A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

had started his movement twenty years earlier, Protestantism would probably have been nipped in
the bud. And at the Council of Trent the Church showed its determination to reform itself by
remaining in session for eighteen years.
So by the year of Luther’s death, 1546, Charles V felt ready to complete the Counter-Reformation
by killing every Protestant in Europe. He had had a great deal of practice in suppressing revolts. He
was the grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella, who had brought unity to Spain. Unfortunately, when
they had driven the Moors out of Granada, they had also founded the Spanish Inquisition to make
sure that everybody in Spain - including Moors and Jews - became good Christians; the name of
their chief inquisitor, Torquemada, became a by-word for cruelty. Charles inherited the bigoted
Catholicism of his grandmother, and approved of her notion of burning heretics. When he came to
Spain from Ghent at the age of seventeen (in 1517) he could not even speak Spanish and soon had a
widespread revolt on his hands. Luck was with him; the rebellion turned into a kind of peasants’
revolt - they even called themselves ‘comuneros’ - and the nobles who had supported it went over
to Charles’s side. So in 1521 there was a mass execution of rebels after they were defeated in battle,
and Charles was confirmed as king of Spain. He spent most of the rest of his life fighting the king
of France, but in 1522, when he realised that Protestantism was spreading fast, he introduced the
Inquisition in the Netherlands; and in 1523, two Protestant martyrs were burnt at the stake, singing
hymns and shouting defiance.
But by the time the treaty of Crespy left Charles free to try and stamp out the Protestantism, the
Protestant princes had formed their own defensive alliance, the Schmalkaldic league.
As his chief commander, Charles appointed the ambitious and sadistic Duke of Alva - who has
strong claims to being the most wholly vicious character to make his appearance in this criminal
history of mankind. (The only attractive episode in his life is a mad seventeen-day ride he made
from Hungary - where he was fighting Turks - back to Spain to spend a few hours with his newlymarried
wife; the rest of his life is a saga of bigotry and torture.) But he was also a man of
undoubted brilliance and courage. Making a dangerous crossing of the Elbe, Alva’s army swooped
on the Protestants at Muhlberg and inflicted a shattering defeat. It was one of the most glorious
days in the life of ‘the second Charlemagne’. Charles then marched his armies on to Wittenberg, no
doubt regretting that his arch-enemy Luther had died in the previous year. After a siege, Wittenberg
surrendered, and for a few days Charles must have believed that he had defeated Protestantism
single-handed. Then he took a closer look at the German scene and his optimism evaporated. These
people were grimly and fanatically Protestant; they hated the Catholics. A war would be a war to
the death. And eight years later, after many battles and sieges, Charles had to acknowledge that he
was never going to batter the Protestants into submission; he concluded the peace of Augsburg,
allowing the Protestants freedom of worship within their own territories. In the same year, the
exhausted and dispirited emperor abdicated and retired to a monastery, where he spent the
remaining two years of his life flogging himself with a rope whose knots gradually wore away.
His empire was divided between his brother Ferdinand and his son Philip. Philip got the
Netherlands - and this was to have far-reaching consequences, for Spain and for the rest of Europe.
Two years before Charles abdicated - in 1544 - Philip had married the queen of England, Mary
Tudor - later to become known as Bloody Mary. This thirty-six-year-old virgin, the daughter of
Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon, had fallen in love with Philip as soon as she saw his portrait.
Philip said he would rather not reign at all than reign over heretics; so Mary restored the laws
against heresy and declared that, from now on, England was once again a Catholic country. Two
weeks later, the first married priest was burnt at the stake in Smithfield.