The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555 | Page 8

its
ancient rights of self-taxation, is sufficiently known to the world, and
has been already narrated at length. Many other instances might be
adduced, if it were not a superfluous task, to prove that Charles was not
only a political despot, but most arbitrary and cruel in the exercise of
his despotism.
But if his sins against the Netherlands had been only those of financial
and political oppression, it would be at least conceivable, although
certainly not commendable, that the inhabitants should have regretted
his departure. But there are far darker crimes for which he stands
arraigned at the bar of history, and it is indeed strange that the man who
had committed them should have been permitted to speak his farewell
amid blended plaudits and tears. His hand planted the inquisition in the
Netherlands. Before his day it is idle to say that the diabolical
institution ever had a place there. The isolated cases in which
inquisitors had exercised functions proved the absence and not the
presence of the system, and will be discussed in a later chapter. Charles
introduced and organized a papal inquisition, side by side with those
terrible "placards" of his invention, which constituted a masked
inquisition even more cruel than that of Spain. The execution of the

system was never permitted to languish. The number of Netherlanders
who were burned, strangled, beheaded, or buried alive, in obedience to
his edicts, and for the offences of reading the Scriptures, of looking
askance at a graven image, or of ridiculing the actual presence of the
body and blood of Christ in a wafer, have been placed as high as one
hundred thousand by distinguished authorities, and have never been put
at a lower mark than fifty thousand. The Venetian envoy Navigero
placed the number of victims in the provinces of Holland and Friesland
alone at thirty thousand, and this in 1546, ten years before the
abdication, and five before the promulgation of the hideous edict of
1550!
The edicts and the inquisition were the gift of Charles to the
Netherlands, in return for their wasted treasure and their constant
obedience. For this, his name deserves to be handed down to eternal
infamy, not only throughout the Netherlands, but in every land where a
single heart beats for political or religious freedom. To eradicate these
institutions after they had been watered and watched by the care of his
successor, was the work of an eighty years' war, in the course of which
millions of lives were sacrificed. Yet the abdicating Emperor had
summoned his faithful estates around him, and stood up before them in
his imperial robes for the last time, to tell them of the affectionate
regard which he had always borne them, and to mingle his tears with
theirs.
Could a single phantom have risen from one of the many thousand
graves where human beings had been thrust alive by his decree,
perhaps there might have been an answer to the question propounded
by the Emperor amid all that piteous weeping. Perhaps it might have
told the man who asked his hearers to be forgiven if he had ever
unwittingly offended them, that there was a world where it was deemed
an offence to torture, strangle, burn, and drown one's innocent
fellow-creatures. The usual but trifling excuse for such enormities can
not be pleaded for the Emperor. Charles was no fanatic. The man
whose armies sacked Rome, who laid his sacrilegious hands on Christ's
vicegerent, and kept the infallible head of the Church a prisoner to
serve his own political ends, was then no bigot. He believed in nothing;
save that when the course of his imperial will was impeded, and the
interests of his imperial house in jeopardy, pontiffs were to succumb as

well as anabaptists. It was the political heresy which lurked in the
restiveness of the religious reformers under dogma, tradition, and
supernatural sanction to temporal power, which he was disposed to
combat to the death. He was too shrewd a politician not to recognize
the connection between aspirations for religious and for political
freedom. His hand was ever ready to crush both heresies in one. Had he
been a true son of the Church, a faithful champion of her infallibility,
he would not have submitted to the peace of Passau, so long as he
could bring a soldier to the field. Yet he acquiesced in the Reformation
for Germany, while the fires for burning the reformers were ever
blazing in the Netherlands, where it was death even to allude to the
existence of the peace of Passau. Nor did he acquiesce only from
compulsion, for long before his memorable defeat by Maurice, he had
permitted the German troops, with whose services he could not
dispense, regularly to attend Protestant worship performed by their own