t must be wholly charged on a wilful
misstatement of facts. It is true, the monkish chronicler is not always
quite so scrupulous in this particular as would be
desirable,--especially where the honor of his order is implicated. But
what interest could the Jeronymite fathers have had in so foolish a
fabrication as this? The supposition is at variance with the respectable
character of the parties, and with the air of simplicity and good faith
that belongs to their narratives.[331]

We may well be staggered, it is true, by the fact that no allusion to
the obsequies appears in any of the letters from Yuste; while the date
assigned for them, moreover, is positively disproved. Yet we may
consider that the misstatement of a date is a very different thing from
the invention of a story; and that chronological accuracy, as I have
more than once had occasion to remark, was not the virtue of the
monkish, or indeed of any other historian of the sixteenth century. It
would not be a miracle if the obsequies should have taken place some
days before the period assigned to them. It so happens that we have no
letters from Yuste between the eighteenth and twenty-eighth of August.
At least, I have none myself, and have seen none cited by others. If any
should hereafter come to light, written during that interval, they may
be found possibly to contain some allusion to the funeral. Should no
letters have been written during the period, the silence of the parties
who wrote at the end of August and the beginning of September may be
explained by the fact, that too long a time had elapsed since the
performance of the emperor's obsequies, for them to suppose it could
have any connection with his illness, which formed the subject of their
correspondence. Difficulties will present themselves, whichever view we
take of the matter. But the reader may think it quite as reasonable to
explain those difficulties by the supposition of involuntary error, as
by that of sheer invention.

Nor is the former supposition rendered less probable by the character of
Charles the Fifth. There was a taint of insanity in the royal blood of
Castile, which was most fully displayed in the emperor's mother, Joanna.
Some traces of it, however faint, may be discerned in his own conduct,
before he took refuge in the cloisters of Yuste. And though we may not
agree with Paul the Fourth in regarding this step as sufficient evidence
of his madness,[332] we may yet find something i