Читать книгу Heart of Europe - Ralph Adams Cram - Страница 8

Table of Contents

WHEN Philip II came to the throne there was a new king in France, Henry II, who forthwith broke the peace Charles V had engineered, and proceeded to invade both Italy and Flanders. He was promptly beaten, in the north by Egmont at St. Quentin, and after so disastrous a fashion that hardly any one but Nevers and Condé escaped. It was in gratitude for the brilliant victory of his Belgian troops that Philip built the palace of the Escorial. Trying again the next year, Henry did indeed, through the Duke de Guise (whose luck was better than that which followed him when he met Alva the year before in Italy), regain Calais, during the absence of the English garrison, who were home on a holiday; but again Egmont came into the breech, crushed the French at Gravelines, and so forced the treaty of Câteau-Cambrésis, which obliged France, amongst other penalties, to give up to Philip more than two hundred walled towns, though she was allowed to retain Calais, Mary of England now being dead.

Flemish soldiers, now forming the best trained and most effective army in Europe, had won the war for Philip, but out of the victory came in the end the ruin of their country, for before leaving for Spain, which he loved, he demanded of the Netherlands, which he disliked, three million florins toward the expense of the war. This was granted, but coupled with a request that the Spanish garrison be withdrawn. It happened that this demand was made at the instigation of William, Prince of Orange, who now appears on the scene, for he had discovered that Henry and Philip had secretly agreed to stamp out Protestantism in the Low Countries by introducing the Spanish Inquisition, and that the alien garrison was to be the means of putting this plan into effect. William of Orange was not a Fleming but a German; he had expected to be made regent when the King went back to Spain, and had been disappointed. He was neither a Catholic nor a Protestant, but a cold, silent, far-seeing politician of extremely rationalistic views. He knew that the spirit of independence in the Netherlands was so dominating that Catholics and Protestants alike could be allied against both the Inquisition and a foreign garrison. He cleverly united them on this basis, alienated the last flicker of friendly feeling on the part of Philip, and so precipitated the conflict that raged for almost a century to the ruin and misery of all the seventeen provinces. Philip appeared to yield, went back to Spain, and at once began his scheming for the destruction of the Protestant heresy in his too-independent territories.

So far as the aristocracy, the rich burghers, and the cultivated classes were concerned, Protestantism had made little if any headway in spite of the wide corruption of the Church, but among the peasants and the ignorant, particularly in the great cities, it had taken firm hold. To Philip it was both a damnable heresy and a civil menace; he hated it as his father had hated it, but Charles V was of a different mould and temper. Philip was a Spanish Catholic, and therein (at that time) lay all the difference. To him with his cold mind and pitiless temper there was only one question: how to root out this accursed and poisonous growth. The answer was at hand in the shape of the peculiar type of inquisition which had been invented in Spain for the sole purpose of completing the expulsion of the Moors and Jews from the Peninsula after the final defeat of the Mohammedan invaders. It had proved its efficiency to admiration, and, though it had never been used against Christian heretics, Philip felt (as others have felt after him) that both the righteous State and the Catholic Church were, through the King, fighting for their lives, and that he had no right to balk at any means that offered when it was a question of life or death.

The old “Papal” Inquisition, which came into existence toward the end of the Middle Ages, and was the corollary of the dawning spirit of the Renaissance with which it synchronised, was legitimate enough, if you hold, as every one held then, that spiritual evil is as wicked as material evil, and just as worthy of formal punishment. Trials were conducted according to civil law, they were public, and the secular arm alone inflicted punishment. The “Spanish” Inquisition, which is the form so bitterly condemned to-day, was a creature of the Renaissance in its fulness. It was an engine of the most diabolical efficiency, for its proceedings were secret, its finding irrevocable, its penalties merciless and as cruel as English criminal law in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, though it lacked certain of the refinements of torture that were first developed under “Good King Hal” when he was waging his war against the monks and monasteries of his own England.

Had Philip been dealing with the Popes of the Middle Ages, he could never have imposed the Spanish Inquisition on the Netherlands, but those of the Renaissance were as different as possible, and he had no trouble in gaining their consent. A few burnings took place, and then the loyal and Catholic but intensely patriotic nobles took matters into their own hands and through the regent, Margaret of Parma, warned the King that unless the thing was stopped the provinces would act in defence of their own rights and in accordance with their solemnly guaranteed privileges. The Protestant mob also began to act after its own fashion, without waiting for an answer from Philip, and week after week carried on a course of destruction that wrecked cathedrals, monasteries, churches, and destroyed more old stained glass, wonderful statues, great pictures, jewelled vestments, and sacred vessels than have escaped to this day. The senseless and sacrilegious fury of this mob of the baser sort not only lashed the King into a cold fury but it even halted some of the Catholic nobles, many of whom, including Egmont himself, began to wonder if, after all, the Inquisition was not permissible in the light of the revelations that were being made in the desecrated churches of Antwerp and Ghent and Tournai. No advantage was taken of this changing sentiment, however, and, ready at last, Philip struck, and the Duke of Alva, with an army of 10,000 picked men, marched up from Genoa, occupied Brussels, seized every disaffected leader, including even those like Egmont and Horn, who were both loyal and devout Catholics (but barring Orange, who had cautiously retreated to Germany), and established the “Council of Blood,” which during the first week of its activities executed more than eight hundred men whose only crime was protesting against the denial of their guaranteed liberties and the maintenance of the Inquisition.

The Prince of Orange organised in Germany a small armed force for the deliverance of the cowed and horrified Netherlanders, but his first victory over Alva’s forces was answered by immediate reprisals in Brussels, a score of nobles being sent to the block, including Horn and