Landmarks of history Modern history Author:Charlotte Mary Yonge Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: - - 1 — v; - - i -. . . i r? :SBS3i=.a j j. .f "Lai -Ła xi.:s. ... . . wic. jv- i. Justice and aioney ux 5fc,?ir . and e a chapter{Secti... more »on 4classes were not set one against the other, and no condition in life was prevented from rising to distinction. So even under the Tudors, the effect of the English law made order and good government so much the spirit of the nation, that king and people worked for the common welfare with unanimity nowhere else existing. PART III. SOVEREIGNS OF EUROPE. 1516 1522. When the sixteenth century opened, the German empire was nominally governed by Maximilian I., King of the Romans, who was called the Last of the Knights, from his spirit of chivalrous honour, which forbade him, through all his distresses for money, to break into the treasury left him by his father, because he regarded it as a sacred trust. He was one of those knights-errant on the throne, who were loved even while they were laughed at, but whose want of constancy often led to such breaches of promise as would have seemed most foreign to their generous nature. It was a saying that the house of Austria made their fortunes by marriages, and Maximilian's family was an instance. His first wife had been Marie of Burgundy, the heiress of the Low Countries; and his son Philip, to whom these had descended, had married Juana, the Queen of Castille, and heiress of Aragon. Since the death of Philip, in 1506, the unhappy widow had sunk into melancholy insanity, and her rights passed on to the eldest of her numerous family, Charles of Austria. He had been born at Ghent, in 1499, and had been there educated by Adrian of Utrecht, Dean of Louvaine, under the superintendence of his wise and spirited aunt Margaret, who ruled the Low Countries in his name. Charles had j...« less