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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."’

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 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 of proceeding in the Netherlands, "where all who remained obstinate
in their errors were burned alive, and those who were admitted to penitence
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were beheaded."
And almost symbolical of his place and rôle 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.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 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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