Ferdinand I of the Holy Roman Empire

“ Philip died in 1506 and Ferdinand, educated in Spain, was regarded with especial favour by his maternal grandfather who wished to form a Spanish-Italian kingdom for his namesake. This plan came to nothing, and the same fate attended a suggestion made after the death of Maximilian in 1519 that Ferdinand, and not his elder brother Charles, afterwards the emperor Charles V., should succeed to the imperial throne. Charles, however, secured the Empire and the whole of the lands of Maximilian and Ferdinand, while the younger brother was perforce content with a subordinate position. ”

“ In spite of constant and harassing engagements Ferdinand was fairly successful both as king and emperor. He sought to consolidate his Austrian lands, reformed the monetary system in Germany, and reorganized the Aulic council (Reichshofrat) . Less masterful but more popular than his brother, whose character overshadows his own, he was just and tolerant, a good Catholic and a conscientious ruler. ”

“ The new emperor did not meditate a breach of faith. Real violence was unavailing where the opponents were in a large majority. The Counter-Reformation had produced in Central Europe a scheme of persecution, which stopped short of tragedy, and laboured to accomplish, by infinite art and trouble, what the readier methods of the Holy Office and the Penal Law were expected to do. Ferdinand II was a slow, laborious, friendly man, with a sense of duty and a certain strictness of private life, but without initiative or imagination. ”

“ It was in the spirit of party that he embroidered a petticoat for the Holy Virgin, solely with the view of pleasing and cajoling the clergy; for, in his heart, Ferdinand is rather a devotee to pleasure than religion. In his habits he is remarkably domesticated; he rises at an early hour, and passes the greater part of the day in his wife's apartment, of whom he is passionately fond. The queen unites to a very graceful figure an interesting expression of countenance, that sometimes wears an appearance of sadness. ”

“ In 1493 Charles VIII. of France was preparing to invade Italy for the conquest of Naples, and Ferdinand realized that this was a greater danger than any he had yet faced. With almost prophetic instinct he warned the Italian princes of the calamities in store for them, but his negotiations with Pope Alexander VI. and Ludovico il Moro, lord of Milan, having failed, he died in January 1494, worn out with anxiety. Ferdinand was gifted with great courage and real political ability, but his method of government was vicious and disastrous. ”

“ The true tendency of affairs manifested itself in 1629, when the emperor Ferdinand II. (1619–1637) , at the zenith of his fortunes, forced the Protestant princes of Germany to restore to the Roman hierarchy all the ecclesiastical territories they had secularized during the past seventy-four years. Then France, freed from the fear of domestic enemies, arose to help the heretics to harry the house of Habsburg. Arranging a truce between Poland and Sweden, she unleashed Gustavus Adolphus. ”

“ All feelings of hostility had long since given way to devoted loyalty towards a government, which had uniformly respected the liberties of its subjects, and whose paternal sway had secured similar blessings to Barcelona with the rest of the empire. They thronged round the building, crying out that the king was slain, and demanding that his murderers should be delivered up to them. Ferdinand, exhausted as he was, would have presented himself at the window of his apartment, but was prevented from making the effort by his physicians. ”

“ That house then appeared at the summit of prosperity. Ferdinand, though seventy years of age, was still vigorous: he was rich, he had triumphed over all his enemies; he passed for the most able politician in Italy. His two sons, Alfonso and Frederick, and his grandson, Ferdinand, were reputed skilful warriors; they had an army and a numerous fleet under their orders. However, Ferdinand dreaded a war with France, and he had just opened negotiations to avoid it when he died suddenly, on the 25th of January, 1494. ”

“ Ferdinand.
The king, perhaps, was good enough for a king as such personages went in the fifteenth century; but his smiles and remorseless coldness were mixed as few could mix them, even in those days. If the Pope regarded him from Italy, that Holy Father called him pious. The modern student finds him a bigot. His subjects thought him great and glorious, but they did not see his dispatches, nor know his sometimes baleful domination in his cabinet. The French would not trust him. The English watched his ambition. The Moors knew him as their conqueror. The Jews fled before his evil eye. ”

“ King Ferdinand, his sovereign, notwithstanding the ambition of universal conquest absurdly imputed to him by the French writers, had no design to extend his acquisitions beyond what he could permanently maintain. His treasury, never overflowing, was too deeply drained by the late heavy demands on it, for him so soon to embark on another perilous enterprise, that must rouse anew the swarms of enemies, who seemed willing to rest in quiet after their long and exhausting struggle ”

“ Profoundly sagacious, he was ever ready to profit by the factional quarrels of his infidel enemies. He made large additions to his power by furnishing Castilian troops to aid the ambition or the enmity of Saracen partisans in return for the cession of important castles and fertile territory. As a pretended neutral, alternately supporting the pretensions and promoting the feuds of rival Moslem princes, the Crown of Castile was always the gainer. King Ferdinand was a worthy representative of the proselyting spirit which characterized his royal line from the very institution of the monarchy. ”

“ On the 15th of February, 1637, the Emperor Ferdinand II. died, in the fifty-ninth year of his age, after having occasioned, by his policy, the death of 10,000,000 of human beings. Yet the responsibility of his fatal and terrible reign rests not so much upon himself, personally, as upon the Jesuits who educated him. He appears to have sincerely believed that it was better to reign over a desert than a Protestant people. As a man he was courageous, patient, simple in his tastes, and without personal vices. ”

“ Several of the princes appealed to Ferdinand to relieve their dominions from the oppressive burden of war, but the emperor was weaker than his general, and dared not act against him. The whole of north Germany lay prostrate beneath the powerful warrior, and obeyed his slightest nod. ”

“ Early in 1558 Charles carried out his intention to abdicate the imperial throne, and on the 24th of March Ferdinand was crowned as his successor at Frankfort. Pope Paul IV. would not recognize the new emperor, but his successor Pius IV. did so in 1559 through the mediation of Philip of Spain. The emperor’s short reign was mainly spent in seeking to settle the religious differences of Germany, and in efforts to prosecute the Turkish war more vigorously. ”

“ When free, he revenged himself with a ferocity which disgusted his allies. In his last years he prepared a change in the order of succession established by his dynasty in Spain, which angered a large part of the nation, and made a civil war inevitable. We have to distinguish the part of Ferdinand VII. in all these transactions, in which other and better men were concerned. It can confidently be said to have been uniformly base. He had perhaps no right to complain that he was kept aloof from all share in government while only heir apparent, for this was the traditional practice of his family. ”

“ His government, though in a sense despotic, was popular and enlightened. In 1759 he became by succession King of Spain; and, under the obligation of existing treaties, he relinquished the Kingdom of Naples to his third [2] son, Ferdinand, aged only eight. In 1768 Ferdinand married Maria Caroline, daughter of the Emperor Francis and of Maria Theresa, and sister of Marie Antoinette.
Ferdinand IV., as he was then termed (afterwards Ferdinand I.) was a man of no great ability, but of vigorous physique, and sufficiently well-disposed as a sovereign ”

“ Prince Ferdinand frequently employed him on missions to England, when there was any important military business to transact, and he seems to have been equally in the confidence of the Prince and the English Government. The King also entertained a warm regard for him, and took much pleasure in his society; no one perhaps being more constantly his Majesty’s attendant in his rides. ”

“ In order to oppose one monarch to another, and by the presence of their sovereign to animate the courage of the troops, Ferdinand, in the ardor of the moment, had offered himself to be the leader of his army; but little trouble was required to overturn a resolution which was the offspring of despair alone, and which yielded at once to calm reflection. But the situation which his dignity, and the duties of administration, prevented the Emperor from holding, might be filled by his son, a youth of talents and bravery, and of whom the subjects of Austria had already formed great expectations. ”

“ OF THE INQUISITION DURING THE REIGN OF FERDINAND VI. PHILIP V. left his crown to Ferdinand VI., his eldest son by his first wife, Gabriella of Savoy. This prince reigned from the 9th of July, 1746, to the 10th of August, 1759; he died without children. He was succeeded by his brother, Charles III. of Naples, the son of Philip V. and Isabella Farnese, his second wife. Don Francis Perez del Prado, Bishop of Teruel, held the office of inquisitor-general at the accession of Ferdinand. ”

“ The hostilities began almost as soon as Ferdinand II of the House of Habsburg had been elected Emperor. He was the product of a most careful Jesuit training and was a most obedient and devout son of the Church. The vow which he had made as a young man, that he would eradicate all sects and all heresies from his domains, Ferdinand kept to the best of his ability. Two days before his election, his chief opponent, Frederick, the Protestant Elector of the Palatinate and a son-in-law of James I of England, had been made King of Bohemia, in direct violation of Ferdinand's wishes. ”

“ Ferdinand was fond of power, and his first steps showed that he would strive to maintain it. Not a few of the discontented, because disappointed, nobles retired from Toro in disgust, assembled others of the same faction at Valladolid, and wrote letters to Philip, then governor of Flanders, pressing him to come and assume the administration of the kingdom. The archduke, eager to seize his consort’s inheritance, had the insolence to order his father-in-law to retire into Aragon, against whose every act of government, since the death of Isabella, he equally protested. ”

“ It is a futile accomplishment, as nearly all his occupations and amusements are futile. Compared with such a king as our own, who does an immense amount of hard, useful work, in an unassuming way; or even with the Kaiser, who makes a lot of fuss, but certainly gets a good deal done, this Ferdinand is surely a make-believe monarch. ”

“ Strange indeed are the changes which have been brought about by the greatest conflict. Ferdinand, descendant of a long line of princes, kings and emperors, has passed round that dark corner whence no man returns, but his ambitious dreams of a triple kingdom which would include the Southern Slavs have survived him, though in a somewhat modified form. But he who sits on the throne of the new kingdom, and who rules to-day over a great portion of the former dominions of the Hapsburgs, instead of being a scion of the Imperial House of Austria, is the great-grandson of a Serbian blacksmith. ”

“ The news from Upper Italy hastened his end; he is said to have exclaimed not long before he died: 'They have won the cause!'
The accession of a youth, of whom nothing bad was known, to a throne [Pg.238] that had been occupied by a sovereign so out of place in modern civilisation as Ferdinand, would appear at first sight a fortunate circumstance for the chances of the dynasty; but it was not so. In an eastern country it matters little whether the best of the inhabitants loathe and detest their ruler ”

“ Want of power to wield power made him love it the more.
The king’s birthday fell on the 30th of May. It was celebrated by the peasants of La Mancha, reunited at Aranjuez. In vain the soldiers repeated the patriotic cry of the peasants, even as the bodyguard at Versailles sang “O Richard! O mon Roi!” If France had not soon interfered, Ferdinand would have followed where Richard led Louis XVI. The militia marched on the people, and a townsman lifted his sword against Don Carlos—that last of the kings and one who waited so heavy a crown. ”

“ His eldest grandson, Charles, was heir not only to Castile and Aragon, Naples and the Indies, which were to come to him from his mother, Ferdinand's imbecile daughter, Juaña, but to Burgundy and Austria, the lands of his father, Philip, and of Philip's father, the Emperor Maximilian. This did not satisfy Ferdinand's grasping ambition; he sought to carve out for his second grandson, named after himself, a kingdom in Northern Italy. [96] On the Duchy of Milan, the republics of Venice, Genoa and Florence, his greedy eyes were fixed. Once conquered, they would bar the path of France to Naples ”