Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 2.djvu/173

 vague aspirations and imperial promises were poor substitutes for political forces, and the forms in which the common feelings of the nation found vent added strength to centrifugal tendencies, and contributed their share to the ruin of unity. The attempt to remodel the Church divided the realm into two persistently hostile camps, and the succession of Charles V secured the throne of the Caesars to a family which was too often ready to sacrifice its national imperial duties to the claims of dynastic ambition.

Seldom has a nation had better cause to repent a fit of enthusiasm than Germany had when it realised the effects of the election of Charles V. Of his rivals Francis I would no doubt have made a worse Emperor, but the choice of Ferdinand-a suggestion made by Margaret of Savoy and peremptorily rejected by Charles himself-or of Frederick of Saxony, would probably have been attended with less disastrous consequences to the German national cause. In personal tastes and sympathies, in the aims he pursued within his German kingdom, and in his foreign policy Charles V was an alien; his ways were not those of his subjects, nor were his thoughts their thoughts; he could neither speak the German language, nor read the German mind. Nurtured from birth in the Burgundian lands of his father, he at first regarded the world from a purely Burgundian point of view and sorely offended his Spanish subjects by his neglect of their interests in concluding the Treaty of Noyon (1516). But the Flemish aspect of his Court and his policy rapidly changed under southern influence, and the ten years of his youth (1517-20 and 1522-9) which he spent in Spain developed the Spanish tastes and feelings which he derived from his mother Juana. His mind grew ever more Spanish in sympathy, and this mental evolution was more and more clearly reflected in Charles' dynastic policy. So far as it was affected by national considerations, those considerations became ever more Spanish; the Colossus which bestrode the world gradually turned its face southwards, and it was to Spain and not to the land of his birth that Charles retired to die.

From this development Germany could not fail to suffer. German soldiers helped to win Pavia and to desecrate Rome, but their blood was shed in vain so far as the fatherland was concerned. Charles' conquests in Italy, made in the name of the German Empire and supported by German imperial claims, went to swell the growing bulk of the Spanish monarchy, and when he was crowned by Pope Clement VII at Bologna it was noted that functions which belonged of right to Princes of the Empire were performed by Spanish Grandees. His promise to the German nation to restore to the Empire its pristine extent and glory was interpreted in practice as an undertaking to enhance at all costs the prestige of the Habsburg family. The loss of its theoretical rights over such States as Milan and Genoa was, however, rather a sentimental than a real grievance to the nation. It had better cause for complaint