Part 21

[Don Inigo Lopez de Recalde de Loyola, born in 1491, died in 1556. The scion of one of the noblest families in Spain, he was courtier and soldier till he was severely wounded in defending the city of Pampeluna against the French. A prisoner and a cripple, he became a religious enthusiast and ascetic, and conceived the idea of forming a body of religious soldiery for the defense of the Roman hierarchy against the assaults of its foes. After studying for the priesthood and taking orders, he went to Rome and with some difficulty persuaded the pontiff Paul III, who dreaded the fanatical discipline of such an order as much as he recognized its value, to issue a bull in sanction of his plan. The Society of Jesus was thus organized, and soon became, as it has continued to be, the most powerful bulwark of Romanism, the most active center of aggression and propagandism. The foundation of this order is recognized by historians as an epoch in the history of religion.]

Descended from an illustrious family, Ignatius had in his youth been a courtier and a cavalier, and, if not a poet, at least a cultivator of poetry. At the siege of Pampeluna his leg was broken, and, after the failure of mere vulgar leeches, was set by a touch from the hand of the prince of apostles. Yet St. Peter’s therapeutic skill was less perfect than might have been expected from so exalted a chirurgeon; for a splinter still protruded through the skin, and the limb was shrunk and shortened. To regain his fair proportions, Ignatius had himself literally stretched upon the rack; and expiated by a long confinement to his couch this singular experiment to reduce his refractory bones and sinews. Books of knighthood relieved the lassitude of sickness, and when these were exhausted, he betook himself to a series of still more marvelous romances. In the legends of the Saints the disabled soldier discovered a new field of

emulation and glory. Compared with their self-conquests and high rewards, the achievements and the renown of Roland and of Amadis waxed dim. Compared with the peerless damsel for whose smiles Palladius had fought and died, how transcendently glorious the image of female loveliness and angelic purity which had irradiated the hermit’s cell and the path of the way-worn pilgrims!

Far as the heavens are above the earth would be the plighted fealty of the knight of the Virgin Mother beyond the noblest devotion of merely human chivalry. In her service he would cast his shield over the Church which ascribed to her more than celestial dignities, and bathe in the blood of her enemies the sword once desecrated to the mean ends of worldly ambition. Nor were these vows unheeded by her to whom they were addressed. Environed in light, and clasping her infant to her bosom, she revealed herself to the adoring gaze of her champion. At that heavenly vision all fantasies of worldly and sensual delight, like exorcised demons, fled from his soul into eternal exile. He rose, suspended at her shrine his secular weapons, performed there his nocturnal devotions, and with returning day retired to consecrate his future life to the glory of the _Virgo Deipara_.

To these erotic dreams succeeded stern realities; convulsive agonies of prayer, wailings of remorse, and self-inflicted bodily torments. Exchanging dresses with a beggar, he lined his gabardine with prickly thorns, fasted to the verge of starvation, assumed the demeanor of an idiot, became too loathsome for human contact, and then, plunging into a gloomy cavern, surrendered himself up to such wrestlings with the evil spirit, and to such vicissitudes of rapture and despair, that in the storm of turbid passions his reason had nearly given way.

At the verge of madness, Ignatius paused. That noble intellect was not to be whelmed beneath the tempest in which so many have sunk, nor was his deliverance to be accomplished by any vulgar methods. Standing on the steps of a Dominican church, he recited the office of Our Lady, when suddenly heaven itself was laid open to the eyes of the worshiper. That ineffable mystery which the author of the Athanasian creed has labored in vain to enunciate in words, was disclosed to him as an object, not of faith, but of actual sight. To his spiritualized sense was disclosed the actual process by which the host is transubstantiated, and the other Christian verities which it is permitted to common man to receive but as exercises of their belief, became to him the objects of immediate inspection and of direct consciousness. For eight successive days his body reposed in an unbroken trance, while his spirit thus imbibed disclosures for which the tongues of men have no appropriate language.

Ignatius returned to this sublunary sphere with a mission not unmeet for an envoy from the empyrean world, of which he had thus become a temporary denizen. He returned to earth to establish a theocracy, of which he should himself be the first administrator, and to which every tribe and kindred of men should be subject. He returned no longer a sordid, half-distracted anchorite, but, strange to tell, a man distinguished not more by the gigantic magnitude of his designs than by the clear good sense, the profound sagacity, the calm perseverance, and the flexible address with which he was to pursue them. History affords no more perfect illustration how readily delirious enthusiasm and the shrewdness of the exchange may combine and harmonize in minds of the heroic order. A Swedenborg-Franklin reconciling in himself these antagonist propensities is no monster of the fancy.

Of all the occupations to which man can devote the earlier years of his life, none probably leaves on the character an impress so deep and indelible as the profession of arms. In no other calling is the whole range of our sympathetic affections, whether kindly or the reverse, called into such habitual and active exercise, nor does any other stimulate the mere intellectual powers with a force so irresistible when once they are effectually aroused from their accustomed torpor. Loyola was a soldier to the last breath he drew, a general whose authority none might question, a comrade on whose cordiality all might rely, sustaining all the dangers and hardships he exacted from his followers, and in his religious campaigns a strategist of consummate skill and most comprehensive survey. It was his maxim that war ought to be aggressive, and that even an inadequate force might be wisely weakened by detachments on a distant service, if the prospect of success was such that the vague and perhaps exaggerated rumor of it would strike terror into nearer foes and animate the hopes of irresolute allies. To conquer Lutheranism by converting to the faith of Rome the barbarous or half-civilized nations of the earth was, therefore, among the earliest of his projects.

Though not in books, yet in the far nobler school of active and especially of military life, Loyola had learned the great secret of government--at least, of his government. It was that the social affections, if concentrated within a well-defined circle, possess an intensity and endurance unrivaled by those passions of which self is the immediate object. He had the sagacity to perceive that emotions like those with which a Spartan or a Jew had yearned over the land and the institutions of their fathers--emotions stronger than appetite, vanity, ambition, avarice, or death itself--might be kindled in the members of his order; if he could detect and grasp those mainsprings of human action of which the Greek and the Hebrew legislators had obtained the mastery. Nor did he seek them in vain.

Some unconscious love of power, a mind bewildered by many gross superstitions and theoretical errors, and perhaps some tinge of insanity, may be ascribed to Ignatius Loyola; but no dispassionate reader of his writings or of his life will question his integrity, or deny to him the praise of a devotion at once sincere, habitual, and profound. It is not to the glory of the reformers to depreciate the name of their greatest antagonist, or to think meanly of him to whom more than any other man it is owing that the Reformation was stayed and the Church of Rome rescued from her impending doom.

From amid the controversies which then agitated the world had emerged two great truths, of which, after three hundred years’ debate, we are yet to find the reconcilement. It was true that the Christian commonwealth should be one consentient body, united under one supreme head, and bound together a community of law, of doctrine, and of worship. It was also true that each member of that body must for himself, on his own responsibility and at his own peril, render that worship, study that law, and seek the guidance of the Supreme Ruler. Here was a problem for the learned and wise, for schools, and presses, and pulpits. But it is not by sages nor in the spirit of philosophy that such problems receive their practical solution. Wisdom may be the ultimate arbiter, but it is seldom the immediate agent in human affairs. It is by antagonist passions, prejudices, and follies that the equipoise of this most belligerent planet of ours is chiefly preserved, and so it was in the sixteenth century. The German pointed the way to that sacred solitude where beside the worshiper himself none may enter; the Spaniard to that innumerable company which with one accord still chant the liturgies of remotest generations. Chieftains in the most momentous warfare of which this earth had been the theatre since the subversion of paganism, each was a rival worthy of the other in capacity, courage, disinterestedness, and love of the truth, and yet how marvelous the contrast!

Unalluring and, on the whole, unlovely as it is, the image of Loyola must ever command the homage of the world. No other uninspired man, unaided by military or civil power, and making no appeal to the passions of the multitude, has had the genius to conceive, the courage to attempt, and the success to establish a polity teeming with results at once so momentous and so distinctly foreseen. Amid his ascetic follies and his half-crazy visions, and despite all the coarse daubing with which the miracle-mongers of his church have defaced it, his character is destitute neither of sublimity nor of grace. Men felt that there had appeared among them one of those monarchs who reign in right of their own native supremacy, and to whom the feebler will of others must yield either a ready or a reluctant allegiance. It was a conviction recorded by his disciples on his tomb in these memorable and significant words: “Whoever thou mayst be who hast portrayed to thine own imagination Pompey nor Cæsar or Alexander, open thine eyes to the truth, and let this marble teach thee how much greater a conqueror than they was Ignatius.”

THOMAS CROMWELL, EARL OF ESSEX.

BY JOHN RICHARD GREEN.

[Born about 1498, executed 1540. Cromwell began his public career as secretary of Cardinal Wolsey, and made a brilliant reputation for administrative ability before his patron’s fall. He acquired the notice of Henry VIII by his loyalty to the disgraced cardinal when all other friends had deserted him. By the king’s favor he received the highest offices of the state, and was made Prime Minister, finally becoming earl of Essex. Cromwell was the political leader of the English Reformation, and the most effective instrument in concentrating power in the hands of the king. His impeachment and execution for high treason, however he may have deserved his fate for his cruelty and unscrupulousness, was gross ingratitude on the part of Henry.]

The debate on the suppression of the monasteries was the first instance of opposition with which Cromwell had met, and for some time longer it was to remain the only one. While the great revolution which struck down the Church was in progress, England looked silently on. In all the earlier ecclesiastical changes, in the contest over the Papal jurisdiction and Papal exactions, in the reform of the Church courts, even in the curtailment of the legislative independence of the clergy, the nation as a whole had gone with the king. But from the enslavement of the clergy, from the gagging of the pulpits, from the suppression of the monasteries, the bulk of the nation stood aloof. It is only through the stray depositions of royal spies that we catch a glimpse of the wrath and hate which lay seething under this silence of a whole people. For the silence was a silence of terror. Before Cromwell’s rise and after his fall from power the reign of Henry VIII witnessed no more than the common tyranny and bloodshed of the time. But the years of Cromwell’s administration form the one period in our history which deserves the name which men have given to the rule of Robespierre. It was the English Terror. It was by terror that Cromwell mastered the king. Cranmer could plead for him at a later time with Henry as “one whose surety was only by your majesty, who loved your majesty, as I ever thought, no less than God.”

But the attitude of Cromwell toward the king was something more than that of absolute dependence and unquestioning devotion. He was “so vigilant to preserve your majesty from all treasons,” adds the primate, “that few could be so secretly conceived but he detected the same from the beginning.” Henry, like every Tudor, was fearless of open danger, but tremulously sensitive to the slightest breath of hidden disloyalty. It was on this inner dread that Cromwell based the fabric of his power. He was hardly secretary before a host of spies were scattered broadcast over the land. Secret denunciations poured into the open ear of the minister. The air was thick with tales of plots and conspiracies, and with the detection and suppression of each Cromwell tightened his hold on the king. And as it was by terror that he mastered the king, so it was by terror that he mastered the people. Men felt in England, to use the figure by which Erasmus paints the time, “as if a scorpion lay sleeping under every stone.” The confessional had no secrets for Cromwell. Men’s talk with their closest friends found its way to his ear. “Words idly spoken,” the murmurs of a petulant abbot, the ravings of a moon-struck nun, were, as the nobles cried passionately at his fall, “tortured into treason.” The only chance of safety lay in silence. “Friends who used to write and send me presents,” Erasmus tells us, “now send neither letter nor gifts, nor receive any from any one, and this through fear.”

But even the refuge of silence was closed by a law more infamous than any that has ever blotted the statute-book of England. Not only was thought made treason, but men were forced to reveal their thoughts on pain of their very silence being punished with the penalties of treason. All trust in the older bulwarks of liberty was destroyed by a policy as daring as it was unscrupulous. The noblest institutions were degraded into instruments of terror. Though Wolsey had strained the law to the utmost, he had made no open attack on the freedom of justice. If he had shrunk from assembling Parliaments, it was from his sense that they were the bulwarks of liberty. Under Cromwell the coercion of juries and the management of judges rendered the courts mere mouth-pieces of the royal will: and where even this shadow of justice proved an obstacle to bloodshed, Parliament was brought into play to pass bill after bill of attainder. “He shall be judged by the bloody laws he has himself made,” was the cry of the council at the moment of his fall, and, by a singular retribution, the crowning injustice which he sought to introduce even into the practice of attainder--the condemnation of a man without hearing his defense--was only practiced on himself.

But ruthless as was the Terror of Cromwell, it was of a nobler type than the Terror of France. He never struck uselessly or capriciously, or stooped to the meaner victims of the guillotine. His blows were effective just because he chose his victims from among the noblest and the best. If he struck at the Church, it was through the Carthusians, the holiest and the most renowned of English churchmen. If he struck at the baronage, it was through the Courtenays and the Poles, in whose veins flowed the blood of kings. If he struck at the New Learning, it was through the murder of Sir Thomas More. But no personal vindictiveness mingled with his crime. In temper, indeed, so far as we can judge from the few stories which lingered among his friends, he was a generous, kind-hearted man, with pleasant and winning manners which atoned for a certain awkwardness of person, and with a constancy of friendship which won him a host of devoted adherents. But no touch either of love or hate swayed him from his course.

The student of Macchiavelli had not studied the “Prince” in vain. He had reduced bloodshed to a system. Fragments of his papers still show us with what a business-like brevity he ticked off human lives among the casual “remembrances” of the day. “Item, the Abbot of Reading to be sent down to be tried and executed at Reading.” “Item, to know the king’s pleasure touching Master More.” “Item, when Master Fisher shall go to his execution, and the other.” It is indeed this utter absence of all passion, of all personal feeling, that makes the figure of Cromwell the most terrible in our history. He has an absolute faith in the end he is pursuing, and he simply hews his way to it as a woodman hews his way through the forest, axe in hand.

His single will forced on a scheme of foreign policy whose aim was to bind England to the cause of the Reformation while it bound Henry helplessly to his minister. The daring boast which his enemies laid afterward to his charge, whether uttered or not, is but the expression of his system. “In brief time he would bring things to such a pass that the king with all his power should not be able to hinder him.” His plans rested, like the plan which proved fatal to Wolsey, on a fresh marriage of his master. The short-lived royalty of Anne Boleyn had ended in charges of adultery and treason, and in her death in May, 1536. Her rival and successor in Henry’s affections, Jane Seymour, died the next year in childbirth; and Cromwell replaced her with a German consort, Anne of Cleves, a sister-in-law of the Lutheran elector of Saxony. He dared even to resist Henry’s caprice, when the king revolted on their first interview at the coarse features and unwieldy form of his new bride. For the moment Cromwell had brought matters “to such a pass” that it was impossible to recoil from the marriage.

The marriage of Anne of Cleves, however, was but the first step in a policy which, had it been carried out as he designed it, would have anticipated the triumphs of Richelieu. Charles and the house of Austria could alone bring about a Catholic reaction strong enough to arrest and roll back the Reformation; and Cromwell was no sooner united with the princes of North Germany than he sought to league them with France for the overthrow of the emperor. Had he succeeded, the whole face of Europe would have been changed, Southern Germany would have been secured for Protestantism, and the Thirty Years’ War averted. He failed as men fail who stand ahead of their age. The German princes shrank from a contest with the emperor, France from a struggle which would be fatal to Catholicism; and Henry, left alone to bear the resentment of the House of Austria, and chained to a wife he loathed, turned savagely on Cromwell. The nobles sprang on him with a fierceness that told of their long-hoarded hate. Taunts and execrations burst from the lords at the council table, as the Duke of Norfolk, who had been charged with the minister’s arrest, tore the ensign of the garter from his neck. At the charge of treason Cromwell flung his cap on the ground with a passionate cry of despair. “This, then,” he exclaimed, “is my guerdon for the services I have done! On your consciences, I ask you, am I a traitor?” Then, with a sudden sense that all was over, he bade his foes “make quick work, and not leave me to languish in prison.” Quick work was made, and a yet louder burst of popular applause than that which hailed the attainder of Cromwell hailed his execution.

CHARLES V, EMPEROR OF GERMANY.

BY JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY.

[Charles V, of Germany, and king of Spain under title of Charles I, born 1500, died 1558. This fortunate monarch inherited from his father, Archduke Philip of Austria, the Hapsburg dominion in Germany; through his grandmother, the dukedom of Burgundy, which included the Netherlands; and through his maternal grandfather, Ferdinand of Spain, the magnificent dominion of the latter country in both the New and Old Worlds. He was elected Emperor of Germany by the diet in 1519, and was the most rich and powerful prince in Christendom. Among the notable events of his reign were the outbreak of Luther’s reformation, the defeat and capture of Francis I of France, the capture and sack of Rome by his generalissimo, the Constable de Bourbon, the two defeats of the Turkish power in Hungary, and the severe punishment of the Mohammedan pirates of Africa. Though Charles could turn his arms against the pontiff when policy dictated, and was not a religious bigot, he strained every nerve to suppress the Lutheran reformation for political reasons. He was at last, however, obliged to assent to a certain degree of religious toleration, fixed by the Nuremburg agreement in 1532, and that of Augsburg in 1548. He abdicated in favor of his son Philip in 1556, and spent the last two years of his life in the convent of Yuste in Spain.]

The edicts and the Inquisition were the gifts 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.