent Catholic as be had lived. A few of his spiritual and secular friends surrounded
his death-bed. He confessed with deep contrition his sins; prayed repeatedly for the unity of the
Church; received, kneeling in his bed, the holy communion and the extreme unction; and placed
his hope on the crucified Redeemer. The Archbishop of Toledo, Bartolomé de Carranza, read the
one hundred and thirtieth Psalm, and, holding up a crucifix, said: "Behold Him who answers for
all. There is no more sin; all is forgiven;" while another of his preachers commended him to the
intercession of saints, namely, St. Matthew, on whose day he was born, and St. Matthias, on whose
day he was in a few moments to leave this world.
"Thus," says Mignet, "the two doctrines which divided the world in the age of Charles V.
were once more brought before him on the bed of death."
It is an interesting fact, that the same archbishop who had taken a prominent part in the
persecution of English Protestants under Queen Mary, and who administered the last and truly
evangelical comfort to the dying Emperor, became a victim of persecution, and that those very
words of comfort were used by the Emperor’s confessor as one of the grounds of the charge of
heresy before the tribunal of the Spanish Inquisition. Bartolomé de Carranza was seven years
imprisoned in Spain, then sent to Rome, lodged in the Castle of St. Angelo, after long delay found
guilty of sixteen Lutheranizing propositions in his writings, suspended from the exercise of his
episcopal functions, and sentenced to be shut up for five years in a convent of his order. He died
sixteen days after the judgment, in the Convent Sopra Minerva, May 2, 1576, "declaring his
innocence with tears in his eyes, and yet with strange inconsistency admitting the justice of his
sentence."^326
In less than two months after the decease of the Emperor, Queen Mary, his cousin, and wife
of his son, died, Nov. 17, 1558, and was borne to her rest in Westminster Abbey. With her the
Roman hierarchy collapsed, and the reformed religion, after five years of bloody persecution, was
permanently restored on the throne and in the Church of England. In view of this coincidence, we
may well exclaim with Ranke, "How far do the thoughts of Divine Providence exceed the thoughts
and purposes of men!"^327
His Tomb.
From Yuste the remains of the once mighty Emperor were removed in 1574 to their last
resting-place under the altar of the cathedral of the Escorial. That gloomy structure, in a dreary
mountain region some thirty miles north of Madrid, was built by his order as a royal burial-place
(between 1563 and 1584), and combines a palace, a monastery, a cathedral, and a tomb (called
Pantheon). Philip II., "el Escorialense," spent there fourteen years, half king, half monk, boasting
that he ruled the Old and New World from the foot of a mountain with two inches of paper. He
died, after long and intense suffering, Sept. 13, 1598, in a dark little room facing the altar of the
church.
(^326) His long trial is told by Prescott, Philip the Second, I. 337, 437 sqq.; and by Stoughton, The Spanish Reformers, pp. 185 sqq.
(^327) Deutsche Gesch., vol. V. 311.