The admiration which was raised by the great events of his reign, was sustained to the last by the unwonted manner of its close. In our days, abdication has been so frequently the refuge of weak men, fallen on evil times, or the last shift of baffled bad men, that it is difficult for us to conceive the sensation which must have been produced by the retirement of Charles. England is among the few nations of Europe to whose thrones there are no pretenders expiating in exile their personal or inherited sins; perhaps the sole nation whose royal house has no member who has put off, or bas declined to put on, the hereditary crown. Now that the divinity which doth hedge a king has become a bowing wall and a tottering fence, it is almost impossible to look upon the solemn ceremony which was enacted at Bruxelles with the feeling or the eyes of the sixteenth century. The act of the emperor was a thing not indeed altogether unheard of, but known only in books and distant times. The knights of the fleece, who wept on the dais, around their Cæsar, knew little more about Diocletian than was known by the farmers and clothiers who elbowed each other in the crowd below. It was only some rare student who remembered that a Theodosius and an Isaac had submitted their heads to the razor, to save their necks from the axe or the bowstring; that a Lothaire had led a hermit's life in the forest of Ardennes; that a Carloman had milked the ewes of the Benedictines at Monte Cassino. Spanish history afforded several examples of abdications, but they belonged to the misty ages of the Goth, and the Castillian who was in the habit of alluding to very remote antiquity as 'the days of king Wamba,' perhaps seldom knew that the example set by that martial monarch had been followed by Bermudo, and Alonso, and Ramiro, when each, in his turn, exchanged the

diadem for the cowl. The act of Charles, therefore, was fitted to strike the imagination of men, by the novelty of the occasion, by the solemnity of the circumstances, by the splendour of the abdicated crowns, and by the world-wide fame with which they had been worn.

There can be no doubt that the emperor gave the true reasons of his retirement when, panting for breath, and unable to stand alone, he told the states of Flanders that he resigned the government because it was a burden which his shattered frame could no longer bear. He was fulfilling the plan which he had cherished for nearly twenty years. Indeed, he seems to have determined to abdicate almost at the time when he determined to reign. So powerful a mind as that of Charles, has seldom been so tardy in giving evidence of power. Until he appeared in Italy, in 1529, the thirtieth year of his age, his strong will had been as wax in the hands of other men. Up to that time the most laborious, reserved, and inflexible of princes, was the most docile subject of his ministers. His mind ripened slowly, and his body decayed prematurely. By nature and hereditary habit a keen sportsman, in his youth he was unwearied in tracking the bear and the wolf over the hills of Toledo and Granada; and he was distinguished for his prowess against the bull and the boar.1 Yet ere he had turned fifty, he was reduced to amuse himself by shooting crows and daws amongst the trees of his garden. The hand which had wielded the lance, and curbed the charger, was so enfeebled with gout, that it was sometimes unable to break the seal of a letter. Declining fortune combined with decaying health to maintain him in that general vexation of spirit which he shared with

'Libro de la Monteria: Discurso de G. Argote de Molina, p. 6. Ranke's Ottoman and Spanish Empires, translated by Kelly. 8vo. London: 1843,

king Solomon. His later schemes of policy and conquest ended in nothing but disaster and disgrace. The pope, the Turk, the king of France, and the protestant princes of the empire, were once more arrayed against the potentate, who, in the bright morning of his career, had imposed laws upon them all. The flight from Innsbruck avenged the cause which seemed lost at Muhlberg. The treaty of Passau, by placing the Lutheran religion amongst the recognised institutions of the empire, overturned the entire fabric of the emperor's policy, and destroyed his hopes of transmitting the imperial crown to his son. While the doctors of the church assembled at Trent, in that council which had cost so much treasure and intrigue, continued their solemn quibblings, the protestant faith was spreading itself even in the dominions of the orthodox house of Hapsburg. The emperor's well-known devise, the pillars of Hercules, with the proud motto, PLUS ULTRA, for which the inventor had been rewarded with two mitres,' became the butt of the pedantic wits of France. Guise and the gallant townsmen of Metz, furnished a new reading-NON ULTRA METAS,-for the motto; and Paris was made merry with the suggestion that the pillars should be changed into a crab, and the words into PLUS CITRA, to express the ebb of the imperial fortunes. The finances both of Spain and the other dominions of Austria were in the utmost disorder; and the lord of Mexico and Peru had been forced to beg a loan from the duke of Florence.

3

It is

1 Luis Marliano, author of this famous device, was paid for his ingenuity, first with the bishopric of Tuy (sorely against the will of cardinal Ximenes; Alv. Gomez; De rebus gestis, fol. 151), and afterwards with that of Ciudad Rodrigo. Rod. Mendez Silva: Catalogo Real. 4to. Madrid: 1656, fol. 136.

Le Moyne: De l'Art des Devises. 4to. Paris: 1666, p. 215. Strada: De Bello Belgico, lib. i. 2 tom. sm. 8vo. Antwerp: 1640, i. 17.

no wonder, therefore, that Charles seized the first gleam of sunshine and returning calm to make for the long desired haven of refuge; that he relieved his brow of its thorny crowns as soon as he had obtained an object dear to him as a father, a politician, and a devotee, by placing his son Philip on the rival throne of the heretic Tudors.

His habits and turn of mind made a religious house the natural place of his retreat. Like a true Castillian,

With age, with cares, with maladies opprest,

He sought the refuge of conventual rest.

Monachism had for him a charm, vague yet powerful, such as soldiership has for the young; and he was ever fond of catching glimpses of the life which he had resolved, sooner or later, to embrace. When the empress died, he retired to indulge his grief in the cloisters of La Sisla, near Toledo. After his return from one of his African campaigns, he paid a visit to the noble convent of Mejorado, near Olmedo, and spent two days in familiar converse with Jeromites, sharing their refectory fare, and walking for hours in their garden alleys of venerable cypress. When he held his court at Bruxelles, he was often a guest at the convent of Groenendael; and the monks commemorated his condescension as a monarch as well as his skill as a marksman, by placing his statue in bronze on the banks of their fishpond, at a point where he had brought down a heron from an amazing height. At Alcala, when attending service in the university church, he would not occupy the throne prepared for him, but insisted on sitting with the canons, saying that he never could be better placed than among reverend and learned divines.'

Alf. Sanctii: De Rebus Hispania anacephaleosis. 4to. Compluti : 1634, p. 377.

These church predilections, coloured with religious melancholy, Charles inherited from his ancestors on both sides of the house, and transmitted to his descendants. Ferdinand the catholic was not free from them; and the emperor Maximilian was said to have entertained, in his latter days, the notable design of taking orders and getting himself chosen pope. Philip the Second was pre-eminently the friend of friars in his wretched cell adjoining the church of the Escorial he lived a life of the severest asceticism; and, ever reckless of the blood of his people, he was often to be seen on his knees, reverently dusting and polishing the golden reliquaries in which he had enshrined the bones of his saints. Don John of Austria, when sickening of deferred hope of a throne, instinctively turned his thoughts to the cowl and a celestial crown. Philip the Third never missed visiting a convent when the opportunity occurred; they long remembered, at Montserrate, the devotion with which he clambered to every rock-hewn cell of that romantic hermit-warren; and when the third part of Siguença's Jeromite history appeared, he sat up a whole night to read the fascinating folio.' Even the licentious Philip the Fourth, and the half idiot Charles the Second were careful to send the best buck or the best boar from their day's heap of game to the prior of the Escorial; and, in the true spirit of their grandsire of Yuste, they used to descend into the pantheon of their palace-convent, and muse upon death amongst the ashes of their

ancestors.

Nor were the princesses of the Spanish house of Austria untinged with the religious melancholy of their race. Like queen Juana, many of them ended their

1 Porreño: Hechos y dichos de Felipe III. 4to. Madrid: 1723, p. 332-4.