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.
Mary was probably insane when she started her campaign of persecution; in the previous year she had been convinced she was pregnant and her stomach swelled convincingly. Then doctors discovered it was a phantom pregnancy, induced by hysteria. It was after this that she ordered the persecution of Protestants; three hundred of them were burned at the stake – the story is told in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, which the English adopted as a second Bible. No one mourned Mary when she died at the age of forty-two. But the people of England went mad with joy when her half-sister Elizabeth was proclaimed queen.
Philip’s first act in becoming ruler of the Netherlands was to tell the Inquisitors to get on with their job. The chief of these was a man called Titelman, and the pleasure he took in torture suggests that he was mentally deranged. He enjoyed personally dragging suspects from their beds and hitting people on the head with a large club. This kind of thing aroused Protestants to a frenzy. One man called Bertrand de Bias snatched the consecrated wafer from the hands of a priest and trampled on it, shouting: ‘Fools, do you take this thing to be Jesus Christ?’ It seemed impossible to devise a suitable punishment for such a crime. He was dragged to the market place on a hurdle, and his hand and foot were twisted off with red hot pincers. Then his arms and legs were tied together in the small of his back and he was suspended over a slow fire on a chain and allowed to swing back and forth as he roasted. Another family called Ogier were arrested for holding prayers at home – they included a teenage son and a child. At the hearing, the child answered with such simplicity that the judges had tears in their eyes and decided to sentence only the father and the teenager. As the boy burnt to death, he screamed aloud ‘Eternal father…’ and a monk who was present screamed back ‘God isn’t your father – you’re the devil’s children.’ A week later, they decided to burn the wife and younger child, wiping out the family.
In the first two years of his reign, Philip encouraged the Inquisition to burn thousands of people. Then, in 1567, he decided that real firmness was needed and sent in the Duke of Alva. It was, we can see in retrospect, the supreme mistake of Philip’s career, the mistake that was to cost Spain the empire built up by Charles V. In February 1568, the Holy Office issued a statement declaring that everybody in the Netherlands was a heretic and therefore sentenced to die. Since the Netherlands had three million inhabitants, it was an impossible task, even for a man as efficient as Alva. In Holy Week, eight hundred people were executed. The method was to seal their mouths with a kind of iron gag that allowed the tongue to protrude, then the end of the tongue was sliced off and burned with a red hot iron, so it swelled and could not be withdrawn. Then they were thrown into the flames. But as a method of genocide, this was too slow. People were made to lie on the ground and had their backs broken with a tremendous blow of an iron bar or axe, then they were left to die. But this required a great deal of energy from the executioners, whose arms became tired. So Alva ordered prisoners to be tied together three at a time and tossed into the river to drown. By this method, he managed to execute eight thousand people in one session in Antwerp. But it was still slow work. Alva himself later said that he had ordered about nineteen thousand executions for heresy. But there were tens of thousands of others for rebellion.
In spite of all the cruelty, Alva was unable to crush the revolt. An attempt to impose a kind of ‘value-added tax’ of ten per cent on everything bought and sold brought matters to a head and he had to climb down. (The inhabitants of Europe have grown more docile since those days.) William of Orange, driven out by the Spaniards, invaded with his brother Louis, while a league of nobles who were contemptuously known as ‘the beggars’ raised a revolt in the north. In 1573, the duke of Alva was withdrawn from the Netherlands at his own request. He knew that, for all his ruthlessness, he had failed to stamp out the spirit of Protestantism.
Meanwhile, the English, under their Protestant queen Elizabeth, were delighted to see the Spaniards getting themselves into so much trouble. She lent secret support to the Dutch, arousing the hostility of Spain. And when British mariners such as Sir John Hawkins and Sir Francis Drake committed acts of piracy against Spanish ships, she turned a blind eye. And Philip, who began by proposing marriage to Elizabeth, ended by hatching a plot to invade England and murder her. He planned to put her cousin, Mary Queen of Scots, on the throne, and the unfortunate Mary lost her head as a consequence. Drake and Howard’s total defeat of Spain’s attempt to conquer England with an armada in 1588 was the beginning of the end of the empire of Charles V.
In France, Protestantism had arrived via Switzerland, and the teachings of a reformer named John Calvin. Calvin was a French version of Savonarola, intended for the Catholic priesthood, converted by some kind of ‘revelation’ at twenty-one, and convinced that he was the direct instrument of God. He arrived in Geneva in 1536, at the age of twenty-seven, just after that city had become Protestant. His bigotry led to his being expelled two years later; but he was recalled in 1541. Calvin’s religious creed could be summarised in Groucho Marx’s words: ‘Whatever it is, I’m against it.’ A merchant who smiled during a baptism ceremony was sent to prison; so was a man who dozed during a sermon. In the four years after he returned to Geneva, fifty-eight men were executed for objecting to Calvin’s narrow theology. In 1553, a Spaniard named Servetus, who held the Arian view that God is one and not three, made the mistake of coming to Geneva and was swiftly burnt at the stake. In 1555, Calvin won an argument with the city government about the right to excommunicate ‘heretics’, and from then on began a kind of religious reign of terror. The Genevans did not show the same good sense as the Florentines, and allowed this maniac to continue to bully them until his death at the age of fifty-five.
But during Calvin’s lifetime, Geneva had become a place of refuge for persecuted Protestants, many of whom returned home to preach his doctrines of damnation and hellfire. Scotland, with its grey skies and damp climate, found the idea of any kind of fire appealing and swallowed the doctrine whole. So did France, where the Protestants called themselves Huguenots. They were particularly strong in the south, where the Cathar heresy had been so successful. Francis I had persecuted heretics, and in 1545 even allowed twenty-four villages in Provence to be burnt to the ground and everyone in them slaughtered. His son, Henry II, married an Italian, Catherine de Medici; but he was killed accidentally when a lance at a tournament went into his eye. (Oddly enough, the French prophet Nostradamus had described the death with startling accuracy in one of his ‘quatrains’.) As the Huguenots became stronger, it seemed a good idea to try to reach some settlement with them; so after a particularly unpleasant civil war, Henry’s widow Catherine decided to marry off her daughter Marguerite to the head of the French Huguenots, Henry of Navarre. All the major Huguenots in France poured into Paris to attend the wedding in August 1572. It looked as if Catherine had found the way to peace. Yet at the same time she was plotting murder. The man she hated most was a leading Huguenot, Admiral Coligny, who was becoming remarkably friendly with her son, the young king Charles IX. Catherine called upon the assistance of the chief Catholic family, the Guises. Four days after the wedding, a gun exploded as Coligny walked past and he fell to the ground. He was not killed – only wounded – but the Huguenots were furious and talked of revenge. Catherine decided to anticipate them. On the morning of 24 August, six days after the wedding, armed men battered at Coligny’s door. He was stabbed to death, then his body was dragged into the street and hacked into pieces. In the Louvre, the Huguenot nobles who were guests of the king were dragged from their beds and murdered. As St Bartholemew’s Day dawned, the bell of the Hotel de Ville gave the signal for the massacre. The people of Paris were told it was the open season for Huguenots. The mobs poured into Huguenot houses and killed everybody inside. Babies were thrown out of windows and tossed into the river. Catholic shopkeepers who disliked the Huguenot shopkeeper next door were delighted to get rid of a competitor. And so it continued for three days; between three and four thousand Huguenots died. Henry of Navarre saved his own life by agreeing to re-convert to Catholicism.