Page:General History of Europe 1921.djvu/451

 The Wars of Religion 331 order and led them to attribute an evil purpose to every act of the Jesuits. They were popularly supposed to justify the most deceit- ful and immoral measures on the ground that the result would be "for the greater glory of God." 1 II. PHILIP II AND THE REVOLT OF THE NETHERLANDS 558. Division of the Hapsburg Possessions. The chief ally of the Pope and the Jesuits in their efforts to check Protestantism was the son of Emperor Charles V, Philip II of Spain. Charles V, crippled with the gout and old before his time, laid down the cares of government in 1555-1556. To his brother, Ferdinand, who had acquired by marriage the kingdoms of Bohemia and Hungary, Charles had earlier transferred the German possessions of the Hapsburgs. To his son, Philip II (1556-1598), he gave Spain with its great American colonies, Milan, the kingdom of the Two Sicilies, and the Netherlands (see table, p. 306 n.). 559. The Netherlands. The Netherlands, which were to cause Philip his first and greatest trouble, included seventeen provinces which Charles V had inherited from his grandmother, Mary of Burgundy ( 516). They occupied the position on the map where we now find the kingdoms of Holland and Belgium. In the north the hardy Germanic population had been able, by means of dikes which kept out the sea, to reclaim large tracts of lowlands. Here considerable cities had grown up Harlem, Leyden, Amsterdam, and Rotterdam. To the south were the flourishing towns of Ghent, Bruges, Brussels, and Antwerp, which had for hundreds of years been centers of manufacture and trade. 560. Philip IPs Harsh Attitude toward the Netherlands; Alva. Philip did everything to alienate all classes in the Nether- lands and to increase their natural hatred and lively suspicion of 1 As time went on the Jesuits found themselves involved in difficulties with the vari- ous European governments, largely because in the eighteenth century they undertook great commercial enterprises, and for this and other reasons lost the confidence of even the Catholics. Convinced that the order had outgrown its usefulness, the Pope abolished it in 1773, I* was > however, restored in 1814 and now again has thousands of members.