Note 459 — Chapter I

[The grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella was not Charles the Fifth when the sceptre of Spain was thrust into his hands because his mother Joanna was unfit to rule. Charles called himself king when he made his triumphal entry into Valladolid in 1517. But it was only with the greatest difficulty that the Cortes of Castile was induced to accept him as titular sovereign in conjunction with his mother. Her name was to take precedence of his in all royal documents. Until her death in 1555, the year before her son’s abdication, Joanna was the rightful sovereign of Spain. Charles was elected emperor of the Holy Roman Empire in 1519, only two years after he had assumed the control of Spanish affairs. It is not remarkable, therefore, that he should be known to most people only by the more important title. Charles was born in Ghent, February 24, 1500. His father was Philip the Fair, the heir of the German possessions of the house of Hapsburg, and the territories of the house of Burgundy. When the marriage of Philip and Joanna was arranged no one dreamed that their son would succeed to the crown of Spain, for Joanna’s elder brother and elder sister were both alive. Charles scarcely knew his parents. When Isabella of Castile died his father and mother went to Spain to take possession of the kingdom she had left to her daughter. This was in 1506, and from that time until 1517 Charles did not see his mother. His character was slow in forming. Only in athletic sports did he early achieve success. In 1517 the Papal legate Campeggi declared him more fit to be governed than to govern. He was never a good scholar, and was a singularly bad linguist. French was the language he first learned to speak. His native tongue, Flemish, he did not begin to learn until he was thirteen. When he went to Spain he knew so little Spanish that one of the first demands made by the Cortes of Castile was that he should learn that language. He never thoroughly mastered German.—M.]