s
German branch, from yielding to the pressing demands of so many of its
subjects, and, after the example of other princes, enriching itself at
the expense of a defenceless clergy? It is difficult to credit that a
belief in the infallibility of the Romish Church had any greater
influence on the pious adherence of this house, than the opposite
conviction had on the revolt of the Protestant princes. In fact,
several circumstances combined to make the Austrian princes zealous
supporters of popery. Spain and Italy, from which Austria derived its
principal strength, were still devoted to the See of Rome with 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