People observed that the Emperor in his excursions through the streets of Bologna usually wore the Spanish habit.  He was dressed in black velvet, with black silk stockings, black shoes, and a black velvet cap adorned with black feathers.  This somber costume received some relief from jewels used for buttons; and the collar of the Golden Fleece shone upon the monarch’s breast.  So slight a circumstance would scarcely deserve attention, were it not that in a short space of time it became the fashion throughout Italy to adopt the subdued tone of Spanish clothing.  The upper classes consented to exchange the varied and brilliant dresses which gave gayety to the earlier Renaissance for the dismal severity conspicuous in Morone’s masterpieces, in the magnificent gloom of the Genoese Brignoli, and in the portraits of Roman inquisitors.  It is as though the whole race had put on mourning for its loss of liberty, its servitude to foreign tyrants and ecclesiastical hypocrites.  Nor is it fanciful to detect a note of moral sadness and mental depression corresponding to these black garments in the faces of that later generation.  How different is Tasso’s melancholy grace from Ariosto’s gentle joyousness; the dried-up precision of Baroccio’s Francesco Maria della Rovere from the sanguine joviality of Titian’s first duke of that name!  One of the most acutely critical of contemporary poets felt the change which I have indicated, and ascribed it to the same cause.  Campanella wrote as follows: 

    Black robes befit our age.  Once they were white;
      Next many-hued; now dark as Afric’s Moor,
      Night-black, infernal, traitorous, obscure,
      Horrid with ignorance and sick with fright. 
    For very shame we shun all colors bright,
      Who mourn our end—­the tyrants we endure,
      The chains, the noose, the lead, the snares, the lure—­
      Our dismal heroes, our souls sunk in night.

In the midst of this mirth-making there arrived on March 20 an embassy from England, announcing Henry VIII.’s resolve to divorce himself at any cost from Katharine of Aragon.  This may well have recalled both Pope and Emperor to a sense of the gravity of European affairs.  The schism of England was now imminent.  Germany was distracted by Protestant revolution.  The armies of Caesar were largely composed of mutinous Lutherans.  Some of these soldiers had even dared to overthrow a colossal statue of Clement VII. and grind it into powder at Bologna; and this outrage, as it appears, went unpunished.  The very troops employed in reducing rebellious Florence were commanded by a Lutheran general; and Clement began to fear that, after Charles’s departure, the Prince of Orange might cross the Apennines and expose the Papal person to the insults of another captivity in Bologna.  Nor were the gathering forces of revolutionary Protestants alone ominous.  Though Soliman had been repulsed before Vienna, the Turks were still advancing on the eastern borders of the Empire.  Their fleets swept the Levantine waters, while the pirate dynasties of Tunis and Algiers threatened the whole Mediterranean coast with ruin.  Charles, still uncertain what part he should take in the disputes of Germany, left Bologna for the Tyrol on March 23.  Clement, on the last day of the month, took his journey by Loreto to Rome.