Magnificent, possessed most of Hungary, and held at that moment a fleet
ready to sail against Naples, in co-operation with the Pope and France.
Thus the Infidel, the Protestant, and the Holy Church were all combined
together to crush him. Towards all the great powers of the earth, he
stood not in the attitude of a conqueror, but of a disappointed, baffled,
defeated potentate. Moreover, he had been foiled long before in his
earnest attempts to secure the imperial throne for Philip. Ferdinand and
Maximilian had both stoutly resisted his arguments and his blandishments.
The father had represented the slender patrimony of their branch of the
family, compared with the enormous heritage of Philip; who, being after
all, but a man, and endowed with finite powers, might sink under so great
a pressure of empire as his father wished to provide for him. Maximilian,
also, assured his uncle that he had as good an appetite for the crown as
Philip, and could digest the dignity quite as easily. The son, too, for
whom the Emperor was thus solicitous, had already, before the abdication,
repaid his affection with ingratitude. He had turned out all his
father's old officials in Milan, and had refused to visit him at
Brussels, till assured as to the amount of ceremonial respect which the
new-made king was to receive at the hands of his father.

Had the Emperor continued to live and reign, he would have found himself
likewise engaged in mortal combat with that great religious movement in
the Netherlands, which he would not have been able many years longer to
suppress, and which he left as a legacy of blood and fire to his
successor. Born in the same year with his century, Charles was a
decrepit, exhausted man at fifty-five, while that glorious age, in which
humanity was to burst forever the cerements in which it had so long been
buried, was but awakening to a consciousness of its strength.

Disappointed in his schemes, broken in his fortunes, with income