days in the cloister; and a few even took the veil and wore the ring of lady abbess. Amongst these were the regent Juana and her sister, the empress Mary, with her daughter the archduchess Margaret, who refused the hand of her uncle, Philip the Second, and, as sister Margaret of the Cross, was famous for near half a century among the vestals of Madrid. The infanta Isabella, the able ruler of the Netherlands, at the death of her husband took the habit, though not the vows, of a Franciscan nun, as the habit which had been worn with so much holy distinction by ladies of her name and lineage, the Isabellas of Hungary and of Portugal.' The married life of queen Margaret, wife of Philip the Third, was divided between childbed and church. Paris, with its pageantries and the new pleasures of bridehood and a throne, could not dispel the constitutional gloom from the young heart of Maria Teresa. 'What did you think of your reception?' asked Anne of Austria, on the evening of her arrival at the Louvre. 'I thought,' replied the queen of Louis the Fourteenth, of that other pageant which shall one day carry me to the tomb." The influence of Spanish blood may be seen in the declining years of Louis himself, and in the strange story of the devout Bourbon, who wore the family honours of Orleans between the profligate regent and the infamous Egalité.

2

To the last Charles loved his woodland nest at Yuste. It has been said that he was wont to declare that he had enjoyed there more real happiness in one day than

1 C. de Benavente: Advertencias para Reyes. 4to. Madrid: 1643, pp. 228, 9.

2 See her life, Vida y muerte de Doña Margarita de Austria, por Diego de Guzman. 4to. Madrid: 1617.

3 Fr. Juan B. de Soria: Historia de Doña Maria Teresa de Austria, Reina de Francia. sm. 8vo. Madrid: 1684, p. 11.

S

he had derived from all his triumphs,' an extravagant assertion, which is nevertheless far nearer the truth than the idle tale that his retirement was a long repentance of his abdication. But the cloister, like the world, was not without its disappointments. He had escaped only from the pageantry of courts, not from the toil and excitement of public affairs. To Yuste he had come, seeking solitude and repose; but although his chamberlain complained bitterly that he had indeed found the one, his own long and laboured despatches prove that he enjoyed but little of the other. He began by attempting to confine his attention to a few matters in which he was specially interested, and which he hoped ere long to bring to a happy termination; but the circle gradually widened, and at last his anxious eye learned once more to sweep the whole horizon of Spanish policy. From the war in Flanders he would turn to the diplomacy of Italy or Portugal; and his plans for replenishing the treasury at Valladolid, were followed by remarks on the garrisons in Africa, or the signal towers along the Spanish shore. He watched the course of the vessel of state with interest as keen as if the helm were still in his own hands; and the successes and the disasters of his son affected him as if they were his own. Unfortunately, in 1557 and 1558, the disasters greatly outnumbered and outweighed the successes. On one side of the account stood the brilliant but barren victory of St. Quentin, and the less signal but better employed victory of Gravelines; on the other, there was the bullion riots at Seville, the disgraceful treaty of Rome, the loss of Calais and of Thionville, the sack of Menorca, and the outburst of heresy. He might well dread the arrival

'Phil. Camerarii Meditationes Historica. 3 tom. 4to. Francofurti : 1602-9, i. p. 210.

of each courier; and the destruction of the army of Oran was announced in the despatches which lay unread on his table at the time of his death.

The prudence and moderation which generally guided his acts in the world dictated his writings at Yuste. Notwithstanding his displeasure with the Roman negotiations of Alba and the loss of Calais and Thionville, which he expressed freely enough in conversation, few traces of ruffled temper are to be found in his written remarks on these subjects. It was this caution and self-control which saved his reign from many of those disorders and scandals which disgraced the rule of his successors. The three Philips were governed by favourites and viziers, minions of fortune, who in time became her martyrs. The ministers of Charles neither rose so high nor fell so low; he never had a Perez, a Lerma, an Olivares, or a Calderon.

Perhaps the very qualities which rendered the despatches of the emperor so admirable as state papers, at the dates which they bore, and in the hands to which they were addressed, tend to diminish their value as materials for his biography. A close reasoner, careful in analyzing facts, and subtle in penetrating motives, Charles was nevertheless one of the most tiresome writers who ever drove the quill of political or diplomatic correspondence. Heavy and redundant in style, his pictures of men and events are flat and colourless; and even in argument, his vivacity is cramped and crippled by the fence of caution and reserve which ever hedges his path. Very rarely does it happen that any spark of human feeling or passion illumines his weary records of the daily toils of power; of hopes and fears, to which a generous heart can seldom respond; of selfish intrigues and ignoble rivalries and of all the dusty plans of an ambition which never soared above the family tree of Hapsburg.

In the cloister, Charles was no less popular than he had been in the world. In spite of his feeble health and phlegmatic temperament, in spite of his caution, which was ever suspicious, and his selfishness, which frequently made him false; in spite of his jealous love of power, and of his contempt for popular rights, there was still in his conduct and bearing that indescribable charm which wins the favour of the multitude. A little book, of no literary value, but frequently printed both in French and Flemish, sufficiently indicates in its title the qualities which coloured the popular view of his character. The life and actions, heroic and pleasant, of the invincible emperor, Charles the Fifth, was long a favourite chap-book in the Low Countries. It relates how he defeated Solyman the Magnificent; how he permitted a Walloon boor to obtain judgment against him for the value of a sheep, killed by the wheels of his coach; how he rode down the Moorish horsemen at Tunis; and how he jested, like any private sportsman, with the woodmen of Soigne. A similar reputation for affability and good humour, heightened by the added quality of sanctity, he left behind him in the sylvan monastery of Estremadura. Doomed by royal etiquette to eat alone, he sometimes broke through the rule in favour of St. Benedict or St. Jerome. Dining in former years with the fathers of Montserrate, the prior, a rough Aragonese, ventured to tell him that he had polluted their sober board by eating flesh-meat there, a monkish pleasantry which the imperial guest won the hearts of his hosts by taking in perfectly good part.' At Yuste he once dined in the refectory, and although the fare did not tempt him to

1 Vida que el emperador tuvo en el convento de Yuste: in the MS. entitled El perfecto desengaño por el marques de Valparaiso, 1638, of which I have given an account in my preface.

do the friars that honour a second time, the bad dishes did not affect the good humour of his conversation.'

In one point alone did Charles in the cell differ widely from Charles on the throne. In the world, fanaticism had not been one of his vices; he feared the keys no more than his cousin of England, and he confronted the successor of St. Peter no less boldly than he made head against the heir of St. Louis. While he held Clement the Seventh prisoner at Rome, he permitted at Madrid the mockery of masses for that pontiff's speedy deliverance. Against the protestants he fought rather as rebels than as heretics, and he frequently stayed the hand of the victorious zealots of the church. At Wittenberg he set a fine example of moderation, in forbidding the destruction of the tomb of Luther, saying that he contended with the living and not with the dead. To a Venetian envoy, accredited to him at Bruxelles, in the last year of his reign, he appeared free from all taint of polemical madness, and willing that subjects of theology should be discussed in his presence, with fair philosophical freedom.3

But once within the walls of Yuste, he assumed all the passions, prejudices, and superstitions of a friar. Looking back on his past life, he thanked God for the evil that he had been permitted to do in the matter of religious persecution, and repented him, in sackcloth and ashes, for having kept his plighted word to a heretic. Religion was the enchanted ground whereon his strong will was paralyzed and his keen intellect fell grovelling in the dust. Protestant and philosophic historians love to relate how Charles, finding that no two of his time

Chap. viii. p. 187.

2 Juncker: Vita Mart. Luteri, sm. 8vo. Francofurti: 1699, p. 219. Sleidan: De Statu relig. et reip., lib. xix., is cited as his authority. 3 Relatione of Badovaro.