The History of the Thirty Years War | Page 6

that blind obedience which, ever
since the days of the Gothic dynasty, had been the peculiar
characteristic of the Spaniard. The slightest approximation, in a
Spanish prince, to the obnoxious tenets of Luther and Calvin, would
have alienated for ever the affections of his subjects, and a defection
from the Pope would have cost him the kingdom. A Spanish prince had
no alternative but orthodoxy or abdication. The same restraint was
imposed upon Austria by her Italian dominions, which she was obliged
to treat, if possible, with even greater indulgence; impatient as they
naturally were of a foreign yoke, and possessing also ready means of
shaking it off. In regard to the latter provinces, moreover, the rival
pretensions of France, and the neighbourhood of the Pope, were
motives sufficient to prevent the Emperor from declaring in favour of a
party which strove to annihilate the papal see, and also to induce him to
show the most active zeal in behalf of the old religion. These general
considerations, which must have been equally weighty with every

Spanish monarch, were, in the particular case of Charles V., still further
enforced by peculiar and personal motives. In Italy this monarch had a
formidable rival in the King of France, under whose protection that
country might throw itself the instant that Charles should incur the
slightest suspicion of heresy. Distrust on the part of the Roman
Catholics, and a rupture with the church, would have been fatal also to
many of his most cherished designs. Moreover, when Charles was first
called upon to make his election between the two parties, the new
doctrine had not yet attained to a full and commanding influence, and
there still subsisted a prospect of its reconciliation with the old. In his
son and successor, Philip the Second, a monastic education combined
with a gloomy and despotic disposition to generate an unmitigated
hostility to all innovations in religion; a feeling which the thought that
his most formidable political opponents were also the enemies of his
faith was not calculated to weaken. As his European possessions,
scattered as they were over so many countries, were on all sides
exposed to the seductions of foreign opinions, the progress of the
Reformation in other quarters could not well be a matter of indifference
to him. His immediate interests, therefore, urged him to attach himself
devotedly to the old church, in order to close up the sources of the
heretical contagion. Thus, circumstances naturally placed this prince at
the head of the league which the Roman Catholics formed against the
Reformers. The principles which had actuated the long and active
reigns of Charles V. and Philip the Second, remained a law for their
successors; and the more the breach in the church widened, the firmer
became the attachment of the Spaniards to Roman Catholicism.
The German line of the House of Austria was apparently more
unfettered; but, in reality, though free from many of these restraints, it
was yet confined by others. The possession of the imperial throne -- a
dignity it was impossible for a Protestant to hold, (for with what
consistency could an apostate from the Romish Church wear the crown
of a Roman emperor?) bound the successors of Ferdinand I. to the See
of Rome. Ferdinand himself was, from conscientious motives, heartily
attached to it. Besides, the German princes of the House of Austria
were not powerful enough to dispense with the support of Spain, which,
however, they would have forfeited by the least show of leaning
towards the new doctrines. The imperial dignity, also, required them to

preserve the existing political system of Germany, with which the
maintenance of their own authority was closely bound up, but which it
was the aim of the Protestant League to destroy. If to these grounds we
add the indifference of the Protestants to the Emperor's necessities and
to the common dangers of the empire, their encroachments on the
temporalities of the church, and their aggressive violence when they
became conscious of their own power, we can easily conceive how so
many concurring motives must have determined the emperors to the
side of popery, and how their own interests came to be intimately
interwoven with those of the Roman Church. As its fate seemed to
depend altogether on the part taken by Austria, the princes of this house
came to be regarded by all Europe as the pillars of popery. The hatred,
therefore, which the Protestants bore against the latter, was turned
exclusively upon Austria; and the cause became gradually confounded
with its protector.
But this irreconcileable enemy of the Reformation -- the House of
Austria -- by its ambitious projects and the overwhelming force which
it could bring to their support, endangered, in no small degree, the
freedom of Europe, and more especially of