As a conqueror, he was signally unsuccessful; as a politician, he could out-wit none but himself; it was only as a tyrant within his own ground, that he could sustain the character which he chose to enact.  He lost the crown, which he might have secured, because he thought the emperor’s son unworthy the heiress of Burgundy; and yet, after his father’s death, her marriage with that very Maximilian alone secured the possession of her paternal inheritance.  Unsuccessful in schemes of conquest, and in political intrigue, as an oppressor of the Netherlands, he nearly carried out his plans.  Those provinces he regarded merely as a bank to draw upon.  His immediate intercourse with the country was confined to the extortion of vast requests.  These were granted with ever-increasing reluctance, by the estates.  The new taxes and excises, which the sanguinary extravagance of the duke rendered necessary, could seldom be collected in the various cities without tumults, sedition, and bloodshed.  Few princes were ever a greater curse to the people whom they were allowed to hold as property.  He nearly succeeded in establishing a centralized despotism upon the ruins of the provincial institutions.  His sudden death alone deferred the catastrophe.  His removal of the supreme court of Holland from the Hague to Mechlin, and his maintenance of a standing army, were the two great measures by which he prostrated the Netherlands.  The tribunal had been remodelled by his father; the expanded authority which Philip had given to a bench of judges dependent upon himself, was an infraction of the rights of Holland.  The court, however, still held its sessions in the country; and the sacred privilege—­de non evocando—­the right of every Hollander to be tried in his own land, was, at least, retained.  Charles threw off the mask; he proclaimed that this council—­composed of his creatures, holding office at his pleasure—­should have supreme jurisdiction over all the charters of the provinces; that it was to follow his person, and derive all authority from his will.  The usual seat of the court he transferred to Mechlin.  It will be seen, in the sequel, that the attempt, under Philip the Second, to enforce its supreme authority was a collateral cause of the great revolution of the Netherlands.

Charles, like his father, administered the country by stadholders.  From the condition of flourishing self-ruled little republics, which they had, for a moment, almost attained, they became departments of an ill-assorted, ill-conditioned, ill-governed realm, which was neither commonwealth nor empire, neither kingdom nor duchy; and which had no homogeneousness of population, no affection between ruler and people, small sympathies of lineage or of language.