he Netherlands.

The causes and character of the two wars were essentially the same. There
were many changes of persons and of scenery during a struggle which
lasted for nearly three generations of mankind; yet a natural succession
both of actors, motives, and events will be observed from the beginning
to the close.

The designs of Charles V. to establish universal monarchy, which he had
passionately followed for a lifetime through a series of colossal crimes
against humanity and of private misdeeds against individuals, such as it
has rarely been permitted to a single despot to perpetrate, had been
baffled at last. Disappointed, broken, but even to our own generation
never completely unveiled, the tyrant had withdrawn from the stage of
human affairs, leaving his son to carry on the great conspiracy against
Human Right, independence of nations, liberty of thought, and equality of
religions, with the additional vigour which sprang from intensity of
conviction.

For Philip possessed at least that superiority over his father that he
was a sincere bigot. In the narrow and gloomy depths of his soul he had
doubtless persuaded himself that it was necessary for the redemption of
the human species that the empire of the world should be vested in his
hands, that Protestantism in all its forms should be extirpated as a
malignant disease, and that to behead, torture, burn alive, and bury
alive all heretics who opposed the decree of himself and the Holy Church
was the highest virtue by which he could merit Heaven.

The father would have permitted Protestantism if Protestantism would have
submitted to universal monarchy. There would have been small difficulty
in the early part of his reign in effecting a compromise between Rome and
Augsburg, had the gigantic secular ambition of Charles not preferred to
weaken the Church and to convert conscientious religious reform into
political mutiny; a crime against him who claimed the sovereignty of
Christendom.

The materials for the true history of that reign lie in the Archives of
Spain, Austria, Rome, Venice, and the Netherlands, and in many other
places. When out of them one day a complete and authentic narrative shall
have been constructed, it will be seen how completely the policy of
Charles foreshadowed and necessitated that of Philip, how logically,
under the successors of Philip, the Austrian dream of universal empire
ended in the shattering, in the minute subdivision, and the redu