Lastly, and perhaps best of all, he secured to the peasantry the right of appealing to the King from the feudal courts of their lords. Doubtless the readiness of the nobles to accept this important reform was much increased by Charles’s willingness to do justice as against himself. Thus, in a dispute with some nobles about the possession of a certain castle, he consented to submit the question to two Bohemian nobles chosen for the purpose; and he abode by the compromise which they suggested.
In short, in his position as King of Bohemia, Charles generally appears as one of those exceptional rulers who combine a genuine zeal for reform with a real sense of justice, and that statesmanlike self-restraint which teaches a man the difference between the desirable and the possible, between the ultimate ideal and the immediately practicable. But it is impossible to separate Charles the Emperor from Charles the King of Bohemia. Many of his greatest reforms, such as the establishment of the University and the assertion of the independence of the Prague archbishopric, could not have been carried out so easily, perhaps not at all, unless he had been able to use his authority as Emperor to back his power as King of Bohemia, and to secure also the sympathy and approval of the Pope. So thoroughly was the connection of his Imperial office with his Bohemian kingship recognised by his subjects, that it is the rarest thing to find this popular King mentioned in the chronicles by his proper Bohemian title of Charles I., still less by his early name of Wenceslaus. The _Emperor_ Charles IV. has overshadowed and absorbed Wenceslaus alias Charles I. of Bohemia; and yet so far was he from losing thereby the sympathies of the Bohemians, that it is they and not the Germans who cherish his memory as that of a great and popular ruler.
The German view, indeed, is more nearly represented by the saying of Maximilian I., “Charles was the father of Bohemia, but the stepfather of the Holy Roman Empire.” This saying, like most epigrams that have lived, has a mixture of truth and falsehood. Certainly one of the morals of Charles’s career might seem to be the impossibility of combining these two important offices in a manner which should satisfy the just demands both of Germans and Bohemians. But though, as will presently appear, the weaker and worse part of his policy was connected with his position as Emperor, yet there is evident, even in his plans for Germany, a real enthusiasm for order, good government, and, above all, independence of that Papal power which had paralysed German progress.
