The spring, however, of 1558 was cold; much illness prevailed in the Vera; Charles, shivering in his bed and suffering from gout, was little prepared for the shock of the sudden death of his favourite sister Eleanor, the 'gentlest and most guileless of beings.' There were but fifteen months between us,' sobbed he, 'and in less than that time I shall be with her once more.' Political troubles contributed also to depress his mind. Larger than a man's hand. grew that little cloud that cast from the seaboard the shadow of coming disasters, and already, ere Charles was gone to his grave, the clay-footed Colossus of Spain's short-lived accidental greatness tottered to a fall. And may not we of England partake in some of the same uneasy thoughts that darkened on the spirit of the imperial hermit? History, to all who do not deem it an old almanack, presents a succession of parallels. The past assuredly is the prophet of the future'the thing that hath been is that which shall be, and that which is done is that which shall be done.' Nous dansons sur un volcan, and slumber in a fool's paradise of peace theorists, drabcoated patriots, and the minor fry, who advocate a dismantled navy, a disbanded army; who, scouting bastions and bayonets, clamour for calico and the cheap defence of nations-economists who, though caring only for pelf, rebel against the paltry premium of insurance. The unexpected loss of Calais, the woeful calamity engraven on our bloody Mary's hard heart, went far to break that of Charles. It was the untoward event which he never ceased to recur to, and regretted like death itself, which indeed it contributed to hasten. He had foreseen the rooted anxiety France would have to wipe out, per fas aut nefas, the blot of St. Quentin-and had urged Mary to strengthen the defences and garrison, scandalously neglected by an illtimed parsimony and fatal economy.' His advice, backed by that of Lord Wentworth, the military governor, was slighted by her ministers at home, who, Manchesterians by anticipation, boasted that the reputation of the strength of Calais was alone sufficient for its security,' and that with their white wands they would defend the place.' They rejected the offer of a Spanish reinforcement, suspecting that Philip coveted the key of the entry to France for himself-just as the occupation of Cadiz was by Spanish jealousy denied to ourselves in the war of independence. The result was that Calais was carried by a coup de main.

'France was then in an uproar of exultation; St. Quentin was forgotten-and loud and long were the pæans of Parisian wits-replenished with scoffs and unmeasured taunts against the English, who, in falling victims to a daring stratagem, gave, as it seemed to these poetasters, a signal proof of the immemorial perfidy of Albion.'

Charles,

Charles, when he turned his thoughts from the land to the sea, found but little comfort. The Turk was then the terror of Europe; his cannon thundered at the walls of Vienna while his fleets insulted the ports of Spain; the civilization of the West trembled in the balance:-and the alliance of the Most Christian King, nay, of the Supreme Successor of St. Peter himself, with the infidel, in order to injure the ever Catholic House of Austria, seemed to the orthodox head of that house scarcely less revolting than one with his Satanic Majesty. The Mediterranean had long run a real risk of being made a Turkish lake; Charles, however, no sooner caught the truth of the case than, adopting the boldest and best policy, he assumed the initiative, and, deaf to the peaceful professions of his one fixed and implacable foe, anticipated aggression, landed in Algeria, and captured and held Oran—a base of operations. He in his time had steadily upheld the navy, and encouraged the spirit which afterwards at Lepanto -the Trafalgar of the day-proved that turning seas into lakes is easier said than done; but now he was only watching things through the 'loophole of retreat'-and it struck to his inner heart's core to hear that, at the very moment when the infidel was again silently but determinately preparing, a slumbering and folding of arms had come over the Spanish Cabinet. In vain he wrote, 'If Oran be lost, I hope I shall be in some place where I shall not hear of so great an affront to the King and to these realms.' His warning voice was neglected, and, ere a year had passed, the Spanish garrison was cut to pieces; but Charles went to his grave unconscious of that calamity, which none dared to reveal to him. This was well-and so is it that our own Great Duke has gone to his last home in honour as he lived,' and has been spared all chances of witnessing that which, years ago, had his Cassandra words been listened to, would have been rendered impossible.

The glorious field of St. Quentin, which, but for Philip's timidity, might have proved a Waterloo instead of an Oudenarde, brightened Charles with but a passing gleam. He had for weeks been counting the days when his son would be at the gates of Paris, and he so deeply felt the lame and impotent conclusion, and especially the favourable terms granted to the Court of Rome, that his health broke down, and he took to his bed. Charles, the Catholic King, who, like our own bold Protestant Bess, feared no pope, had on this occasion counselled the course he himself formerly pursued, and gladly would have seen the turbulent Paul IV. a captive in St. Angelo, or sculking out like Clement VII., disguised as a servant-much as we have beheld the liberal Pio Nono fly from his flock-the Servus Servorum Dei

VOL. XCII. NO. CLXXXIII.

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Dei in a Bavarian footman's livery; but Philip, craven and superstitious, dealt gently with the wicked old man, who, having set the world in flames, was now ready to sacrifice France, too much his friend, to close a dirty nepotist bargain with long hostile Spain.

Charles, however, was never one jot the less eager to uphold the papal system. A Catholic not merely from policy and position, but sincere conviction, he felt that the moment was most critical. In 1558 the Church of Rome was indeed in extreme danger even in her strongest hold-in Spain-where it could no longer then be concealed that the seeds of the Reformation had taken root. Once alarmed, and armed with power, the priesthood were too wise in their generation to trifle with a foe so deadly she of the seven hills knows no mercy for dissent-all tolerance indeed she has over and over proclaimed to be but the mask of indifference:-she adopts no sprinkling of dust, no rose-water process; her one maxim and, unless under irresistible pressure, her one practice is ever 'quod ferro non curatur igne sanatur. Accordingly, the infant Hercules was strangled in the cradle by the gripe of the inquisitor; and the Vatican can fairly boast that the Reformation in the Peninsula was nipped in the bud and annihilated at once. It must be remembered that the general temper of Spain was peculiarly favourable to such a result; the bulk of the nation itself was fanatic-a long lifeand-death war waged on their own soil against the infidel, for hearth and altar, had coupled creed with country and heresy with enemy. The Inquisition, a double-edged engine, originally armed by the bigotry and avarice of the Spaniards against the Moor or Jew, was destined by divine justice to recoil ultimately on its abettors, and to sink a land once at the head of European civilization into an obscurantism and backwardation' paralleled only by the states of Rome, Naples, Tuscany, and John of Tuam.

Mr. Stirling, in his eighth chapter, fully confirms the accuracy of Dr. M'Crie's History of the Progress and Suppression of the Reformation in Spain. The Holy Tribunal scarcely found a warmer friend in the cold-blooded Philip than in the once moderate Fray Carlos; and certainly no so-called historian ever countenanced anything more absurd than the theory that the Emperor was himself tainted with Protestantism. Father,' said he to the Prior of Yuste, as soon as he heard of the black business, "if anything could drag me from this retreat, it would be to aid in chastising these heretics. I have written to the Inquisition, to burn them all; for not one of them will ever become a true Catholic, or worthy to live.' He urged his son to cut the root

of the evil with all rigour; expressing his regret that he himself had not put Luther to death when in his power at the Diet of Worms: so much had age and the priest got the better of that soldier and gentleman, who blushed to commence his career with the foul church-suggested crime; for he then remembered well how his ancestor Sigismond's fame had been tarnished by sacrificing Huss at Constance, in 1414, in violation of a regular safe-conduct. Temporal considerations, occasionally, it must be confessed, induced Charles to play a double game, and fight with his own weapons his rival Francis I., who, while burning Protestants at Paris, supported them in Germany, because hostile to the Emperor. Our hero, no doubt, when young in mind and body, held it lawful in the game of politics to use Pope and Lutheran for his own purposes, and offended both parties, who were seriously in earnest, and had thrown away the scabbard, by his Interims and other conciliatory juste milieu measures. Nevertheless, all his personal instincts, first and last, as well as all his hereditary interests, were opposed to the Reformation. The cry of the Comuneros at Salamanca, which met his ear as he mounted the throne of Castile-Thou shalt have no Pope or King but Valloria !'—was echoed in after-life in the Union of Smalkalde, which pitted the Protestant princes against his imperial prerogatives and pretensions; and, in truth, the boundaries. between religious and civil liberty, reformation and reform, are fine and delicate. At the present crisis, Charles, it is said, heard with surprise, and, not without appearances of some sorrow, that many of his own former preachers were tainted with the heresy plague, and carried to the hospitals of the Inquisition; but, sorrowing or not sorrowing, he entered no plea for mercy. Even Mathisio, his favoured physician, was forced to burn his translated Bible-then, as now, the foremost prohibited book in the Liber Expurgatorius of Rome.

These accumulated anxieties, however, hastened that utter break-up of his constitution which the medical men had long anticipated from his imprudent diet; and early in August symptoms appeared which the patient himself could not mistake. His thoughts naturally turned more than ever to religion and its rites. Long accustomed to recelebrate, with his personal attendance, the obsequies of his departed kinsfolk on the anniversaries of their obits, he now determined to rehearse his own funeral. This incident-one of the disputed points in his history -has been very carefully sifted by Mr. Stirling:

'Gonzalez,' says he, treats the story as an idle tale; he laments the credulity displayed even in the sober statement of Siguença, and pours out much patriotic scorn on the highly wrought picture of Ro

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bertson,

bertson, of whose account of the matter it is impossible to offer any defence. Masterly as a sketch, it has unhappily been copied from the canvas of the unscrupulous Leti. In everything but style it is indeed very absurd. "The emperor was bent," says the historian, "on performing some act of piety that would display his zeal and merit the favour of Heaven. The act on which he fixed was as wild and uncommon as any that superstition ever suggested to a weak and disordered fancy. He resolved to celebrate his own obsequies before his death. He ordered his tomb to be erected in the chapel of the monastery. His domestics marched thither in funeral procession, with black tapers in their hands. He himself followed in his shroud. He was laid in his coffin, with much solemnity. The service for the dead was chanted, and Charles joined in the prayers which were offered up for the rest of his soul, mingling his tears with those which his attendants shed, as if they had been celebrating a real funeral. The ceremony closed with sprinkling holy water on the coffin in the usual form, and, all the assistants retiring, the doors of the chapel were shut. Then Charles rose out of the coffin, and withdrew to his apartment, full of those awful sentiments which such a singular solemnity was calculated to inspire. But either the fatiguing length of the ceremony, or the impressions which the image of death left on his mind, affected him so much that next day he was seized with a fever. His feeble frame could not long resist its violence, and he expired on the 21st of September, after a life of fifty-eight years, six months, and twenty-five days."

6

Siguença's account of the affair, which I have adopted, is that Charles, conceiving it to be for the benefit of his soul, and having obtained the consent of his confessor, caused a funeral service to be performed for himself, such as he had lately been performing for his father and mother. At this service he assisted, not as a corpse, but as one of the spectators, holding in his hand, like the others, a waxen taper, which, at a certain point of the ceremonial, he gave into the hands of the officiating priest, in token of his desire to commit his soul to the keeping of his Maker. There is not a word to justify the tale that he followed the procession in his shroud, or that he simulated death in his coffin, or that he was left behind in the church when the service was over. In this story respecting an infirm old man, the devout son of a church where services for the dead are of daily occurrence, I can see nothing incredible or very surprising. Abstractedly considered, it appears quite as reasonable that a man on the brink of the grave should perform funeral rites for himself, as that he should perform such rites for persons whose bones had become dust many years before. But without venturing upon this dark and dan gerous ground, it may be safely asserted that superstition and dyspepsia have driven men into extravagancies far greater than the act which Siguença has attributed to Charles. Nor is there any reason to doubt the historian's veracity in a matter in which the credit of his order or the interest of the church is no way concerned. He might perhaps be suspected of overstating the regard entertained by the emperor for the friars of Yuste, were his evidence not confirmed by the letters of

the