, however, in favour of the latter, that they
shall not be burnt alive, but that the men shall be beheaded, and the
women buried alive! _Religion_ could not, then, be the real motive of
the Spanish cabinet, for in returning to the ancient faith that point
was obtained; but the truth is, that the Spanish government considered
the reformed as _rebels_, whom it was not safe to re-admit to the rights
of citizenship. The undisguised fact appears in the codicil to the will
of the emperor, when he solemnly declares that he had written to the
Inquisition "to burn and extirpate the heretics," _after trying to make
Christians of them_, because he is convinced that they never can become
sincere catholics; and he acknowledges that he had committed a great
fault in permitting Luther to return free on the faith of his
safe-conduct, as the emperor was not bound to keep a promise with a
heretic. "It is because that I destroyed him not, that heresy has now
become strong, which I am convinced might have been stifled with him in
its birth."[159] The whole conduct of Charles the Fifth in this mighty
revolution was, from its beginning, censured by contemporaries as purely
_political_. Francis the First observed that the emperor, under the
colour of religion, was placing himself at the head of a league to make
his way to a predominant monarchy. "The pretext of religion is no new
thing," writes the Duke of Nevers. "Charles the Fifth had never
undertaken a war against the Protestant princes but with the design of
rendering the Imperial crown hereditary in the house of Austria; and he
has only attacked the electoral princes to ruin them, and to abolish
their right of election. Had it been zeal for the catholic religion,
would he have delayed from 1519 to 1549 to arm? That he might have
extinguished the Lutheran heresy, which he could easily have done in
1526, but he considered that this novelty would serve to divide the
German princes, and he patiently waited till the effect was
realised."[160]

Good men of both parties, mistaking the nature of these religious wars,
have drawn horrid inferences! The "dragonnades" of Louis XIV. excited
the admiration of Bruyere; and Anquetil, in his "Esprit de la Ligue,"
compares the revocation of the Edict of Nantes to a salutary amputation.
The massacre of St. Bartholomew in its own day, and even recently, has
found advocates; a Greek professor at the time asserted that there were
_two classes_ of protestants