under whose protection that country might throw itself the instant
that Charles should incur the slightest suspicion of heresy.
Distrust on the part of the Roman Catholics, and a rupture with the church,
would have been fatal also to many of his most cherished designs.
Moreover, when Charles was first called upon to make his election
between the two parties, the new doctrine had not yet attained
to a full and commanding influence, and there still subsisted a prospect
of its reconciliation with the old. In his son and successor,
Philip the Second, a monastic education combined with
a gloomy and despotic disposition to generate an unmitigated hostility
to all innovations in religion; a feeling which the thought that
his most formidable political opponents were also the enemies of his faith
was not calculated to weaken. As his European possessions,
scattered as they were over so many countries, were on all sides exposed
to the seductions of foreign opinions, the progress of the Reformation
in other quarters could not well be a matter of indifference to him.
His immediate interests, therefore, urged him to attach himself devotedly to
the old church, in order to close up the sources of the heretical contagion.
Thus, circumstances naturally placed this prince at the head of the league
which the Roman Catholics formed against the Reformers.
The principles which had actuated the long and active reigns
of Charles V. and Philip the Second, remained a law for their successors;
and the more the breach in the church widened, the firmer became
the attachment of the Spaniards to Roman Catholicism.

The German line of the House of Austria was apparently more unfettered;
but, in reality, though free from many of these restraints,
it was yet confined by others. The possession of the imperial throne --
a dignity it was impossible for a Protestant to hold,
(for with what consistency could an apostate from the Romish Church