, who mutinied everywhere from his
inability to pay them. He therefore assembled the Cortes, or
states-general, of Castile, at Toledo, in 1539, stated his wants, and
demanded subsidies. The clergy and nobility pleaded their own exemption
and refused to impose new taxes on the other orders. Charles, in anger,
dissolved the Cortes, and declared the nobles and prelates forever
excluded from that body, on the ground that men who pay no taxes have no
right to a voice in the national assemblies. But the people of Ghent
made a more serious resistance to authority, on account of a tax which
infringed their privileges. They offered to transfer their allegiance to
Francis, who did not avail himself of the proposal, not from either
conscientious or chivalrous scruples, but because his views were all
centred in Milan; he therefore betrayed his Flemish clients to the
emperor, in hopes of obtaining the investiture of the Italian duchy. By
holding out the expectation of this boon, Charles obtained a
safe-conduct for his passage through France into Flanders, whither he
was anxious to repair without loss of time. His presence soon reduced
the insurgents. The inhabitants of Ghent opened their gates to him on
his fortieth birthday, in 1540; and he entered his native city, in his
own words, "as their sovereign and their judge, with the sceptre and the
sword." He punished twenty-nine of the principal citizens with death,
the town with the forfeiture of its privileges, and the people by a
heavy fine for the building of a citadel to coerce them. He broke his
word with Francis by bestowing the Milanese on his own son, afterward
Philip II.

Our limits will not allow of our detailing the circumstances of the
emperor's calamitous expedition against Algiers; but his courage,
constancy, and humanity in distress and danger, claim a sympathy for his
misfortunes which is withheld from the selfish and wily career of his
prosperity.

Francis devised new grounds for war, and allied himself with Sweden,
Denmark, and the Sultan Soliman. This is the first instance of a
confederacy with the North. But he had alienated the Protestants of
Germany by his severe measures against the Lutherans, and Henry VIII. by
crossing the marriage of his son Edward with Mary of Scotland, yet in
her cradle. Henry therefore leagued with the emperor, who found it
convenient to bury the injuries of Catherine of Aragon in her grave. The
war was continued during the two following