Retirement at Yuste
On 28 September 1556 Charles V returned from his last voyage to Spain. At Burgos he rewarded and dismissed many of his attendants and took leave of his two sisters, Mary, the former queen of Hungary, and Eleanor, widow of Francis I. His sisters, apparently the only people who still felt affection for him, decided to stay with him in a monastery; but since Spanish law did not permit this, they took lodging near their brother's monastery.
After enduring a number of ceremonies on the way, Charles finally reached the village of Jarandilla in the valley of Plasencia, two hundred kilometers west of Madrid, and spent some months there while the residence being built for him at the monastery of Yuste (St. Justus), ten kilometers from Jarandilla, was finished. His residence, instead of a monk's cell, was a palace that could hold fifty of his servants. The monks were glad to see so distinguished a guest settle in their house, but they were hurt when they saw that he did not consider himself bound by the rules and discipline of monastic life. Here, as in his reign, Charles overindulged in food and drink. He ate so much omelette, sardines, Estremadura sausage, eel pie, choice partridges, fat capons, wine and beer that his own doctors had to prescribe him a medicine against appetite (the book's phrase) to stop the effects of gluttony.
Instead of spending his time in prayer and reading psalms, Charles read and answered his son's letters and advised him on war, religion and government. In his last year a ruthless bigotry took hold of him. He ordered every kind of heresy "uprooted," and regretted having let Luther escape him at the Diet of Worms. He ordered that any woman seen within two bowshots of the monastery be punished with a hundred lashes. He altered his will so that thirty thousand Masses would be said for the peace of his soul after his death. These things should not be put down simply to old age, for he may have had a share of his mother's madness.
In August 1558 Charles's gout was joined by a burning fever, and for a month before his death (21 September 1558) it wrestled him through the pains of dying. In 1574 Philip moved the remains of his body to the Escorial and buried them under a splendid memorial.
A Balance Sheet
Charles V embodied the failure and helplessness of his age, and even some of his merits brought the people nothing but misfortune. He pacified Italy, but at the cost of ten years of ruinous war and bloodshed and the submission of Italy and the pope to Spain. The Italian Renaissance fell silent under the political rule of this man of poor taste. He defeated and captured Francis, but did not use the chance to make a treaty that would save the honor and lives of a hundred thousand men. He drove Suleiman the Magnificent back from Vienna and cut Barbarossa's hand off the Mediterranean. He raised the House of Habsburg to power, but broke up and weakened his own empire. He lost Lorraine and handed Burgundy to the enemy. The rulers of Germany foiled his efforts to keep imperial power there, and of the Holy Roman Empire nothing remained but a shaky, rotting structure that collapsed at Napoleon's hands. Charles failed to crush the Protestants of Germany, and the method he chose for crushing the Protestants of the Netherlands left his son an inheritor of a painful fate. He caught the cities of Germany, which were enjoying freedom and economic prosperity, in the clutches of rotten, reactionary feudalism.
On the day he stepped onto German soil, the German nation led all of Europe in new ideas and energy; on the day he gave up the throne, it was so worn out and weakened intellectually and spiritually that for two hundred years it could not shake off its torpor and stand up. In Germany and Italy his policy was one of the causes of torpor and decline, and the destruction of the freedom and strength of the Spanish cities had no cause but his actions. Instead of getting Catherine of Aragon to bow to Henry's wish for a male heir, and so keeping a split from opening between England and the Roman Catholic Church, he pushed the pope into steps that led to England's complete break with Rome.
When we recall Charles's shortcomings and mistakes and their ruinous results, the spirit of historical understanding bids us, in light of his intellectual world and the deceptions of his time, to overlook his faults. He was the ablest ruler of his day, but only in that he faced with courage and daring the most thorny and deeply rooted problems of the age; and in the end these same problems brought down a great and able man like him.
Two Forces That Remade Europe
In Charles's long reign we meet two historical forces that in the end changed the face of Europe. One was the growth of nationalism under independent local rulers, in which Charles had no part. The other was the religious revolution that grew from the love of freedom and special interests of nations. Northern Germany and the Scandinavian countries turned to Luther's faith; southern Germany, Switzerland, Holland and Flanders were divided into Catholic and Protestant regions; Scotland took Calvin's Presbyterian system; England chose Anglican Catholicism or Calvinist Puritanism; and Ireland, France, Italy, Spain and Portugal stayed loyal to a distant pope who in practice had no power. Before long the scattering that came from these two forces gave way to unity. Europe's free and proud nations drew closer together; economic interests joined them; and the wars, policies, laws and art that nationhood created are a story worth hearing in themselves. The Europe we knew in our youth took shape in this age.