Such was the state of things in the hereditary dominions of Charles when he ascended the throne of Spain in 1519. Indeed, the movement which convulsed the whole of Germany, was early transmitted to all the other territories of the Emperor. Being a Catholic king, this fact was no doubt the cause of his double policy towards the Reformers from the Diet of Worms in 1521. With Francis I, the pope, and the Turks watching his movements on every side, and he theirs, he had no leisure to chastise the heretics. Besides, the ample revenues, which flowed into the imperial treasury from those wealthy provinces, made him unwilling to resort to severe measures, with a view to check the progress of the new opinions. At the same time, he did not fail to exhort those in power to use their authority in suppressing heresy. This is evident from a placard which was published in the name of that monarch, by Margaret of Austria, his father's sister, Governess of the Netherlands, in the year 1521. Luther is there described as a "devil in the shape of a man and the habit of a monk, that he may more easily occasion the eternal death and destruction of mankind." The placard is very long, giving strict orders for the prohibition of all books which contained any allusion to the scripture or its doctrines, and that no book was to be circulated without the approbation of the faculty of divinity in the university.