As to Charles V., even had he not joined to his title of Emperor of Germany the crown of Spain, with all his possessions in the Low Countries and in the New World, one would have still found it strange to see him excluded from the _cortége_ of sovereigns, politicians, and statesmen who gave lustre to the sixteenth century.
A sketch of the sixteenth century, then, is incomplete without these two princes, who represent the fierce struggle between the two most powerful Catholic nations at an epoch in which the religious revolutions of the European world should have made such an omission, so it would seem, impossible. Strange antagonism indeed that between these two nations, who would have been able by their accord to arrest the political progress of Protestantism, and to hinder the theology of Wittenberg and Geneva from becoming subsequently a preponderating influence in the direction of the affairs of Europe! Strange and restless antagonism, which occupies a large part of the political history of the sixteenth century; fills, again, the seventeenth with Richelieu and Louis XIV.; seemingly is quieted for an instant when Marie Antoinette shares the throne of Louis XIV. and Marie-Louise that of Napoleon the First; survives, however, three centuries of wars, of changes and revolutions of every sort, to place anew the two peoples in hostile array upon the fields of Magenta and Solferino, and only seems bound to disappear when it has arrived at one of its extreme but logical consequences, namely, the exaltation of the power which most fully represents upon the European continent the Protestant enthusiasm and the ancient grudges against France. { 61} It is, in fact, only since the battle of Sadowa that this antagonism between these two great Catholic nations has seemed to give place to mutual intelligence of a common danger, and to that sympathetic regard which a recent and distinguished visit has consecrated, so to speak, in the face of Europe, and commended to the intelligent applause of the people of Paris.
The exclusive glorification of Protestantism in the master-work of Kaulbach has also been an occasion of another lamentable omission. It is not enough--be it said without excessive and immoderate partiality toward our own country--it is not enough to have made France represented only by Calvin and by Coligny in the imposing _cortége_ of all the glories of the sixteenth century. This systematic exclusion is explained even by itself. In such a composition the places of honor were to be reserved to the countries which welcomed Protestantism with an enthusiasm so ardent, or submitted themselves to its dictation with so strange a docility. One knows, on the other hand, what insurmountable resistance France opposed to the introduction and establishment of Protestantism. It cost her, it is true, more than forty years of continual wars. And what wars those terrible fratricidal and religious strifes of the sixteenth century were; stirred up and kept alive on both sides by the most violent passions, and which, after the unhappy and sanguinary convulsions in which were consumed the reigns of Henry II., Francis II., Charles IX., and Henry III., would have ended surely in the breaking up of the ancient national unity, if Providence had not, at the conclusion of those frightful dissensions, caused to intervene a prince pre-destined to pacify the minds, quiet the discords, and close up and heal the deep wounds of the country! Henry IV. arrives at the end of the sixteenth century, as it were in order to bring about union between Protestantism vanquished and Catholicity triumphant. He gives to the latter the pledge of a public conversion; to the former, the benefit of a legal existence; and, especially in rendering sacred the respect due to minorities, he demonstrates, better than by all arguments, and perhaps for the very reason that his conversion was less a work of devotion than of policy, how the genius of the French nation was opposed to the doctrines of the reformers.