e: Adrian VI, 1522-September 1523] After teaching
theology at Louvain he had been appointed tutor to Prince Charles and,
on the accession of his pupil to the Spanish throne was created Bishop
of Tortosa, and shortly thereafter cardinal and Inquisitor General of
Spain. While in this country he distinguished himself equally by the
justness of his administration and by his bitter hatred of Luther,
against whom he wrote several letters both to his imperial master and
to his old colleagues at Louvain.

[Sidenote: December 1521]

The death of Leo X was followed by an unusually long conclave, on
account of the even balance of parties. At last, despairing of
agreement, and feeling also that extraordinary measures were needed to
meet the exigencies of the situation, the cardinals, in January,
offered the tiara to Adrian, who, alone among modern popes, kept his
baptismal name while in office. The failure of Adrian VI to accomplish
much was due largely to the shortness of his pontificate of only twenty
months, and still more to the invincible corruption he found at Rome.
His really high sense of duty awakened no response save fear and hatred
among the courtiers of the Medicis. When he tried to restore the
ruined finances of the church he was accused of niggardliness; when he
made war on abuses he was called a barbarian; when he frankly
confessed, in his appeal to the German Diets, that perchance the whole
evil infecting the church came from the rottenness of the Curia, he was
assailed as putting arms into the arsenal of the enemy. His greatest
crime in the eyes of his court was that he was a foreigner, an austere,
phlegmatic man, who could understand neither their tongue nor their
ways.

{379} Exhausted by the fruitless struggle, Adrian sank into his grave,
a good pope unwept and unhonored as few bad popes have ever been. On
his tomb the cardinals wrote: "Here lies Adrian VI whose supreme
misfortune in life was that he was called upon to rule." A like
judgment was expressed more wittily by the people, who erected a
monument to Adrian's physician and labeled it, "Liberatori Patriae."

[Sidenote: Clement VII, 1523-34]

The swing of the pendulum so often noticed in politics was particularly
marked in the elections to the papacy of the sixteenth century. In
almost every instance the new pope was an opponent, and in some sort a
contrast, to his predecessor. In no case was this more true than in
the election of 1523. De