Could a single phantom have risen from one of the many thousand graves where human beings had been thrust alive by his decree, perhaps there might have been an answer to the question propounded by the Emperor amid all that piteous weeping.  Perhaps it might have told the man who asked his hearers to be forgiven if he had ever unwittingly offended them, that there was a world where it was deemed an offence to torture, strangle, burn, and drown one’s innocent fellow-creatures.  The usual but trifling excuse for such enormities can not be pleaded for the Emperor.  Charles was no fanatic.  The man whose armies sacked Rome, who laid his sacrilegious hands on Christ’s vicegerent, and kept the infallible head of the Church a prisoner to serve his own political ends, was then no bigot.  He believed in nothing; save that when the course of his imperial will was impeded, and the interests of his imperial house in jeopardy, pontiffs were to succumb as well as anabaptists.  It was the political heresy which lurked in the restiveness of the religious reformers under dogma, tradition, and supernatural sanction to temporal power, which he was disposed to combat to the death.  He was too shrewd a politician not to recognize the connection between aspirations for religious and for political freedom.  His hand was ever ready to crush both heresies in one.  Had he been a true son of the Church, a faithful champion of her infallibility, he would not have submitted to the peace of Passau, so long as he could bring a soldier to the field.  Yet he acquiesced in the Reformation for Germany, while the fires for burning the reformers were ever blazing in the Netherlands, where it was death even to allude to the existence of the peace of Passau.  Nor did he acquiesce only from compulsion, for long before his memorable defeat by Maurice, he had permitted the German troops, with whose services he could not dispense, regularly to attend Protestant worship performed by their own Protestant chaplains.  Lutheran preachers marched from city to city of the Netherlands under the imperial banner, while the subjects of those patrimonial provinces were daily suffering on the scaffold for their nonconformity.  The influence of this garrison-preaching upon the progress of the Reformation in the Netherlands is well known.  Charles hated Lutherans, but he required soldiers, and he thus helped by his own policy to disseminate what had he been the fanatic which he perhaps became in retirement, he would have sacrificed his life to crush.  It is quite true that the growing Calvinism of the provinces was more dangerous both religiously and politically, than the Protestantism of the German princes, which had not yet been formally pronounced heresy, but it is thus the more evident that it was political rather than religious heterodoxy which the despot wished to suppress.