But all Catholic political personages were not as good Papists as Queen Isabella.
Montalembert, full of thoughts suggested by the questions rising in the Church, saw in her fall but an incident of the decay of Spain, which, again, was but the most striking example of the condition of most Roman Catholic countries. He wrote what, as we have seen, appeared only after his death. Confessing that the reign of Isabella had lasted "too long," he traced the ruin of the country to "despotism, spiritual and temporal, absolute monarchy, and the Inquisition." After showing that both municipal and parliamentary liberties had been well developed in Spain in the days when she struggled, rose, and took the lead, he dates the beginning of her fall from the combination of Church and State, under Charles V, to work unitedly in quenching civil and religious liberty. Though no advocate of the separation of Church and State, he says, "A thousand times better the fullest separation with all its excesses, than the absorption of the State by the Church, or of the Church by the State." No better expression could have been chosen than the former of these phrases to designate the effect of the Jesuit polity of Church and State just about to be adopted by Rome.
He takes the social and political effects of the Inquisition to have been disastrous--"That monstrous institution ceased to act only when it had no more to do, when it had substituted emptiness, death, and nothingness for the life, the force, and the glory of the first nation of the middle ages, the one which we may justly call the pearl of the Catholic world." Aiming a two-edged thrust at Bonapartist legislatures, and at the character of the coming Council, he says that the "ill-omened" Charles V was the inventor "of consultative despotism," or representative absolutism, of which the Napoleons are wrongly accused of being the originators. For one who had spent his life in battling for the Papacy, but always with the hope of reconciling it to liberty, it was bitter, when death was in view, to write: "There is not in the history of the world a second example of a great country so ruined, so broken down, so fallen, without foreign conquest or civil war having materially contributed to the result, but by the sole effect of institutions of which it was the prey."[134]