If Charles V.had been Pope, and Leo X.had been emperor, we might never have heard of Luther.

Froude sincerely respected Charles V., and held that Protestant historians had done him less than justice.

Although Charles opposed the Reformation, he opposed it honestly, and his faith in his own religion was absolute.
He was a Christian gentleman.

As he entered Wittenberg after the battle of Mahlberg, some bishop asked him to dig up Luther's body and burn it.

"I war not with the dead," he perhaps remembering the grand old Roman line: Nullum cum victis certamen, et aethere cassis.
One valuable truth Froude had learned not from Carlyle, but from study of the past, and from his own observation at the Cape.