By a strange irony of fate, he
has been born in Ghent, in that same castle of the counts of
Flanders, which the Germans used as a prison during their
recent occupation of Belgium, and although a Spanish king
and a German emperor, he receives the training of a Fleming.
As his father is dead (poisoned, so people say, but this is
never proved), and his mother has lost her mind (she is travelling
through her domains with the coffin containing the body
of her departed husband), the child is left to the strict
discipline of his Aunt Margaret. Forced to rule Germans and
Italians and Spaniards and a hundred strange races, Charles
grows up a Fleming, a faithful son of the Catholic Church,
but quite averse to religious intolerance. He is rather lazy,
both as a boy and as a man. But fate condemns him to rule
the world when the world is in a turmoil of religious fervour.
Forever he is speeding from Madrid to Innsbruck and from
Bruges to Vienna. He loves peace and quiet and he is always
at war. At the age of fifty-five, we see him turn his back upon
the human race in utter disgust at so much hate and so much
stupidity. Three years later he dies, a very tired and disappointed
man.
So much for Charles the Emperor. How about the Church,
the second great power in the world? The Church has changed
greatly since the early days of the Middle Ages, when it started
out to conquer the heathen and show them the advantages of
a pious and righteous life.
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