§ 52. HIS DEATH. 285
commended him to the intercession of saints, namely, St. Matthew, on whose day he was born, and St. Matthias, on whose day he was in a few moments to leave this world.
“Thus,” says Mignet, “the two doctrines which divided the world in the age of Charles V. were once more brought before him on the bed of death.”
It is an interesting fact, that the same archbishop who had taken a prominent part in the persecution of English Prot- _estants under Queen Mary, and who administered the last and truly evangelical comfort to the dying Emperor, became a victim of persecution, and that those very words of comfort were used by the Emperor’s confessor as one of the grounds of the charge of heresy before the tribunal of the Spanish Inquisition. Bartolomé de Carranza was seven years imprisoned in Spain, then sent to Rome, lodged in the Castle of St. Angelo, after long delay found guilty of sixteen Lutheranizing propositions in his writings, suspended from the exercise of his episcopal functions, and sentenced to be shut up for five years in a convent of his order. He died sixteen days after the judgment, in the Convent Sopra Minerva, May 2, 1576, “declaring his innocence with tears in his eyes, and yet with strange inconsistency admitting the justice of his sentence.” }
In less than two months after the decease of the Emperor, Queen Mary, his cousin, and wife of his son, died, Nov. 17, 1558, and was borne to her rest in Westminster Abbey. With her the Roman hierarchy collapsed, and the reformed religion, after five years of bloody persecution, was permanently restored on the throne and in the Church of England. In view of this coincidence, we may well exclaim with Ranke, “ How far do the thoughts of Divine Providence exceed the thoughts and purposes of men!” ?
1 His long trial is told by Prescott, Philip the Second, I. 837, 487 sqq.; and by Stoughton, The Spanish Reformers, pp. 185 sqq. 2 Deutsche Gesch., vol. VY. 811.
286 THE GERMAN REFORMATION. A.D. 1517 To 1530.
Ms Tomb.
From Yuste the remains of the once mighty Emperor were removed in 1574 to their last resting-place under the altar of the cathedral of the Escorial. That gloomy structure, in a dreary mountain region some thirty miles north of Madrid, was built by his order as a royal burial-place (between 1563 and 1584), and combines a palace, a monastery, a cathedral, and a tomb (called Pantheon). Philip II., “el Escorialense,” spent there fourteen years, half king, half monk, boasting that he ruled the Old and New World from the foot of a mountain with two inches of paper. He died, after long and intense suffering, Sept. 18, 1598, in a dark little
room facing the altar of the church.
Father and son are represented in gilt-bronze statues, opposite each other, in kneeling posture, looking to the high altar; Charles V., with his wife Isabella, his daughter Maria, and his sisters Eleonora and Maria; Philip II., with three of his wives, and his weak-minded and unfortunate son, Don Carlos.
The Escorial, like Spain itself, is only a shadow of the past, inhabited by the ghost of its founder, who entombed in it his own gloomy character.!
1 The convent was robbed of its richest treasures by the French invaders in 1808, and by the Carlists in 1837. Some of the finest pictures were removed to the museum of Madrid. There still remains a considerable library; the books are richly bound, but their gilt backs are turned inside. The Rev. Fritz Fliedner, an active and hopeful Protestant evangelist in Madrid, with whom I visited the Escorial in May, 1886, bought there the ruins of a house and garden, which was built and temporarily occupied by Philip II. (while the palace-monastery was in process of construction), and fitted it up for an orphan-home, in which day by day the Scriptures are read, and evangelical hymns are sung, in the Spanish tongue.