第46节

ount of all the good and

bad sides of every historical event. It is very difficult to do

this because we all have our personal likes and dislikes. But

we ought to try and be as fair as we can be, and must not allow

our prejudices to influence us too much.

Take my own case as an example. I grew up in the very

Protestant centre of a very Protestant country. I never saw

any Catholics until I was about twelve years old. Then I felt

very uncomfortable when I met them. I was a little bit afraid.

I knew the story of the many thousand people who had been

burned and hanged and quartered by the Spanish Inquisition

when the Duke of Alba tried to cure the Dutch people of their

Lutheran and Calvinistic heresies. All that was very real

to me. It seemed to have happened only the day before. It

might occur again. There might be another Saint Bartholomew's

night, and poor little me would be slaughtered in my

nightie and my body would be thrown out of the window, as

had happened to the noble Admiral de Coligny.

Much later I went to live for a number of years in a Catholic

country. I found the people much pleasanter and much

more tolerant and quite as intelligent as my former countrymen.

To my great surprise, I began to discover that there

was a Catholic side to the Reformation, quite as much as a

Protestant.

Of course the good people of the sixteenth and seventeenth

centuries, who actually lived through the Reformation, did

not see things that way. They were always right and their

enemy was always wrong. It was a question of hang or be

hanged, and both sides preferred to do the hanging. Which

was no more than human and for which they deserve no blame.

When we look at the world as it appeared in the year 1500,

an easy date to remember, and the year in which the Emperor

Charles V was born, this is what we see. The feudal disorder

of the Middle Ages has given way before the order of a number

of highly centralised kingdoms. The most powerful of

all sovereigns is the great Charles, then a baby in a cradle.

He is the grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella and of Maxi-

milian of Habsburg, the last of the mediaeval knights, and of

his wife Mary, the daughter of Charles the Bold, the ambitious

Burgundian duke who had made successful war upon France

but had been killed by the independent Swiss peasants. The

child Charles, therefore, has fallen heir to the greater part of

the map, to all the lands of his parents, grandparents, uncles,

cousins and aunts in Germany, in Austria, in Holland, in

Belgium, in Italy, and in Spain, together with all their colonies

in Asia, Africa and America. By a strange irony of fate, he

has been born in Ghent, in that same castle of the counts of

Flanders, which the Germans used as a prison during their

recent occupation of Belgium, and although a Spanish king

and a German emperor, he receives the training of a Fleming.

As his father is dead (poisoned, so people say, but this is

never proved), and his mother has lost her mind (she is travelling

through her domains with the coffin containing the body

of her departed husband), the child is left to the strict

discipline of his Aunt Margaret. Forced to rule Germans and

Italians and Spaniards and a hundred strange races, Charles

grows up a Fleming, a faithful son of the Catholic Church,

but quite averse to religious intolerance. He is rather lazy,

both as a boy and as a man. But fate condemns him to rule

the world when the world is in a turmoil of religious fervour.

Forever he is speeding from Madrid to Innsbruck and from

Bruges to Vienna. He loves peace and quiet and he is always

at war. At the age of fifty-five, we see him turn his back upon

the human race in utter disgust at so much hate and so much

stupidity. Three years later he dies, a very tired and disappointed

man.

So much for Charles the Emperor. How about the Church,

the second great power in the world? The Church has changed

greatly since the early days of the Middle Ages, when it started

out to conquer the heathen and show them the advantages of