BOOK and perpetuated by the secret operation of Pius IV. and his new political missionaries. II. Mary expressed her sympathy to the pontiff, by the letters to him and to the cardinal uncle of Lorraine, to which we have already referred." Having closed the council of Trent in December 1563, Pius IV. died in the same month, two years afterwards, when the tiara was placed in the following January on the head of Pius V.;75 who soon became the most active and dangerous enemy that Elizabeth, the Huguenots, and the Protestant Reformation had hitherto encountered. No pope ever showed more painfully what the papacy could resolve, and would attempt, to perpetrate; nor the danger which such implacable and persevering animosity could effect, even in the period of its abated and suspected, tho still politically supported, power. The popedom was then upheld by its friends, as the Eastern crescent is now, not for its moral deserts or religious character, but for its worldly convenience and utilities, 74 Dated 30 Jan. 1563, in Le Plat, Monum. Trid, v. 4. p. 660, 661. See before, in this volume, p. 16. 75 Pius IV. died, aged sixty-five, in Dec. 1565. Onuf. Pan. p. 625. It is in the unfavorable branch of his character as the persecutor and the disturber of kingdoms, for the sake of his supremacy, that the preceding facts exhibit him to our recollection. But these were the vices of his station, his education, and his hierarchy, and were not his only features. He had many virtues and valuable qualities. and was sincere in his religion, tho mistaken in some essential points, especially in the forgetfulness of the benevolence, liberty, and perfect disinterestedness which it inculcates. His catechism, framed on the system of the Trent divinity, has great beauty in its Latinity, and abounds with passages which I have read with delight, amid many tenets which I regret to see intermingled with so much excellence. But both his age and his church abounded with men who united all that we most like with all that we most shrink from. And the incongruity seems to have arisen from that ever favorite, but ever vain attempt, to unite the mammon we are resolved to pursue, with the divine things which we cannot but admire, and wish also to possess. XXVI. to those, who applied their temporal sword to main- CHAP. tain its despotism over the heart, the reason, and the conscience, as long as that despotism promoted their interests. This reciprocity of benefit is every day diminishing in the present state of feelings and relations of Europe: and therefore the popedom will ere long be left to its pleasing dreams of past magnificence: in the insulated inferiority of unlamented decay. II. CHAP. XXVII. HISTORY AND PROJECTS OF PIUS V.-HIS EFFORTS TO DE- BOOK THE best of men, by adopting wrong principles of action, and by enforcing them with violence, transform themselves, more or less, into the likeness of those evil beings, whom we make our ethical and poetical illustrations of all that is most wicked and abhorrent among intelligent natures. All the virtues of the individual become, in his misdirected activity, but fearful and pernicious vices; by strengthening him in his course of mischief, by multiplying his means of perpetrating it, and by hallowing, both in his own estimation and in that of others, his most censurable conduct. The resolution to exterminate the Protestant Reformation by force, and therefore by human bloodshed, and by all the sufferings which vengeance and power could bring upon human sensitivity, was one of those unfortunate principles, which could not but create a character like that which we call Satanic, and produce a conduct to which a similar epithet is applicable, in every king and pope, in proportion as any one acted zealously upon it. In no one did these mischievous effects become more manifest, and more criminal, than in Pius V., whose real merit, in many important respects, would have XXVII. entitled him to the applause of those whose approba- CHAP. tion becomes lasting celebrity, if, by making the extirpating determination one of the undeviating rules of his official actions, he had not placed himself among those, whom the human sympathies consign to a reprobation, which must continue as long as memory survives. The papacy of Pius V. tho short in its chronological length,' became unusually extensive and destructive in its operations, from the lamentable principle to which we have adverted. Among these, he distinguished himself by commencing, and acrimoniously pursuing, a personal and deadly warfare against the only maiden queen, that has swayed the English sceptre. Elizabeth was no amazon, and was as inoffensive to this particular pope, as one individual could be to any contemporary member of European society; and yet from his intellectual bigotry and pontifical hostility, Pius V. has the distinguishing notoriety of assailing this illustrious female, who was shedding more lustre on her throne than most of her male predecessors, since the death of Alfred, had imparted to it, with the combined mischiefs of personal conspiracy, of interior rebellion, and of external invasion. Yet Pius V. might allege, that he only put into more strong and unlimited action, the antient principles of his see, which many of his predecessors had exemplified or inculcated," 1 His pontificate began 7th January 1566, and ended 1st May 1572. 2 The bull of Nicolaus III. dated 3d March 1280, against heretics, contains a summary of the most objectionable severities against them; and as it was a precedent and groundwork of what were afterwards inflicted, may be taken as the specimen of the spirit and practice of the papal hierarchy on this subject, between 1200 and 1600. It is in II. BOOK when he began that career of violence and homicide, which blends his memory so inseparably with the reign and biography of the endangered Elizabeth.3 The pride and passion of his mature life was to be a Roman inquisitor. If experience had not proved that it is possible to be this dreaded and dreadful description of human character, without any visible marks of an atrocious disposition," we might have inferred from his taste for it, that he was of a fierce and merciless nature. But having so perverted his judgment, and deadened his moral sensibilities, as to select it as his pleasure and as his merit, he exercised this cruel office effectually against those who wished reformation at Como, even tho of episcopal dignity ;o and pursuing it afterwards at Pergamo, he was at the Bullarium, v. 3. part 2. p. 26. Gregory IX. emulated the principle so far as to declare,' that not to have built any churches, monasteries, or pious places, justified a suspicion that the emperor Frederic II. was an heretic.' Labb. Concil. 2. p. 644. So soon after his becoming pope as 29th December 1567, Thobias Eglinus wrote from Italy, that persons of all ranks were promiscuously subjected to the same imprisonment, tortures, and death.' And on 2d March 1568, his letter was, At Rome some are every day burnt, hanged, or beheaded. All the prisons and places of confinement are full. They are obliged to build new ones. That large city cannot furnish gaols for the number of pious persons who are continually apprehended.' M'Crie's Reformation in Italy, p. 272, 3. He was of the Ghislieri family, which had become 'debole e ridotta a pochi.' He came in poverty on foot to Rome a private and destitute Dominican friar; but in fifteen years raised himself to be a bishop, cardinal, and the supreme governor of the inquisition. T. Porcacchi da Castiglione Vite, p. 627. 'Wolff tells us, that an inquisitor of Spain, whom I met with in the Propaganda of Rome, said that the members of the inquisition in Spain are very gentlemanlike men, and of a very mild and cool disposition.' Journal, v.2. p. 38. This description leads me to recollect Mr. Keppel's account of the Arab Moolah Ali: One with whom murder and every other crime had long been familiar. Yet there was nothing in his appearance to justify the supposition. His mild eye beamed with intelligence when he spoke; and his mouth was lighted up with so pleasing a smile, that the diabolical matter of his speech was often lost in attending to the pleasing manner of his delivery.' Kepp. Journey from India. 6. Against its bishop Vittor Loranzo.' Porc. p. 627. |