But Charles was also, like his grand- mother Queen Isabella, a committed Catholic who, had he been as cynical and self-serving as Rogerson suggests, would have ditched the Pope and reached an accommodation with the Protestant princes in Germany. Equally, if he had not insisted upon respecting Luther’s safe-conduct after the Diet of Worms, he might have saved western Europe from the wars of religion — as Richelieu was later to point out. This is no doubt why he was so emphatic, later in life, in advising his son, King Phillip of Spain, to be ruthless in the suppression of heresy. 

Of course Rogerson, as a bien-pensant Englishman not wholly emancipated from the Whig view of history, execrates the Spanish Inquisition: yet with a modest body-count (‘lower than in any provincial court of justice in Spain or anywhere else in Europe’ — Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition), it did save Spain and Portugal from the slaughter and iconoclasm that followed the Protestant Reformation in other parts of Europe. And it is thanks to the devout Queen Isabella that women can now sun-bathe wearing bikinis on the Costa del Sol.

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