THE impossible task undertaken by the Emperor Charles V in his youth had worn him out, mentally and bodily, at an age when most men are in their prime. From the beginning he had proceeded on the assumption that he and his were the chosen instruments by means of which God's cause must finally triumph over impious rebellion. Popes, kings, and peoples, the institution of the Church itself, were but pawns to be used according to his inspired direction. The idea of a Christendom religiously unified, with a Spanish Caesar politically supreme, was the end aimed at; and the Emperor recognised quite early in the struggle that the life of one man was too short to see the fruition of the dream. His only son Philip had from his birth been schooled in the cynical distrust and wary patience which formed his father's system, and in the belief in his divine selection to succeed the Emperor in his great task. Philip inherited both the policy and the methods, neither of which he could have changed, even if he had desired to do so. The policy thus inherited was in the main Aragonese in its immediate political purpose. The dream of a Romance empire on the Gulf of Lyons under the King of Aragon had been destroyed by the advance of France southward to the Mediterranean ; but the prevention of French extension eastward, which had always been the object of Aragonese policy, had become of vital importance to Spain when Charles had succeeded to the Empire and the Burgundian heritage, as well as to the championship of religious unity. Spain provided the bulk of the men and money required ; and the hold of the Spanish Caesar over Italy had to be complete, in order to secure a passage for troops from one part of his dominions to another, and to prevent the Papacy from thwarting him by uniting France and Italy against him. This necessity imposed upon the Emperor and his successor the maintenance of a close friendship with England, and the preservation of contentment in the Emperor's Flemish dominions; the first, in order to hold France in check at sea, and the second, to render her innocuous on her northern land frontier. This was the position to which Philip succeeded. It was recognised, after much discussion, in 1551 that Philip's desire to succeed to the Empire must be postponed;

and one of the conditions imposed upon Ferdinand when he was placed before his nephew in the Imperial succession was that the suzerainty of the Empire over certain of the Italian States should be exercised by Spain. This, as will be seen, was absolutely necessary if Spain was to assume, as she did, the burden of carrying out the work of religious unification to which Charles and his son were pledged.

The vacant duchy of Milan had been conferred upon Philip in 1546, and he had been proclaimed King of Naples when he married Mary Tudor in 1554. Shortly afterwards his father granted to him the vicariate of the republic of Siena, when it should be conquered-as it was in 1555. The tentacles of Spain thus reached over Italy. The Farnesi, long estranged, were lured by the bait of Parma and Piacenza, whilst Genoa and Mantua remained as ever in the Emperor's pay.

While yet in England, Philip assumed the control of Italy. His position there was difficult and anomalous. The Emperor's viceroys had grown independent and resented interference ; the duchy of Milan was a tief of the Empire ; Naples and Sicily were independent kingdoms, except for a repudiated claim for papal homage ; and in Siena Philip was his father's substitute, claiming suzerainty over the republic by virtue of force. Philip, when in England, took the bold course of sending the Duke of Alva to Italy as his representative, much to the Emperor's dissatisfaction. Alva's methods and his vast ambition for Philip and for himself were well known; but those around the King in England, especially his favourite Ruy Gomez, whose influence was in favour of peace, were anxious at any cost to get Alva away from England and Flanders, where he could have done most harm ; and he was sent to Italy to hold it in his grip for its new master, and to humble Pope Paul IV (Caraffa), who hated Charles, Philip, and the Spaniards with true Neapolitan rancour.

When Philip left England on August 26, 1555, he knew that the master-stroke of policy which was to tie England to Spain for ever had failed, and that new devices must be adopted to hold that outpost of his fortress when his English wife should die. For the moment more pressing claims called him to his father's side. The Emperor could wait no longer for his rest. Philip was twenty-eight years of age, but prudent and experienced beyond his years. Thanks to the influence of Ruy Gomez he had freed himself from Alva's plans for the Imperial succession. With a burden thus lightened he dreamed that he might succeed better than his father had done in the main object of his life. He was never light-hearted, and he did not disguise from himself the difficulties of his task. An absolute and crushing want of means dogged him from the first; Italy was in a state of turmoil, and the Flemings were already frowning on their new Prince. But Philip shouldered his burden with a dull, plodding determination to do his best, and to sacrifice everything to his view of duty. There was no enthusiasm ; only the conviction of inevitable destiny, that doomed him to labour patiently

with utterly inadequate means, assured of final triumph in the cause, because it was that of God, of Spain, and of himself.

On January 16, 1556, three months after the transfer of the Flemish sovereignty, the memorable assembly of Spanish grandees in Brussels witnessed the surrender to Philip of the historic Crowns of Spain, the Emperor retaining his Imperial title yet for a time at the prayer of his brother Ferdinand. But, though Charles might thus accede to Ferdinand's wish for delay, he was determined that nothing should stand between Spain and the dominion over Italy ; and by two secret documents, now at Simancas, Philip's protectorate over Siena was confirmed, and all future Kings of Spain were authorised to exercise the Imperial suzerainty over Italy. Philip now stood alone. He was conscientious, clement, and well-meaning, and he loved peace ; but his outlook was limited on all sides by his conception of his mission ; and dissent from his will was impious blasphemy. Human suffering and earthly sacrifice were as nothing, if the divine cause triumphed and the sovereign appointed as its champion was acknowledged supreme amongst the sons of men.

Slowly and reluctantly, Philip was forced to understand after Mary Tudor's death in November, 1558, that England was slipping through his fingers. Politic always, but determined not to be patronised, the new Queen of England played and paltered with all the approaches which he made to her. Philip's English adherents promptly changed their colours; and the Spanish ambassador, Feria, could only tire his master's ears with the one theme, that England should be conquered by fire and sword before it was consolidated under the new dispensation. But Philip was slow, and hated violence ; Ruy Gomez and the churchman Granvelle were by his side in Flanders; Alva was far away in Italy; and a new policy which commended itself to the peace party was adopted by Philip-a policy which, though it had been tried again and again and had failed, this time for a few short months looked as if it might bring to Spain the triumph upon which now depended almost its national existence. In his peace-negotiations with France Philip for some time stood out on the question of the restitution of Calais to England ; but when it became clear to him that Elizabeth was not to be cajoled or coerced into accepting his protection, the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis was signed (April 2, 1559), and England's ancient foothold in France was lost. As had been the case with his father Francis I in the Peace of Crépy, Henry II was mainly moved in his desire for peace with Spain by the growing strength of the Reformation in France, and a desire to join the other great Catholic Power in its suppression. So long as any hope whatever remained to Philip of retaining his hold on England he had listened courteously, but coolly, to the French advances ; but when the French King's fears had become acute and England was drifting ever further away, Philip made such a bargain as seemed, for the time at least, to promise a rich compensation

for the defection of his late wife's kingdom. By the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis France surrendered nearly all her Italian claims and* conquests ; Savoy (but without Saluzzo and Pignerol) was restored to its own Duke. Siena went to the Medici ; Corsica was handed to the Genoese ; and, to the dismay and surprise of Frenchmen, they saw themselves treated as vanquished after a war in which they had in the main been victorious. Henry II offered to give the flower of his flock, his child Elizabeth, not yet fourteen, to Philip as his third wife, as a pledge of future friendship between France and Spain, which Philip accepted with feigned reluctance ; and for all this concession-apart from the conquest of Calais from England-all that Henry II obtained was the secret compact by which Philip bound himself to join hands with the French King for the purpose of opposing heresy throughout Christendom. The scheme, at least so far as Philip was concerned, was not directed specifically against England ; for the presence of Elizabeth on the throne, so long as she was not actively aggressive, was infinitely preferable to the accession of the next legal heiress, Mary of Scotland, married to Henry's heir, the Dauphin Francis. But the union of the Catholic Powers would render the English Queen impotent for harm; and, what was perhaps of more importance still, it would secure Philip against French interference in favour of the Reformers, if he decided to begin his reign by stamping out ruthlessly any spark of heresy that might be kindling in his own dominions.

Philip in the meanwhile was impatient to get back to Spain, the country of his heart. He had no sympathy with the habits and traditions of the Netherlanders and Flemings whom his father had loved so well. He spoke French badly, and Flemish not at all : the outspoken roughness and the independence of his subjects in the Low Countries galled him, accustomed as he had been to an almost complete autocracy in Castile, where the parliamentary institutions, once so vigorous, had been fatally weakened forty years before when the Commons were beaten at Villalar. Above and before all money was needed for the work he had been set to do ; and in his realms of Castile alone could money be had at his behest. Other reasons, beside his homesickness and his poverty, drew him at this time towards his own people so irresistibly as to make Feria, one of his closest friends, exclaim in July, 1559, "It is of no use saying anything more about the voyage to Spain ; for if the world itself were to crumble there would be no change in that."

The main tie that bound together the various autonomous territories of which Spain consisted was the spiritual pride and religious exaltation cunningly promoted by Ferdinand the Catholic of Aragon and his wife the Queen of Castile as a means of unity. The activity of the Inquisition for seventy years since then (1490) had been popular with the majority of the people; for it had flattered their intensely individualistic pride to feel that they were of the elect, and that in the

system to which they belonged there was no room for those upon whose faith lay the slightest suspicion. The ruler of Germany might be forced to hold parley with vassals who dared to deny the religious infallibility of the Church ; the King Consort of England might for political reasons smile upon courtiers whose heresy was but thinly veiled, and do his best to temper the burning zeal of the churchmen ; he might indeed, as he did, seek in marriage his schismatic sister-in-law. But the King of Spain in his own land must be able to look around him and see every head in his realm bowed to the same sacred symbols, and hear every tongue repeating the same creed. The day that it ceased to be so the binding link of the Spains was broken, and the powerful weapon in the hand of the King to force religious unity upon Christendom melted into impotence.

Philip had been absent from Spain since June, 1554, and for these five years the country had nominally been governed by a gloomy widowed woman, his sister Juana, whose great sorrow had deepened the shadow of madness that had befallen her, as it had most of her kindred. In these circumstances it was natural that the Council of State should have exercised a more decided initiative in international relations than had previously been the case. The members of the Council were, so to speak, consultative ministers appointed by the favour of the King, and, as is usual in such cases, were more jealous of his prerogative than the sovereign himself. The traditional policy of Castile had been for many years to increase the hold of the Kings upon the patronage and temporalities of the Church in Spain, and to weaken the papal power even over ecclesiastical affairs. The struggles of Charles to this end against successive Popes had been bitter and almost continuous ; but as he had usually been able to hold out rewards or threats, he had, especially with Clement VII (Medici) and Paul III (Farnese), on the whole been successful in his policy. With Paul IV (Caraffa) in the papal chair, and Alva and his troops thundering at the gates of Borne (1557), the persistence of the Council in their policy of encroachment upon the power exercised over the Spanish Church by the Papacy greatly strained the relations of the latter with the State; and they remained out of harmony until the death of Paul IV (August 15, 1559), when Philip was about to return to Spain.

But in the meantime ecclesiastical affairs had been seriously disorganised by the spectacle of the Council of State suspending the papal Bulls, and refusing permission to the Spanish Bishops to obey the Pope's summons to Rome; by the order given in the name of the Regent Juana for the Pope's messenger to Spain to be captured and punished ; and by several other irritating measures which finally led to the excommunication of both Charles and Philip. The cloistered clergy and high dignitaries were scandalously corrupt ; and the general tone of religion, notwithstanding the slavish obedience to ritual and lip service to the Church, was loose

and cynical. Philip, whilst yet in Flanders, had seen the danger, and had sent orders to Spain that the Inquisition there was to increase its vigilance. A few months before his return the effect had been seen in the presence of the Regent Juana and Philip's heir, Carlos, at the great auto-de-fe at Valladolid, where some of the greatest nobles in Spain were accused. That Popes might be treated curtly by Kings of Castile, and that ecclesiastical revenues might be used for political purposes under the pretext of religion, was quite in the nature of things ; but if Spaniards once assumed a right to judge for themselves in matters of doctrine or religious procedure, the very foundations of Philip's system were threatened. Rumours had reached Philip that in his absence, and owing to the laxity of ecclesiastical discipline, the virus of heresy was showing itself even amongst his own people ; and this probably was a more powerful reason than any other for his irresistible desire to return to Spain. The Inquisition in Castile had from the first been guarded on every side against papal interference, and it was more than ever necessary now that the King should be able to use it unchecked as a political instrument, to reinforce civil authority. When, therefore, shortly before Philip's arrival in Spain his own favourite churchman, who had been with him in England, Bartolomé de Carranza, Archbishop of Toledo and Primate, was with other Bishops, probably as truly orthodox as he was, accused and imprisoned by the Holy Office, the King raised no hand to help them, though he probably knew, as did others, that the persecution, which lasted whilst Carranza lived, was prompted mainly by the jealousy of the Dominican accusers. How unsatisfactory was the religious position in Spain at the time, is seen by Count Feria's vehemently indignant reference to Carranza's arrest in a private letter in October, 1559, to Bishop Quadra, Spanish ambassador in England. Philip's first need was to support authority, even that of fools against wise men ; and his ardent desire to get back to Spain is thus quite comprehensible.

The situation which he was leaving behind him in the Netherlands was also ominous in the extreme. His gravity and known Spanish sympathies had produced a bad effect upon his new Flemish subjects. In the Belgic Provinces, at least, the people were strongly Catholic; but the whole country, which had grown rich and prosperous under its various autonomous local institutions, dreaded the centralising Castilian system and the inquisitorial methods which Philip was known to favour. His measures, however well meant, were therefore regarded with suspicion ; especially when it was known that, against the Flemish constitutions, he intended to retain under arms in the Provinces 4000 Spanish infantry. The indignant Flemings presented a strongly signed remonstrance, to which the King was obliged to give a temporising answer: but, before he stepped upon his great galleon at Antwerp (August, 1559), he knew that some of the highest heads in Flanders must be humbled before he could have his way in the heritage of his Burgundian forefathers.

On every side of him, therefore, the prospect was gloomy when at length Philip landed in Spain (September 8, 1559). He had left his half-sister the Duchess of Parma as Regent of his Flemish dominions, with Granvelle as her principal minister, a man almost as unpopular as his master ; and it was evident to all men that a storm was brewing there.

The Treaty of Peace signed with France had left Philip's Mediterranean coasts still harassed by the Turkish and Barbary corsair fleets which had joined the French coalition against Spain during the late war ; and unless the commerce of Spain in the inland sea was to be destroyed, and her authority utterly humbled, a great effort must be made by Philip in this direction also. Called on to meet all these responsibilities, the new King had to face the fact that his country was beggared and his treasury empty. The vicious system of Spanish finance and the constant need for ready money had during the whole of the Emperor's reign led to the collection of revenue from the sources of prosperity rather than from its results. The great metallic wealth which came annually from America was in most cases forestalled, the King's portion being pledged to Genoese or German bankers, the merchants' share being hidden or surreptitiously sent abroad to avoid frequent seizures and other extortions. The greater part of the land of Spain was owned by the ecclesiastical corporations and the nobles, who were exempt from the regular taxation, but were fleeced intermittently and irregularly. The main revenue of the Castilian kingdoms was derived from the alcabaJa, a 10 per cent, tax upon all sales. Thus every time a commodity changed hands its value was raised by 10 per cent., which hampered business to such an extent that in the course of time Spanish manufactures could only be used at or near the places of their production, especially as the local tolls levied by each township through which the commodity passed added to its cost. This suicidal tax finally destroyed Spanish industry altogether^although many attempts were made to mitigate its rigour by fixing quotas for townships, to be raised and paid by local authorities and by other devices. In addition to this constantly decreasing source of revenue, the King received his royalty on the bullion sent from America, import and export duties on merchandise, an excise (subsequently called the " millions ") on' the principal articles of food, the proceeds of the sale of offices and titles, the dues arising from the sale of indulgences (originally for the support of the wars against the infidels), the State monopoly of salt, and the revenues of the royal patrimony. These taxes were difficult and costly to collect, in addition to being unwise in principle. The mistaken idea that industries handicapped by the akabala and excise, with the addition of municipal tolls, could be protected by prohibiting the introduction of merchandise from abroad, and the export of bullion from Spain to pay for it, was persisted in for a century and a half. At a time when Spanish America with her abounding new

wealth was clamouring for luxuries, and Spain herself, in a whirlwind of sumptuary splendour, was squandering all her substance on fine stufls and bullion embroideries, the manufacture of such things was prohibited in Spain to avoid waste, and the importation of them rendered illegal. The natural result was universal smuggling, and a ruinous loss to the national exchequer. But this was not all; the killing of the most productive industries, together with the drain of the best Spanish manhood for the armies and for America, reduced a naturally industrious people to habitual idleness and pretentious poverty.

Philip struck the keynote of his reign on the occasion of his first public appearance as King by presiding over one of the most splendid

So far, however, as the lights of Philip and his subjects allowed them to judge, his reign in his own land seemed to open propitiously. He had cleared Italy of the French by treaty; his old enemy Paul IV had just died of rage and grief at the crimes of his infamous nephews; the placid Pius IV was, on the whole, favourable to Spain; and, what no doubt appeared to Philip of the highest importance, he himself had his finger on the pulse of French policy for the first time in his life. Henry II had been quite sincere in his eagerness to commence a crusade against heresy and to attack Geneva as its centre Philip had no intention of going so far as that, for religion was only one branch of his policy ; but his new father-in-law's honest zeal had been a valuable guarantee that, strike at heresy wherever Philip might, and with whatever object he pleased, he had nothing to fear from French opposition. The accidental death of Henry II at the tournament in celebration

of the peace (June, 1559), while it had rendered French interference in favour of Protestantism even more improbable than before, owing to the now complete ascendancy of the Guise kinsmen of the Queen-Consort, had nevertheless increased the need for Philip's firmness in restraining active Catholic aggression on the part of his French allies, because such aggression would have now inevitably assumed the form of an attack upon England in the interests of Mary Stewart. While, therefore, Philip's diplomatic triumph was for the moment complete, and he was more free than his father had been for many years to strive for his ultimate objects, the utmost vigilance and patience were demanded to prevent the control of European events from passing into other hands than his own. In the first place, it was of the utmost importance to him that England should not fall under French influence, or on the other hand be driven to make common cause with the Protestants in general against Catholicism. Even before he left the Netherlands, he had made up his mind that the free-spoken Flemings must be taught a stern lesson of obedience, of which the primary principle was religious conformity. If the ambition and political levity of the Guises forced Elizabeth to look to the extreme Protestant elements for her support, it was obvious that she, or her people by her connivance, would do battle overtly or covertly on behalf of the Protestant Netherlanders in the hour of their trial. Philip's present policy was to prevent this, and to effect the isolation of England by joint French and Spanish action, while behind the back of his allies he was striving to persuade Elizabeth that he, and not France, was her real friend.

The accession of Francis II to the throne and the Guises to power in France was promptly followed by the assertion of the right of Mary Stewart to the Crown of England; and in the consequent English attack upon the French and Scottish forces in Leith (early in 1560), Philip's strenuous efforts to bring about peace, notwithstanding Guise's prayers for his aid, are a clear indication of his intention not to allow the secret anti-Protestant part of the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis to be used for the benefit of any policy but his own. For him it meant that he was to have a free hand with his own Flemish Protestants, not that England should be crushed in the interests of the French Guises. This was the state of affairs when at the end of January, 1560, Philip travelled to Guadalajara to meet the child Elizabeth of France, whom in June Alva had wedded as his proxy in Paris with incredible splendour. The death of her father, and the almost endless political and ceremonial exigencies of Philip's agents in Paris, had delayed the new Queen's long winter journey to her future home ; but when she came at length through the Pyrenean snows to meet her prematurely aged husband of thirty-two years, the child consciously bore within her sweet and dainty personality the springs of a secret diplomacy intended to change the balance of power in Europe and transfer the poise to the hands of her mother.

After years of neglect and contumely, patiently, almost cheerfully borne, the opportunity of Catharine de' Medici had come. Her natural tendency as the daughter of a great papal House would be in favour of the extreme Catholic policy which had led her husband to submit to the hard terms of the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis. But with the accession of her son Francis II, under the control of the ultra-Catholic Guises, it became her advantage to side with the " Politiques " or Moderates, who had for their left wing the growing Huguenot party. Philip's consent to take the young French Princess as his wife had been prompted by a desire to keep in touch through her with the secret course of her father's policy. But the father had been in his grave for six months ere Elizabeth of France met her husband; and Catharine de' Medici in the meanwhile had entrusted her daughter with the intrigue by which she hoped to make Philip an instrument of her own triumph and of the preponderance of France in the councils of Europe. The young Queen was to gain her husband to a marriage between his heir the miserable Carlos, and her younger sister Margaret of France, and then to negotiate a union between Charles IX and the gloomy, widowed sister of Philip, Dona Juana. The objects she was to serve were, first, those of her mother against the Guises, and those of France afterwards; the crusade against heresy was to be used as Philip himself desired to use it, only to a different end, and was to be alternately pressed and slackened, as the changing circumstances might make it desirable in the interests of the Queen-Mother of France. Elizabeth promptly won the heart of her husband and of his people, as no other of his wives did. She was tender, prudent, and good; but Philip, much as he loved her, was not the man to allow himself to be made a tool of, even by her, for the advantage of her mother, whom he cordially detested and profoundly distrusted ; and in the contest of cunning which followed, French and Spanish interests soon drifted apart, as if the religious part of the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis had never existed.

The death of Francis II (December, 1560) relieved Philip of the danger that French national resources would be employed against England in the interests of Mary Stewart ; and thenceforward for many years the three main factors in European politics were Philip, Catharine de' Medici, and Elizabeth of England. The frequent mutations of their relations towards each other, and towards the secondary factors, were ruled by the desire of each one of them to get the better of the other two. Philip's astute, though slow and over-cautious foreign policy, was only one of the means necessary for the attainment of his supreme end. His determination to establish unquestioned authority in his own dominions by the extirpation of religious dissent, and subsequently to secure Spanish supremacy in Europe by uniting the Catholic elements under his leadership, had primarily to depend for its execution upon the resources, and unflinching orthodoxy, of Spain itself. His presence at

the great auto-de-fe already mentioned was a proof that he was aware of this ; and his mode of life from the day of his landing in Spain until his death was such as to impress upon his people the mysterious sacred-ness with which he sought to invest his mission in their eyes.

The ancient institutions of Spain had grown out of locally diverse conditions in the various realms. The Castilian Parliaments had been the outcome of a system of privileged autonomous towns strong enough to supplant a turbulent, but weak, disunited, and corrupt feudalism. The Cortes of Aragon and Catalonia, on the other hand, had originally sprung, like the Parliament of England, from a strong feudalism, to which the landed gentry and the burghers had rallied as a defence against the encroachments of the Crown. In Castile the removal of the nobles from the Parliament, and the reduction to eighteen of the number of towns sending members ; the weakening of municipal institutions, upon which representation rested, by the introduction of royal patronage into the town councils ; and finally, the crushing by force of arms of parliamentary resistance to the financial encroachment of Charles V, had before Philip's accession rendered the Cortes in a great measure effete as a financial safeguard: and under the fixed policy, which was that of both the Emperor and his son, to establish a complete autocracy the decadence of the Cortes of Castile continued, until they flickered out in 1812. The Cortes of Aragon and Catalonia, consisting of representatives of three Estates and secure in the possession of binding charters, were able to resist all attempts at encroachment until early in the eighteenth century ; and from them Philip could obtain but a fixed vote at regular intervals, often at the cost of much wrangling and humiliation. Upon the Castilian kingdoms therefore-that is to say from Spain, exclusive of the Basque provinces, Navarre, Aragon, Catalonia and Valencia-the main burden of the cost of Philip's ambitions fell. The government theoretically consisted of a Council of State, selected by the King to advise him upon foreign affairs ; a Council of Castile, to administer the interior government and the judicature ; and councils of war, finance and so forth : though in practice, even the pettiest item in every branch of administration was submitted to Philip personally before and after exhaustive discussion and rediscussion by the respective Councils. With these the King usually communicated through his Secretaries of State, of whom there were several, each in charge of a particular department, and who were invariably persons of obscure birth. Legislation was usually initiated by petitions from the Cortes to the sovereign, asking that decrees should be issued remedying the grievances recited ; but the assembly had lost the strength necessary for the refusal of supply until its grievances were amended ; and Philip habitually disregarded the presentments of the Castilian Parliaments.

There was, however, one petition presented to him by his first Parliament in Toledo to which he was ready enough to listen. The

insolence of the Muslim in the Mediterranean had passed all bounds. Sicily, Naples, and the Baléares, even the coasts of Spain itself, were raided with impunity by the Turk : and Tripoli, the African stronghold of the Knights of Malta, had been captured by the Barbary corsair, Dragut Reis. Let the Catholic King, prayed the Cortes, strike at the hereditary infidel foes of Spain, and reestablish the Christian power in the inland sea. But, willing as Philip was, and vital as the action suggested was for the success of his aims, enterprise was paralysed by the cumbrous system, introduced by him, of personal supervision on his own part of every detail of administration and of endless penmanship. Consequently, instead of a swift blow being struck, the Turks were given time to gather a great fleet before Medina Celi and the younger Doria (Gian Andrea) led the Spanish fleet to the Tripoli coast (February, 1560). After capturing the small island of Los Gelves, in the Gulf of Khabes, they were surprised the next day by a great fleet of Turkish galleys. The Spanish commanders lost nerve and fled. Panic seized their force, and 5000 men with 65 vessels fell into the hands of the enemy, while 8000 more, starved and hopeless, held out upon the island. After six weeks' siege only 1000 of them remained alive; and these, standing in the breach, with naked breasts defied the infidel assault, till all were dead or disabled. It was the first great blow that fell upon Philip. Thenceforward for eleven years the Spanish power in the Mediterranean was eclipsed ; and throughout the calamities and anxieties which crowded upon Philip with respect to international policy and the struggle for Christian religious uniformity, the need of defending the ravaged littoral of his own land, and avenging his plundered and outraged subjects, was an ever-present nightmare. But, stolidly convinced that he was fighting God's battle which in the end he must win, Philip never despaired and was never elated : and, just as he heard of the disaster of Los Gelves with no sign of dismay, the crowning victory of Lepanto (October, 1571), which restored his Mediterranean supremacy, failed to wring from him a smile of exultation.

The almost simultaneous accession to power of Elizabeth of England, Philip of Spain, and Catharine de' Medici, Queen Mother of France, radically changed the problems of European politics. The religious divisions in France and Catharine's balancing methods removed for the first time for centuries the danger to Spain of French aggression in Italy, and the danger to England of French interference in Scotland. The severance of the Empire from the Spanish Crown relieved Philip of a crushing burden, though it rendered more difficult than ever the task to which his life was pledged, since his own kinsmen on the Imperial throne had been forced to recognise the rights of the Princes of the Empire in the matter of religious toleration. Central European politics therefore no longer turned on the enduring territorial rivalry between the House of Aragon-Austria and that of France, in which England and Scotland

had been the smaller shifting weights upon the balance. The religious divisions in each of the countries had driven new lines of cleavage athwart the old political alliances. For the first time England became a primary, instead of a secondary factor, because the Queen's peculiar position towards the Papacy placed her in sympathy with the Protestants in all countries; and, more important still, because the main point to be decided in the next fifty years was not political, but religious. The key of the position was no longer far-away Italy, as it had been, but Flanders and France, which were close neighbours to England. The Emperor's life problem had been by crippling France to make her harmless as against his dominions. There was now no fear of her encroaching on these any more than of a French domination of Scotland, which had been England's standing danger for centuries; for France had crippled herself and was no longer homogeneous. So long as France was kept divided both England and Spain were secure; and, if in addition English religious dissensions were fomented by the Spanish encouragement of Catholic revolt, there would be no Power in Europe to counteract Philip's plans. These plans were, first, to secure absolute religious uniformity and unquestioned obedience in his own dominions; and thereafter to side cautiously in turn with the Catholic elements in England and France, and probably also in the Empire, in order that his political influence might become all-powerful in those countries. We shall see how the strength and craft of Elizabeth of England and her officers ruined his plans and doomed Spain to decay, by vigorously counteracting his efforts to paralyse England by religious revolt, as France was paralysed by the ambition of Catharine and the ineptitude of her sons.

The net of the Inquisition was cast wide over Spain, to begin with. Rich and poor, great ecclesiastics and nobles, gentle ladies, professional men, craftsmen and tillers of Moorish or Jewish descent, were swept in by thousands, and paid in life or estate for the mere suspicion of heterodoxy. When Philip opened the Cortes of Madrid in 1563, he thanked God that "so much had been done, and such careful and minute intervention effected in religious affairs by the Holy Office, whose ministers had been so actively aided and favoured, that not only had the evil (of heresy) which had begun to spread been utterly extirpated, but such precautions had been taken that, with God's help, the country was now, and he hoped would remain...as pure, steadfast, and devout, as could be hoped." This reign of religious terror, popular as it was with the thoughtless masses, was not established even in Castile without some remonstrance. The Cortes, again and again, petitioned against the abuses and methods of the Holy Office, and especially against the enormous number of unpaid "familiars," who, in consequence of their nominal connexion with the institution, escaped civil jurisdiction and evaded civic responsibilities. Philip, however, paid but little attention to the petitions of the Castilian Cortes, for he extorted the regular vote

of supply, 450 million maravedis, every three years before discussion of grievances, and even laid on new impositions without the authority of the Cortes at all. So great indeed was his penury that at this period (1563) he assured the members of the Cortes that every national resource had been exhausted, his treasury was empty, and he had no money even to defray the necessary expenses of his own household. The Cortes in reply told him that the country itself was sunk into the deepest misery, and could provide no more than it had done. This was in poor agricultural Castile. In Aragon it was quite another matter. It was necessary that the three Parliaments of the Crown of Aragon should take the oath of allegiance to Philip's heir, Don Carlos ; and the King summoned the Cortes to Monzon for that purpose in the autumn of 1563. The assembly had not met for ten years, though by the Constitution they should have been summoned every three years. Philip made no secret of his detestation of the claims to self-government professed by his Aragonese and Catalan subjects, and went to Monzon with the almost avowed intention of curtailing their privileges. He found the Cortes suspicious and sulky, and was at first met by a demand that the powers of the Inquisition in Aragon should be limited strictly to matters of doctrine, and that the oppressive methods of the institution should be enquired into. The King told the representatives to vote supply, and he would consider their requests later. But the Aragonese answered that no money would be voted until a satisfactory reply was given. Philip fell ill with rage, but he was powerless to coerce ; and he had to give way and promise enquiry. Only then did the Cortes vote the 1,500,000 ducats that formed their three years' contributions to the King's expenditure. Shortly before this (December, 1562), even the Spanish Bishops grew restive, when power was granted by Pope Paul IV to the Inquisition to try them for heresy; and finally, the Pope himself, submissive as he had been to Philip, lost patience at the constant interference of the Spanish ambassadors with the action of the Council of Trent-then in session-to prevent its attempts to mitigate the methods of the Holy OfBce. But Philip resisted every power, from Pope to Parliament, that sought to weaken the instrument upon which he depended for working out the object of his life. Thus Spain itself was cleansed of expressed dissent, and all men bowed ostentatiously to one formula.

But if Spaniards were full of the exalted spiritual pride that made them accept with but slight opposition a system which increased the conviction of their own superiority at the expense of their independence, other subjects of Philip were equally proud of their local autonomy, of their enlightened institutions, and of the personal freedom which had rendered them prosperous and contented. The Flemings and Netherlander had, under Charles V and his Burgundian forefathers, enjoyed vast prosperity protected by their provincial constitutions : and the known Spanish and centralising sympathies of Philip had from the first aroused

the distrust of his Flemish subjects. That his confidential minister, Cardinal de Granvelle, was a foreigner, increased the discontent which culminated in the gradual alienation of the nobles, the resignation of Margaret of Parma, the sanguinary rule of Alva, and the great insurrection, described elsewhere in this volume.

That Philip's plans to rule his Flemings on the same system as he adopted in Spain had been long maturing in his mind, is evident from the persistent efforts of Alva to effect a new Catholic league through the Cardinal of Lorraine and Catharine de1 Medici, with the object of reviving the secret religious part of the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis. Philip's French wife was to meet her mother at Bayonne; and under the cover of a family reunion the Catholic Powers were to bind themselves anew to extirpate heresy throughout Europe. At the very hint of the negotiations heterodox Flemings fled across the North Sea to England by thousands; and Elizabeth, alarmed at the prospect and at the talk of Philip's coming to Flanders with his fleet, developed an intense affection for Spain, and an attachment to Catholic principles which had not been apparent for some time before. Some sort of agreement was ostensibly patched up at the Conference of Bayonne in the summer of 1565; but Alva's demands frightened Catharine, and she easily found means to avoid the fulfilment of the conditions, as she had no desire to destroy the balance of her own power by making Catholicism permanently supreme. But for a time it looked as if Protestantism was doomed in Europe; and the prospect for the first time gave a purely religious character to the Flemish revolt, a character which Philip doubtless from the beginning had intended it to assume when the final trial of strength should come.

Tribulation had, in the meanwhile, continued to follow the King in other portions of his dominions. His attempt to introduce the Spanish^ form of Inquisition into Naples, as a political instrument, had caused a revolt which threatened his domination ; and he had been forced to give way (1565). His struggle with the Muslim in the Mediterranean still drained his treasury, and well-nigh broke his heart. By a supreme effort of his Sicilian Viceroy, Garcia de Toledo, rather than of himself, he had succeeded in relieving Malta when the Knights were at their last gasp, besieged by a great force of Muslim (September, 1565) ; but the Turkish power remained unbroken, both on land and sea, and reduced Philip's pretensions to the supremacy of the Mediterranean to a dead letter. At home, too, his troubles gathered thick about him. His beloved young French wife had brought him two daughters, the elder of whom, the Infanta Isabel Clara Eugenia, was ever his best-beloved child ; but the heir to his crowns was his only son Don Carlos (born 1546), who was now approaching man's estate. We have seen that Catharine de' Medici dreamed of winning the lad for her younger daughter Margaret. The ideal marriage for him to suit his father's projects would have been with Mary Stewart after the death of her French husband ; and for a short

time such an event seemed probable. But Philip would take no risks. While he was intriguing so that he alone should gain by such a match, and that the Guises should not benefit by it, the clever counter-moves of Elizabeth and Catharine upset his scheme. The condition of the Prince, moreover, made the negotiation of his marriage difficult. He was a lame, stunted, hydrocephalous epileptic, uncontrollable in his vicious passions, and alternately under the influence of his stepmother and his aunt Juana. When he was sixteen his father had hinted to the Imperial ambassador, who sought his hand for the Emperor's daughter Anne, that Don Carlos was not in his right mind; and his extraordinary and outrageous behaviour during the remainder of his life leaves but little doubt that this was the case. His violent and unprovoked attacks upon inoffensive citizens in the streets of the capital, his attempts to murder with his own hand Cardinal Espinosa and the Duke of Alva, and his threats to Don John of Austria, his young uncle, rendered his isolation necessary. It is probable that he may have been approached by agents of the Flemings, or of Ruy Gomez' party, opposed to Alva, with suggestions that he should go to Flanders on a mission of pacification ; which would account for the attack upon Alva when the latter was about to start on his voyage, and for Carlos' violent threats to the members of the Cortes who petitioned that he should remain in Spain if Philip went to Flanders ; but the deciding factor of his fate was his last resolve, which he confessed to Don John, to escape from and defy his father. Philip was a man of extremely strong family affections. His ambitions and hopes for his son had been boundless ; but the task entrusted to him overrode all considerations, whether of suffering love or human instinct. When his only son had proved that he would be an obstacle and not a help to his father's task, Philip, with much consultation of churchmen, with prolonged prayer and many tears, decided to sacrifice his heir. Whether the young Prince was strangled by his father's orders, or, as is much more likely, killed himself in desperate apprehension of a lifelong incarceration, is not quite certain; but, whichever was the case, Philip's love and his pride alike suffered a heavy blow. Still he accepted this, as he did all his afflictions, humbly, and as a chastening discipline sent from his Master, the better to fit him for the work of his life. Another bereavement befell him three months after he lost his son (October, 1568) when his beautiful and beloved wife was sacrificed to the unskilfulness of Spanish physicians. This loss almost broke him down. "It is enough," wrote the French ambassador, "to break the heart of so good a husband as the King was to her." In the deepest grief, the bereaved husband retired for a time to a monastery and saw no one. For the rest of his long life little pleasure came to him ; and though his fourth wife, his niece, Anne of Austria, brought him many puny children, the two daughters of Elizabeth of Valois always remained his chief solace.

We have seen how, in order that Philip should be able to effect his first great object, namely the forcing of religious uniformity upon his Nether-land subjects, it was necessary for him to secure, at least, the neutrality of England and of the French Huguenots. The latter he could usually paralyse by intriguing with the Guises and Catharine de1 Medici ; but the Queen of England was more difficult to deal with. She was, it is true, desirous, as was her wisest minister, Burghley, to avoid a national war with Spain ; but it was evident to both the sovereign and people of England, that the extirpation of Protestantism in the Netherlands would only be the first step to the suppression of religious dissent from Rome throughout Christendom ; and that the unchecked supremacy of Catholicism, as represented by Philip and Alva, would mean the political supremacy of Spain throughout the world. From the first day of Elizabeth's accession Philip's ambassadors had exhausted all the resources of diplomacy to pledge her, either by means of marriage or by fear of her Catholic subjects, to a friendly neutrality towards Spain. The conservative nobles, with whom Burghley usually, though not invariably, acted, and the party of Leicester and the growing Puritan element, had alternately gained the upper hand in the English counsels, as Elizabeth's fears of Catholic solidarity waxed and waned ; but, with the arrival of Alva in the Netherlands and the strong religious feeling aroused in England by his severities, it became daily more difficult to maintain an appearance of friendship between Spain and England. There arose, moreover, concurrently another reason for enmity, which eventually proved more powerful even than the religious question. From the latter years of Henry VIII the piratical attacks of English shipping upon Spanish commerce had been a stock subject of complaint and remonstrance ; but during the religious war in France, and in the period following Alva's suppression of the first Netherlands rising, English seamen from the southern and eastern coasts had in large numbers eagerly seized the opportunity for plunder by preying upon Philip's subjects as privateers, authorised respectively by the Huguenot and Flemish Protestant leaders. Elizabeth, of course, disclaimed them, but she was fully aware that Philip could not afford to go to war with her while Flanders was simmering in revolt, and while the religious discord in France prevented the Catholics from wielding the national power at their will ; so that, though she continued to profess friendship, she took less care than ever before to propitiate Philip. The English depredations on Spanish shipping had naturally been met by increased interference on the part of the Inquisition with English merchants and sailors in Spanish ports ; and early in 1568 a crisis was reached when the English ambassador, Dr Man, was hampered in performing Divine service in the embassy according to the Reformed rites. In reply to a peremptory demand from Elizabeth that full liberty in this respect should be given, the English ambassador was expelled the country. The Catholic rising

which took place at the same time in Scotland, and the rumours of help sent thither by the Guises, furthered the giving of bolder and more open aid to the Flemings by the English, especially in their depredations at sea, and to the French Huguenots. These causes would have been sufficient to drive England and Spain into open war, had Philip dared to attack England while the Protestants of Holland and France were still unsubdued, and had Elizabeth not dreaded open war with her own north country, almost solidly Catholic and longing for an opportunity of rising in favour of the imprisoned Mary Stewart. But in 1568 the advent in England of Gerau de Spes, a violent bigot, as Spanish ambassador, simultaneously with a treacherous attack upon English seamen on the American coast, almost brought matters to a crisis.

The Spanish claim to commercial monopoly of the whole of America, although jealously enforced so far as was possible, had from the nature of the case become impracticable. The crushing of Spanish industry by an unwise fiscal policy had made it impossible for Spain itself to supply the growing needs of the settlers, whilst the galling restrictions imposed upon foreign sailors and vessels in Spanish ports had immensely hampered the importation into Seville, the centre of the whole transatlantic trade, of manufactures from abroad. The natural consequence was a widespread smuggling trade with America both from England and France. Sanguinary reprisals had been made, especially upon the attempted French settlement in Florida ; but the business had proved a profitable one, especially in conjunction with the importation into Spanish America and the West Indies of negro slaves captured on the African coast. An expedition led by John Hawkins and his nephew, Francis Drake, consisting of five small vessels from Plymouth, was caught in September, 1568, by a greatly superior Spanish force at San Juan de Lua on the Mexican coast, and overwhelmed, in violation, as it was asserted, of a compromise that had been arranged. Two of the smallest vessels alone escaped with Hawkins and Drake ; and thenceforward the latter devoted his great genius, skill and boldness, to harrying Spanish commerce from the seas. For the next thirty years the Spanish claim to a monopoly of transatlantic trade was laughed to scorn by the English sailors, whose ceaseless piratical depredations upon Spanish shipping increased a hundredfold the enmity between the nations which religious persecution had begun.

De Spes was known from his first arrival to be plotting with the English Catholics, and had endeavoured to frighten Elizabeth by threats of Alva's vengeance if she allowed the Huguenot and Flemish privateers to take shelter in her ports. It is not to be wondered at, therefore, that, when chance threw into her way an opportunity of crippling Alva and spiting the officious ambassador, she should have seized it. Philip, as usual, was in dire straits for money, but he had contrived to borrow a large sum from Genoese bankers to meet Alva's pressing requirements,

and shipped it in six vessels for Antwerp. They were chased by privateers in the Channel, and for safety ran into Plymouth, Falmouth, and Southampton. Two of the cutters, rightly believing that they had as much to fear from the English on shore as from the pirates at sea, escaped from port, ran the gauntlet of the pursuers and arrived at Antwerp; the others, being still assailed, though in port, requested permission through the Spanish ambassador to send the specie overland to Dover, and so across the Channel. Elizabeth not only accorded her consent but volunteered to give the protection of a squadron of her own ships if needful. Just as the bullion was being landed there came rumours from Spain, and a few days later a letter from William Hawkins at Plymouth to Burghley, telling of the destruction of Drake and Hawkins' squadron on the Mexican coast. The excuse was sufficient, particularly when Elizabeth learnt from Spinola, the banker in London, who was in association with the lenders of the money, that they had contracted to deliver the specie in Antwerp. Her credit, she said, was as good as that of Philip ; she would borrow the money herself. It was a heavy blow to Alva, and when he retaliated by seizing all English property in Flanders, Elizabeth in her turn laid hands on all Spanish property in England, to a very much greater value. Thenceforward for some years trade between England and Philip's dominions was practically suspended ; and English piracy in consequence enormously increased. The futile plots of de Spes and Alva to depose Elizabeth, by means of a rising of the English Catholics, were all known ; and the ambassador was finally expelled with ignominy (December, 1571) after the discovery of the Ridolfi plot, in which he had been a principal. For the next five years Philip had no formal ambassador in England ; and English aid to the Flemish " Beggars," both on land and sea, went across the North Sea almost undisguised.

Thus in the ten or eleven years that had passed since Philip arrived in Spain he had made practically no progress in the great objects of his policy. Far from securing religious uniformity in the Netherlands, Alva's cruelties had only made the reconciliation of the Protestants for ever impossible. The Huguenots in France, in close union with Elizabeth, were strong enough to paralyse any attempt of the Guises to join France with Spain for the suppression of Protestantism in general ; while the course of events in England and Scotland enabled Elizabeth practically to defy Spanish threats of vengeance for her aid to the Netherlands and the depredations of English sailors. The Turks and North Africans in the Mediterranean, moreover, were still unsubdued, and raided almost with impunity the south-east coast of Spain, being doubtless abetted by the descendants of those Moors of the kingdom of Granada who only seventy years before, when the Catholic Kings had conquered their lands, had been solemnly promised toleration for their faith. These Moriscos were a standing reproach to Philip's boast that in Spain, at least,

the orthodoxy of every man was beyond reproach. Throughout the country the Moorish blood had mingled so much with the Christian as to be in many places »indistinguishable ; but in the kingdom of Granada the race, so recently conquered, was almost pure. Successive galling edicts had forced upon them the Christian garb, faith, name, and tongue; but in secret they still preserved their ancient beliefs and usages, to the despair of the bigoted churchmen who were the King's instruments. The Moriscos were the most skilful and prosperous people in Spain; and, especially in agriculture and horticulture on the fertile Vega of Granada, their success brought them the hatred and envy of their Christian neighbours. The Castilian Cortes vied with the Catholic Bishops in urging a constant renewal of measures of oppression against them, alleging their doubtful orthodoxy, their undue wealth, their sympathy with the marauding Muslim corsairs, and their utilisation of slave labour. At first the Moriscos bribed, and bowed sulkily to the yoke ; but finally at the end of 1568 the storm, long gathering, broke, and rapine swept down from the Morisco fastnesses in the Alpujarras upon smiling Granada, desecrating Christian churches, and avenging on Christian Spaniards the hoarded wrongs of centuries. Philip's vengeance was prompt and terrible. Men, women and children were slaughtered by thousands by the Marquis de los Vêlez, and by Bishop Deza, who knew no mercy ; and, when the danger was past, Philip's natural brother, Don John of Austria (born 1547), was sent to give the last blow to the lingering rebellion.

The young Prince was one of the handsomest and most chivalrous men of his time, the idol of his brother's subjects, and a soldier every inch of him. But the cruel work he had to do after he had finally vanquished the Moriscos in arms well-nigh broke his heart. Death or slavery were the only alternatives left to the conquered. Those Moriscos who escaped the bloodthirstiness of the Christians were driven forth, heavily chained, from their own fair land through the winter's snow to the bleak plains of Castile, to lifelong servitude; and by the end of 1570 the whole of Andalusia was cleared of those who bore the taint of Moorish blood or sympathised with the Muslim corsairs. This victory for the orthodox churchmen was not without political warrant ; but it was one stroke more at the dwindling industrial prosperity of Spain.

While Philip was celebrating in Seville his brother's victory over the Moriscos, there came to him an envoy of the Pope to urge him to a crowning effort to chase the Turks from the inland sea. A great Ottoman fleet was before Cyprus, which island, unaided, the Venetians were powerless to save. The loss of the island to Christendom would be irreparable, and the Pope exhorted Philip to join a league with Rome and Venice to crush the Muslim. Philip had no love for the temporising mercantile Venetians, but the occasion was pressing, and Don John was clamorous to fight again against unbelievers. Philip ultimately consented to make a supreme effort to clear the Mediterranean of the scourge, although

he utilised the opportunity for extorting from Pius V one more concession diminishing the power of the Papacy over the Spanish Inquisition. Europe rang with the preparations for the new crusade. The task of collecting the vast force needed was a long one ; and Cyprus had fallen before Don John had gathered in the Bay of Messina the finest fleet of war galleys ever seen in the Mediterranean. The Turks were by this time harrying the Adriatic coasts (September, 1571) and defied the Christian forces. All that religious fervour could give to strengthen Don John and his force was lavishly poured out ; and the young commander himself aroused the extravagant enthusiasm of Catholics throughout Christendom in his favour. Overriding the cautious advice of older commanders, he sought the Turkish fleet in the Bay of Lepanto (October 7, 1571) with his 270 galleys and 80,000 men. The spirit infused into the attack was irresistible ; and in a few hours the Muslim power in the Mediterranean was broken, never to be fully restored. The religious exaltation that followed passed all safe bounds. Don John was to restore the throne of Constantine, and was to sweep the unbelievers from Europe and North Africa. Don John, then only twenty-four years of age, lost his head with adulation. Philip, almost alone in Europe, would not allow his judgment to be shaken ; for he knew that his brother's dreams could only be realised at the sacrifice of his own.

In the meanwhile affairs were going badly in Flanders. Trade there was ruined by the suspension of the English commerce, and the flight of craftsmen under Alva's persecution ; while the seizure by Elizabeth in December, 1568, of the Spanish remittances had driven the Duke to despair. In answer to Philip's statement that every national resource was pledged, and that he was absolutely without means to carry on his government, the Cortes of Castile protested (1570) that the people of the realms of Castile were sunk into so dire a poverty, as to make it impossible to raise a maravedi beyond the ordinary tribute. No money therefore could be sent to Alva from Spain ; and he was driven to adopt in Flanders the fatal tax that had ruined Spanish industry, namely, the alcabala or 10 per cent, upon all sales of commodities; a step which united the Flemings of all classes and creeds in resistance to the commercial and industrial ruin that threatened them. Ultimately, the peace party in Philip's councils brought about Alva's recall and the experiment of a conciliatory policy under the new Viceroy Requesens (September, 1573).

The curse of poverty lay upon all Philip's plans; and yet Spain was a by-word for riches throughout Europe. The reason for this is to be found in the administration rather than in the amount of revenue and expenditure. The Emperor's ruinous system had depended largely upon arbitrary impositions crippling the Spanish commercial and industrial classes, and upon the pledging of specific sources of revenue at extravagant interest to foreign bankers. During his early regency of

Spain Philip had frequently protested against these oppressive methods. But when he succeeded to his father's task, he was obliged to follow the same evil course. Personally, he was extremely frugal, almost penurious, and was a notoriously bad paymaster to those who served him. He was grieved beyond measure at the distress suffered by his Castilian subjects, in consequence of the taxation which he was obliged to impose upon them. But he could devise no other scheme of finance than the vicious one he had inherited. By the middle of his reign the stifling of industry by the alcdbala and local tolls, the depopulation of the agricultural districts by the oppression of the Moriscos and the great drain of men for America and the wars, had immensely diminished the sources of revenue ; while the inability of Spain to supply manufactured goods to her colonies caused a great portion of the American treasure to be diverted to other countries through Seville or direct, notwithstanding the prohibition of the export of the precious metals. The arbitrary seizure of specie belonging to merchants, to meet sudden government emergencies, had also bred distrust; and much of the commercial wealth was smuggled abroad or concealed. The amounts received by the treasury therefore tended to become smaller as time went on. On the other hand, Philip's rigidly centralised system, which weakened the control and authority as well as the responsibility of his executive officers, inevitably encouraged corruption to an extent almost beyond belief ; and much of the money sent for the payment of soldiers, the purchase of munitions and victuals, and the maintenance of fleets, was appropriated to the private use of the intermediaries. It was impossible for one overburdened man in the centre of Spain effectually to superintend, as Philip tried to do, the minute details of administration in all parts of the world. The amounts of money actually received from America, even before the English systematically plundered the galleons, were much smaller than public opinion at home and abroad imagined. Vast sums were stolen, hidden or surreptitiously detained, by the King's officers in America; and not only viceroys, but bishops and friars who had gone to the Indies penniless, returned laden with great ill-gotten booty. It thus happened that the vast revenues enjoyed on paper by the Catholic King dwindled by a faulty system, bad management, and peculation, to an amount almost absurdly inadequate to the demands made by Philip's objects. The Italian dominions produced practically nothing for the Spanish exchequer; the Netherlands, which had always managed their own resources, now constituted a terrible drain upon the King; Aragon and Catalonia stood stiffly by their parliamentary charters, contributing only their moderate fixed quota, and even that unwillingly. In Castile, moreover, the nobles were exempt from regular taxation, though large and irregular sums were extorted from them by various devices ; while the enormous accumulation of property in ecclesiastical hands, which was also exempt from

taxation, cast by far the larger portion of Philip's enormous expenditure upon the commercial, agricultural, and industrial classes of the provinces of Castile.

Requesens prayed ceaselessly for money. The troops, he said, unpaid, were turning bandits, sacking and plundering at large; and even the Catholic Flemings could endure it no longer. The credit of the "rebels" was good, he complained, while no one would trust him or Philip : and, such being the state of things in Flanders, Don John's clamours for aid for his visionary ambitions necessarily remained unheard. Philip did not openly contradict : that was not his way. Evasion and silence served as well, and while he was thus paltering, the Calabrian renegade Luch Ali had, within nine months of the battle of Lepanto, raised another force of 150 galleys. Don John was alternately prayerful and indignant at his brother's coolness; and all the summer of 1572 was wasted in and out of Messina. The autumn and winter passed. Don John's force fell away and decayed; the Venetians patched up a peace with the Turk, but still no money came from Spain. Not until October 7, 1573, could Don John sail to relieve the garrison he had left at La Goleta. That was his ostensible object, but his plans were larger ; for he made a sudden dash upon Tunis and captured it, in the hope of making it the base for the conquest of his new empire. Leaving there a garrison of 8000 men he sailed back to Sicily to summon all Christendom to his aid. Gregory XIII gave him his blessing and the golden rose, but Philip was aghast. The Prince's adviser, Soto, was recalled; and Don John was instructed to abandon and dismantle Tunis. He disobeyed these orders, and even asked Philip's permission to attack Constantinople. The reply was the stoppage of all supplies, both from Spain and from Naples. In vain Don John raved. No money and no help came; and, before a year had passed, Tunis and La Goleta fell into the hands of the Turks, and the soldiers who were to carve out Don John's new empire were massacred or made galley-slaves.

But Don John had tasted the sweets of victory, and his dreams of empire beguiled him still. A fresh adviser was sent to him of the strictest Ruy Gomez school, named Escobedo; but he too fell under the spell of the Prince's visions, and, like his master, entreated the Pope and the Christian Princes to subsidise the crusade. For three years longer Don John thus remained in Italy, his brother's resentful jealousy growing as his turbulent demands became more pressing, and his conduct more flighty and unstable. The Neapolitan nobility, indignant at Philip's treatment of Don John, established a league for the purpose of formulating for their country demands similar to those of the Flemish nobles, namely, provincial assemblies and the withdrawal of Spanish garrisons. Genoa, too, the now decadent Republic, which had always been the faithful servant of Philip and his father, rose in revolt against the Doria and Grimaldi, the Spanish King's henchmen, and threatened an

appeal to France, which Philip dreaded of all things ; so that humiliating concessions had to be made to Dona's enemies.

In this dangerous condition of things Requesens died in Flanders (March, 1576). The Catholic Flemings had continued to press for the withdrawal of the troops, which Requesens had promised again and again. But without money the troops would not budge; and Philip was at the end of his resources. Walcheren had been completely lost to the Spaniards ; the siege of Leyden had failed ; and at one time, in his despair, Philip had resolved either to drown or burn all Holland. Tired out at last of the hopeless contest, and of the ceaseless demands of the Catholic Flemings, Philip bent to the inevitable, and summoned Don John from his dissolute life in Naples, to carry to Flanders the message of peace, offering any terms, so long as Spain's suzerainty over the Low Countries were retained.

The humiliation, bitter for Philip, was more bitter still for his brother. Don John was ordered to travel post-haste to Flanders direct, to withdraw the mutinous troops at any sacrifice, and to conciliate the Belgic Provinces. The task was repulsive to him ; as he said, any old woman with a distaff could do it better than he ; but it seemed to offer him a chance of reaching an ambition even greater than that of his visionary Eastern empire. Either the Prince or his minister, Escobedo, conceived the rash idea that the cut-throats who were ravaging Flanders, instead of being marched overland to Italy, might be withdrawn by sea, and suddenly be thrown into England, where, in conjunction with a rising of Catholics in the north, they might liberate Mary Stewart. Don John would marry her; and they would reign over Great Britain as Catholic monarchs under the aegis of Spain. It was a wild and impracticable plan, but to Don John real enough to make him disobey orders, and rush to Spain to beg his brother's aid to it. Philip's heart hardened at the coming of Don John with plans that would have set all Europe in a blaze ; and with a cool, evasive answer to his prayer, he sent his brother in disguise through France to Flanders.

Before Don John arrived there the catastrophe had happened. Antwerp had been sacked and ruined by the revolted soldiery (November 4, 1576). There was no more hesitation. Flemings of all ranks and creeds made common cause to defend their homes and lives ; and, when Don John reached the frontier, he found that he could only enter upon his governorship on terms dictated by the States. News had reached Orange of the great plan against England ; and the first demand of the States was that the troops must be withdrawn by land and not by sea. Don John rebelled against his task. Wild prayers went to Spain that he might be allowed to fight the insolent rebels who thus defied their sovereign. But Philip knew better. He had no money, no credit ; and an unsuccessful attack upon England now would have meant ruin. He distrusted Don John too, for Perez was hourly poisoning his

ear against his brother. At length, with infinite trouble, humiliation, and bitterness, sufficient money was borrowed in Flanders on Escobedo's credit to satisfy the soldiers, who marched out of the country in the spring of 1577. The "joyous entry " of Don John into Brussels marked the triumph of the Flemings ; but there was no joy in Don John's heart. His prayers for recall were unanswered ; and at length in despair he broke with the States, threw himself into Namur, and defied the Flemings, Catholics and Protestants, to do their worst. His greater cousin, Farnese, hurried from Italy to bring his generalship and diplomacy to bear, whilst Don John, heartbroken, sank and died (October 1, 1578). There were other importunities besides those of Don John upon which Philip was forced to frown. The young King Sebastian of Portugal, his nephew, was burning with zeal for the conquest of Morocco for the Cross, and sought to persuade his uncle to throw the weight of Spain into the project. As we have seen, Philip was hopelessly bankrupt at the time, at close grip with the Flemings, and on most critical terms with Elizabeth of England. He dared not arouse all Islam against him anew, and did his best to divert his half-crazy nephew from his plans, but without success. Don Sebastian led his Christian host across the Strait, to the deep grief and discontent of his people ; and met his fate, of which the mystery can never be revealed, at the battle of Alcazar-Kebir, on August 4, 1578. The next heir to the Crown of Portugal was the aged and childless Cardinal Henry, great uncle of Sebastian ; after him came a host of claimants, amongst whom Philip II was the strongest, though not the most popular in Portugal or possessed of the best title. The possession of Portugal seemed to hold out the hope to the Spanish King of an accession of power that would enable him to have his way in Europe. The great wealth of the Portuguese Crown, the revenues from the East Indies, where the Portuguese were rapidly ousting the Venetians from their monopoly of trade, the mines of Brazil, and the great possessions in Africa, would provide resources, which, when added to those of Spain, would far exceed those of any other Power in the world ; and the prospect of their possession opened to Philip a bright vista of success for the future, since all his previous failure had sprung from want of means. To him it mattered little that he claimed the succession through his mother, the daughter of Emmanuel the Great, whilst the other claimants descended from sons of the same King. He lost no time in sending trusty agents to Portugal to bribe his way to the throne whilst yet King Henry lived. The old King himself had vain dreams, notwithstanding his seventy-seven years, of founding a dynasty and disappointing all rivals; but Philip's ambassador in Rome promptly stopped the project of releasing him from his vows. Don Cristobal de Moura, Philip's ambassador at Lisbon, and the eager Spanish churchmen, were not long in worrying the old Cardinal King into his grave with their importunities (January 31, 1580) ; and, of the

five Regents left by the King to choose a successor, Philip's bribes and threats had won three. An army was standing ready in Andalusia; and Alvaro de Bazan, Marquis of Santa Cruz, the stout Admiral, had thirty-nine armed galleys lying in the Bay of Gibraltar. But a land commander was wanted. Alva alone would suit. He had lain in disgrace since his return from Flanders ; his enemies, Ferez and the peace party, had been all-powerful. As will be related below, Don John had been abandoned, and his minister, Escobedo, murdered, on the mere apprehension that they might strengthen Alva. But, now that Alva was needed for Philip's plans, the old soldier was called to honour again, and bidden to lead the Spanish army through Portugal. The Regents were on Philip's side ; and those of the Portuguese nobility who were not bribed were terrified by threats or kidnapped to Spain. The first movement of the Portuguese people and clergy had been to elect to the throne Don Antonio, the half-Jewish and doubtfully legitimate grandson of Emmanuel the Great, Prior of Crato ; but his resources were scanty, and, though he was personally popular, the people themselves were cowardly and unorganised- Alva marched through the country almost unresisted, defeating Antonio's forces in two battles, and driving the unfortunate pretender into hiding, and thence into lifelong exile.

In the meantime Philip followed in the wake of his army, to take possession of his new realm. On his way, at Badajoz, in October, 1580, to his inexpressible grief, he lost his fourth wife ; and soon afterwards two of the three children she had left followed her to the grave. Philip was a good husband and father, and after this there was no more pleasure for him in life. He had always been reticent and grave ; now he became a gloomy recluse, living but for his great task and for the love of his eldest daughter. In gathering sadness, but striving still to bear his troubles humbly and patiently, he went from town to town through his new kingdom to receive the oath of allegiance from the Portuguese Cortes at Thomar on April 1, 1581. Now, if ever, there seemed a chance of his being able to crush his enemies by mere force and wealth. All America, all Africa, vast, rich territories in Asia, the finest Atlantic ports in Europe, with trade and mineral wealth unbounded, were his; and the mere contemplation of the power thus acquired by him drove Elizabeth of England and Catharine de' Medici both into a panic.

The fugitive Don Antonio fled through France to England in July, 1581, and was received with royal honours, Elizabeth and Catharine vying with each other in their endeavours to secure the direction of so powerful an instrument to oppose Philip, or so valuable an asset for a transaction with him. Antonio at first decided to trust the English ; and the Puritan party, now led by Leicester and Walsingham, rose in influence with such a tool in their hands. Catharine de' Medici pretended to some sort of claim to the Portuguese throne herself, but it was not seriously pressed ; and, when Antonio found that Elizabeth and her

ministers were more eager to get possession of the priceless jewels which he brought than to go to war with Spain for his sake, he listened to the more tempting offers of the French Queen-Mother to fit out a mercenary fleet for the seizure of the Azores, which were inclined to accept him as King. Leaving England in October, 1581, he sailed in the following summer in high hope with a great fleet of 55 ships and 5000 men, commanded by Strozzi. Terceira received the pretender with open arms; but in the midst of the rejoicing the terrible Santa Cruz, with his Spanish fleet, appeared, and scattered to the winds Antonio's ships, the pretender himself barely escaping and Strozzi being slain. In the following year an exactly similar attempt was made, with the same result, when Aymard de Chaste's mercenary fleet with 6000 partisans of Don Antonio fell a prey, also off Terceira, to the skill and daring of Santa Cruz. Then Antonio, with broken fortune and flagging spirit, drifted back to England again, to be alternately taken up and dropped by Elizabeth, as the mutations of her attitude towards Spain demanded, until the crowning fiasco of the English mercenary invasion of Portugal in 1589 quenched for ever his chances of reigning in his own country. Then, having served Elizabeth's turn in the war of England against Spain, he sank into obscurity.

But both Catharine and Elizabeth took stronger measures than cherishing Don Antonio to retort upon Philip for his seizure of Portugal. When the Catholic Flemings had been driven to revolt by the outrages of the Spanish troops, some of the Catholic nobles had invited the Archduke Matthias to assume the sovereignty of Flanders. At the risk of offending his uncle Philip, Matthias consented; and the interests of the two branches of the House of Austria were thus separated; a diplomatic advantage which led Orange to accept with alacrity a subordinate position to the young Catholic Prince. But it soon became evident that another prince of stiffer material must be found by the Catholic Flemings, or Brabant and Flanders would have to choose between submission to the Protestants of Holland or to the Spanish tyranny. Before Don John's failure negotiations had taken place with the Catholic Flemings to place upon the throne of Brabant Elizabeth's young French suitor, Francis of Valois, now Duke of Anjou. Henry III, who had no desire to be drawn into a war with Spain in which his own Guises and extreme Catholics would not be likely to help him, was panic-stricken at the idea, and promptly put his brother under lock and key. Anjou escaped in February, 1578 ; and Huguenots and " malcontents " flocked to his standard to aid in the project of crippling Philip, by placing a Frenchman on the Belgic throne, with Hollanders and Protestants by his side, and perhaps with the support of England. Henry III and his mother were anxious not to be compromised with Spain; but the matter was much more serious for Elizabeth. Envoys were sent from England to Don John in his retreat at Namur, and to

the States urging them to agree in order to keep the Frenchman out. During the next few years English diplomacy was directed to this end, or to ensure that, if Anjou ever ruled, it should be under English influence alone, while France and Spain were embroiled. With Leicester by his side Anjou was crowned Duke of Brabant in Antwerp in 1582, only to be repudiated as such by Elizabeth directly afterwards. His utter worthlessness soon became apparent, and the farce of his sovereignty was abandoned; while the Catholic Flemings were cajoled or coerced by Farnese back into submission, and the northern Provinces, now supported undisguisedly by Queen Elizabeth, stood apart again from them.

It is not to be supposed that these French and English intrigues, carried on through a series of years to his detriment, were allowed by Philip to pass without retaliation. With every move of Anjou towards the Huguenots, the Guises drew nearer to Spain. In 1580 they gave Philip to understand that their niece Mary Stewart would thenceforward serve Spanish interests alone ; and from that period until the unfortunate Queen's death the conspiracies constantly formed in her favour, at first with Guise, and subsequently without him, were purely Spanish in object, and intended, by placing England in Catholic hands, to end a régime by which Spanish commerce had been well-nigh destroyed, and the Protestant revolt against Philip sustained. For twenty-five years open national war between England and Spain had been avoided, with the constant hope on Philip's part that he might be able alone to crush religious dissent in his own dominions, and thus be in a position to deal with England subsequently. But, as we have seen, his poverty and tardy methods, as well as the resource and agility of his opponents, had frustrated this plan. He lived for the object of unifying Christianity for the ultimate political benefit of Spain; and, after a quarter of a century of ceaseless struggle, he was further from the goal than ever. Not only were the depredations of Drake and his many imitators a standing humiliation to him, but the interference with his shipping, Spanish and Portuguese, hampered him financially to a ruinous degree. His mind was slow to move, and he detested war. Despite the oft-repeated prayers of his ambassadors and agents that he would make open war on England, he had not dared to face the cost and responsibility of this course. He had done his utmost, by encouraging Catholic revolt in favour of Mary Stewart and subsidising English religious discontent, even by listening to and aiding plans for Elizabeth's murder-though with little conviction, for repeated failure had taught him the efficacy of Walsingham's spies and the faithlessness of conspirators. Very slowly and reluctantly he was forced to recognise that he would have to begin by mastering England, or the rest of his task would be impossible. Santa Cruz had always been of that opinion, and after his victory over Don Antonio's second expedition off Terceira he wrote to the King (August 9, 1583), fervently begging him to allow him to conquer

England with his fleet. Philip coolly thanked the Admiral, but evaded the offer. The idea however germinated ; and, when Elizabeth accepted the supremacy over the Netherlands in 1585, the eventual adoption of the plan became inevitable. England, or rather Elizabeth's government, must be crushed, or Spain was doomed to decay. To this pass had Philip been brought by the march of circumstances and his own rigidity of method. His tactical mistake had been to refrain from dealing with England when she was weak, and so depriving the continental Protestants of their main support, misled by Elizabeth's clever juggle of an Austrian marriage and similar diplomatic pretences.

If, however, he was to be driven to the conquest of England, he was determined that the benefit must accrue to him alone. The plan of the Scottish, French, and Welsh Catholics and of the Vatican had always been to convert James Stewart, forcibly if necessary, and make him King of Britain-the end for which James himself ceaselessly worked. The English Jesuit party and Philip's English pensioners were violently opposed to such a solution, and indignantly scouted the idea of a Scottish King over England. Guise's plans had always included the invasion of Scotland in the Catholic interest simultaneously with that of England ; but Philip looked more and more askance both at James Stewart and his French kinsmen, and listened with increasing favour to the hints of the English Jesuits that after James, excluded for heresy, he, Philip, had a good claim to the English throne through his descent from John of Gaunt and the House of Portugal. There was no candidate outside his own House who could be trusted ; and with Mary Stewart's formal recognition of Philip as her heir (June, 1586), the policy of forcing a Spanish sovereign upon England was finally adopted. Thenceforward, if the plans of the Guises and the Scottish Catholics were smiled upon, it was done only in order to frustrate them.

In January, 1586, Santa Cruz again urged the King to adopt a strong naval policy. The English, he said, had since the previous August done damage to Spanish shipping to the extent of a million and a half ducats, and a national war would be less costly than that. Philip ordered the admiral to submit his plans and estimates for the invasion of England ; but when they were complete, the cost-3,800,000 ducats-was alarming, and the whole force was to be raised and sent from Spain. Philip knew that ruined Castile could not produce such an amount and that years would be needed to collect in Spain the material for such a force. But he recognised at last that his time was now or never. The Flemings had been cajoled or crushed by Farnese; the Dutch were in worse case than they had been in for years ; the English garrisons in the Netherlands towns were passing over to Farnese's side in a most alarming fashion; the Turk was busy at war with the Emperor; and France, divided by religious discord, was powerless to interfere. So the plunge was taken, though on a smaller scale, and on a less concentrated

plan, than that suggested by Santa Cruz. Orders went to Naples, Sicily, Portugal, and the Spanish ports, for ships and munitions to be prepared. Not a hint was given openly of the destination of the force, though the Irish refugees from the Munster rebellion who crowded the quays of Lisbon and Corunna soon began to chatter gleefully of the vengeance that at last was to fall upon their enemy. In his cell in the Escorial the little white-haired man toiled night and day, directing the smallest details everywhere. Pope Sixtus V (Peretti) was alternately bullied and cajoled into promising a million gold crowns, and perhaps half as much again if once a landing was effected in England. But he was kept in the dark as to whom the King of Spain was to put in Elizabeth's place, though he promised, after infinite wrangling, to approve of the person Philip might choose. In the secret councils of the King the English Jesuits had prevailed ; and the Infanta Isabel Clara Eugenia was Queen designate of England. But the papal subsidy was not available until after the event : and, though finally Philip managed to borrow some money on the security of it, the sums needed at once and continuously were enormous.

The Cortes of Castile, when they met in the autumn of 1586, could only repeat in doleful tones their oft-told tale. The realm, they said, was going from bad to worse. Lands were untilled, and the former cultivators wandering tramps and homeless beggars at convent gates; trade was everywhere languishing or extinct, owing to taxation ; and the utmost that could be squeezed from the country of Castile was the usual triennial grant of 450 million maravedis. It was a mere drop in the ocean of Philip's needs. The clergy had to disburse handsomely for the crusade, and the nobles were half ruined by extortions : the Italian princes were made to understand that if they wished to be regarded as friends they must contribute ; and so, throughout the vast dominions of Spain, money was wrung from all classes in the name of Philip and the cause he championed; and the dockyards and arsenals throbbed with life.

Flanders. But, so far as Philip was concerned, the negotiations were insincere from first to last, though Farnese earnestly prayed for permission to make peace in reality.

Santa Cruz and Farnese urged ceaselessly the need for seizing a port of refuge in the North Sea ; and the admiral fretted over the change of plan that had been forced upon him. An army under Farnese was to be convoyed across the Channel, and on land Farnese was to be supreme. Santa Cruz's idea was that of a seaman : first defeat the English fleet and gain command of the sea, and then invade the land. Philip's plan was that of the landsmen : keep the English fleet at bay whilst Farnese's army was ferried across in barges. In September, 1587, Santa Cruz received his orders. He was to sail straight to the North Foreland and protect Farnese's passage across. He replied that the force was not ready and the season was too far advanced to sail without a port of refuge. Philip's soldier officers were scornful of such timid counsels; and Philip was impatient too, for he knew that Farnese's 30,000 men would melt away before another season came. So the only man who could have led the fleet to victory was driven to his death by the unmerited reproaches of his master, and Santa Cruz breathed his last in February, 1588.

The delay nearly ruined the whole project. Food went bad ; ships grew foul; men had to be fed; and money was ever harder to be come by. The Pope distrusted Philip and stood firm to his stipulation that he would pay nothing until the Spanish troops landed in England; and one more appeal was made to the Cortes of Castile (April, 1588). They were well-nigh effete now, but they protested that no such sum as that demanded (8,000,000 ducats) had ever been heard of in Spain before and could not be raised. The pulpit and the confessional were set to work throughout the country; the members of the Cortes were bribed and terrified into acquiescence; the town councils were similarly treated; and the vote was passed that led to the excise tax called the "Millions," which for the next two centuries burdened the simple food of the people.

Philip had several fine seamen in his service, but pride and jealousy reigned supreme amongst the officers at Lisbon. The soldier always assumed superiority ; the sailor was only a carrier to convey the fighting man to battle ; and Philip was obliged to choose a man to succeed Santa Cruz whose rank was high enough to command respect from all, soldiers and sailors alike. He was also guided in his choice by his fatal desire to command the Armada himself from his cell ; and a man of initiative and ability did not suit him. The man he chose was the greatest noble in Spain, the Duke of Medina Sidonia, head of the great House of Guzman, and admiral of the coast of Andalusia. He was a fool and a poltroon, and he knew it ; but it served the King's purpose to appoint him. In vain he protested his unfitness, he suffered from sea-sickness, he knew nothing of marine warfare, he was half ruined already by the preparation

of his squadron, and he was in poor health. But Philip was firm. He was sure, he said, that the Duke would worthily uphold the great namehe bore.

Medina Sidonia found disorganisation, corruption, and jealousy rampant in Lisbon. Pestilence and famine were rife, the men and ships all unready, and the stores rotten. This gave the new chief an excuse for fresh and ever repeated delay in sailing. More men, more arms, more money, was his constant cry, until his own officers accused him of wilful procrastination and sent angry remonstrances to the King. Only at Philip's peremptory command did Medina Sidonia unwillingly sail from Lisbon (May 30, 1588, N. S.); and even then nothing short of a miracle could have made the expedition successful. The teachings of experience, the advice of experts, the most obvious precautions, had all been perversely neglected. Everyone knew that the English sailors had revolutionised tactics in the previous twenty years ; that their ships were stancher and handier, and could sail closer to the wind. The galley tradition still ruled in Spain ; and the first principle was to grapple and close so that soldiers and small arms could be utilised. Artillery was reckoned an ignoble arm, and its use amongst Spaniards was to disable rigging not to pierce hulls. Philip and his advisers knew to their cost that Drake had formed a new system, depending upon the power of the English craft to evade grappling and employ their superior artillery upon the enemy's hull; but all this knowledge was useless, for Philip's mind was impervious to new ideas. Similarly, his neglect of the best advice to seize a safe port on the English coast was neglected. To all remonstrance he had but one type of reply. The expedition was in God's service, and He might be trusted to bring it victory. So in Lisbon, before the fleet sailed, and throughout Spain, prayers and vows took the place of prudent mundane precaution. Sacred banners, holy water, crucifixes, blessed scapularies, priests and friars, and images of the Saints, made the great fleet like a cloister, and inflamed to religious ecstasy the crews and soldiers, who were told that they went on a saintly crusade to deliver a yearning people from the tyranny of the evil one. If exalted enthusiasm and religious zeal had sufficed, the Armada was sure of victory ; but its material, organisation, plan of campaign, and system of tactics, were such that it could only win by an almost impossible combination of entirely favourable circumstances.

Its unseaworthiness was proved almost as soon as it got clear of the Tagus. For the next three weeks the unwieldy ships were buffeted by a series of gales on the coasts of Portugal, Galicia, and Biscay ; some of the vessels reaching as far north as the Scilly Isles. With gaping seams and shattered spars they sought such shelter as they might, and those that were not entirely disabled were finally once more collected in Corunna. This foretaste of disaster increased the Duke's fears. On June 24 he wrote to the King solemnly urging him to abandon

the expedition and to make an honourable peace with Elizabeth. The water, he assured the King, was fetid, and the food putrid ; the supplies already so short that, under the most favourable circumstances, they could not suffice for two months. " The ships have suffered much and are now greatly inferior to the English; and the crews are seriously weakened, numbers falling ill every day in consequence of the bad food.1" All the force of Spain, he urged, was employed in this unpromising venture; and ill success would mean utter ruin. The same advice in more dignified language had been given two months before by Farnese. His men, unpaid as usual, for he was in dire straits for money, had dwindled by sickness and desertion after long waiting and two disappointments. His Italians, Germans, and Walloons were in a dangerous state of discontent ; his only ports were the little sand-blocked harbours of Dunkirk and Nieuport; his boats were only flat-bottomed barges, unfit to face any weather but the finest : Justin of Nassau with his fleet was watching for him outside; and, unless the Armada could first gain complete command of the sea, and give him 6000 Spanish veterans to stiffen his own mercenaries, he warned the King again and again he neither could, nor would, move. Thus, with two unwilling commanders foretelling failure, Philip's faith was put to the supreme test, and conquered all his boasted prudence. Farnese was given no authority to make his sham peace negotiations with the English Commissioners real ; and Medina Sidonia was coldly ordered to sail at once and carry out the plan laid down for him. Ever since the first sailing from Lisbon Medina Sidonia had continued to urge Farnese to be ready to come out and meet him ; and on the voyage to England and up the Channel the Duke's letters to this effect became more and more peremptory. Farnese, in hot indignation, could only repeat that the conditions promised to him must be fulfilled to the letter or he could not move. His men had dwindled by plague and defections to 17,000 ; he was being closely watched by Nassau and Seymour; his barges were powerless against attack ; and the sea must be cleared of enemies and 6000 Spanish veterans given to him, or the Armada must do without his aid.

Catastrophe, almost inevitable, therefore loomed ahead when on July 29, 1588, the Lizard was sighted from Medina Sidonia's flagship. The soldiers were confident ; but the sailors knew the conditions better and were assailed by doubts. How in a week's running fight up the Channel, and one awful battle off a lee shore near Gravelines, the sailors were justified and the soldiers lost faith in themselves and in the Divine patronage promised to them, is told in detail in another chapter ; but a few words must be said here with regard to the effects of the catastrophe upon Spaniards generally. A cry of despair and rage rang throughout the land. The Duke, abandoning everything, fled to the refuge of his palace at San Lucar, pursued by the curses of his countrymen. Farnese's

loyalty was impugned, the Duke's reputation for valour was attacked ; but amidst the recriminations and dismay the one man to whose hopes the defeat was indeed a death-blow, blamed no one and gave no sign of anger. In agonised prayer for days together, Philip still fervently whispered his unquestioning faith to the God he tried to serve according to his dim lights. " It is Thy cause, O Lord ! " he murmured : " if in Thy wisdom defeat is best, then Thy will be done." He could no more doubt of the final triumph than he could doubt the sacredness of the cause he had inherited. His slow, laborious mind was incapable of change or adaptations ; a conviction once assimilated by him could only with great difficulty be eradicated. He had been taught that his royal House and his Spanish people were divinely appointed to champion the system which was to bring about God's kingdom upon earth. Suffering, hardship, oppression, cruelty, might be necessary for the attainment of the glorious object, of which he and Spain were to be the instrumental factors. If so, they must be endured without murmur, even as he endured unmoved labour and disappointments that would have broken the heart or crushed the faith of any other man. And thus, in the hour of Spain's bitter disillusionment the King alone remained serene, and turned again to his ceaseless round of plodding office-work, patiently planning how best to retrieve the disaster.

The immediate and personal effects of the catastrophe of the Armada were felt so poignantly, the culmination was so dramatic, the reaction both in Spain and England so violent, that the larger results were only very gradually understood. For the greater part of a century Spain had imposed herself upon the world to an extent entirely unwarranted by her native resources and the numbers of her population. She had during the period discovered, subjected, and organised a vast new continent : the commercial and mineral wealth of both East and West had been claimed as her monopoly; and throughout the world her assumption of the leadership of orthodox Christianity had been humbly accepted by all but a few. The accident of the accession of Charles V to Spain and Naples and the Empire with the added possession of the vast heritage of Burgundy, had given the appearance of strength necessary to maintain the pretence : but it was still only Castile, poor in herself, and her colonial possessions that bore the main burden of the expenditure demanded by the world-policy of the Emperor and his son.

The sentimental impetus such as must inspire a people for any great national advance came from Spain as a whole, though Castile had to provide most of the means. Yet there was no true Spanish nationality at all before the time of Ferdinand and Isabel, and to this day the nation is far from homogeneous. No purely political cooperation for national purposes was to be expected from the many divided peoples, with separate institutions, and antagonistic racial qualities, which constituted Spain. The bond of union had been sought in spiritual exclusiveness.

Under this influence the Spanish people had been used as a political instrument by its monarchs for a century. The religious pride thus engendered enabled the Spanish men-at-arms to dominate in Europe and America with a power that far surpassed the material resources behind it, and dazzled the eyes of the world for a century. The American treasure, which enriched other countries more than Spain, encouraged the deception ; and until the defeat of the Armada there were few to question the claims of Spaniards to overwhelming power, except the English sailors and the Beggars of the Sea. In their running fight up the Channel the Spanish mariners first raised the sinister cry wmng from their disillusioned hearts, " God has forsaken us ! " From that hour, though it lingered yet awhile, the source of Spain's ephemeral strength, the conviction of special divine protection, decayed ; and, as it waned, so waned the haughty tradition that had for so long cowed Europe. Spain's agony lasted for a hundred years longer ; and more than once in the period it suited other nations to revive the old pretence for their own ends : but the defeat of the Armada marked the commencement of the Spaniard's doubt of the destiny of his country.

But all this was hidden at first from those who witnessed the catastrophe. When the extent of the disaster became known, the unanimous cry of the Spanish people was for vengeance against the insolent islanders, who dared to claim a victory over Spain for what was really a visitation of Providence. The towns, half-ruined and depopulated as they were, came to Philip with offers of money for a new fleet ; the Cortes secretly offered to vote five million ducats to wipe out the stain ; the monasteries found that they still had some treasure left that might be employed for the holy cause ; and the sailors and merchants were clamorous that they should be allowed to fit out a new Armada. But Philip knew, as yet alone, how utterly ruined the calamity had left him both in credit and in coin. The promised papal subsidy was not forthcoming. He was deep in debt everywhere ; and, though he would have been willing to receive the money offered to him by his subjects, the offers were always clogged with conditions which he could not accept-that his organisation should be reformed, and that the contributing bodies should supervise the expenditure of their money. So he bade his people be patient, thanked them with evasive courtesy, and promised that he would act for the best when he judged opportune.

Other reasons gave him pause beside the lack of money. The Pope had been cajoled once into supporting a policy intended to make England a dependency of Spain ; but he would hardly be likely to be so compliant a second time. The Papacy, always deeply jealous of Spanish supremacy, and depending naturally much upon France and other Catholic Powers, had no intention of aiding the subjection of all Christendom to Philip. But a still more important element was the attitude of France. The strong Huguenot party had been thrown into

a ferment at the threat conveyed by the Armada ; and Henry III had only been kept neutral with difficulty by his hard taskmasters the Guises and by the strong Catholicism of the Parisian population. That, also, would never be likely to happen again. Henry III was sinking into premature senility; he had no child or brother to succeed him ; and the next heir to the French throne was Henry of Navarre, the hereditary foe of Philip, whose great-grandfather Ferdinand with the aid of the Pope had filched the ancient Spanish mountain realm from its rightful Kings. Not only was it clear that as Henry of Navarre's sun rose, the danger of French interference in Philip's plans increased; but a still greater peril loomed ahead that well might turn the King of Spain's thoughts from Protestant England, even from the Netherlands and their revolt. Unless Spain was to decay, as has already been explained, England must be kept friendly as a counterbalance to France in the Channel. For her to be a fit friend for Philip's ends she must be at least tolerant to Catholics. Philip had signally failed to make her so, and, in addition, had now gained her undying enmity. He could therefore expect from England nothing but opposition, continuous and strenuous. The Dutch Protestants, instead of being nearer submission to their nominal sovereign in the matter of religion, were more stoutly determined than ever, now that they realised his maritime impotence, on resistance to the death. Philip had therefore failed completely in the two primary and most obvious points of his policy ; and it was evident that, whatever happened, Spain could not hope to regain or retain her commanding political position by means of forcing religious uniformity upon all Christendom. This was bad enough ; but if France under a Huguenot King became Protestant too, then the ruin, rapid and complete, of the system upon which the Spanish power was based, was inevitable.

This was a danger more pressing even than that of England or Holland ; and the Spanish intrigues to avoid it were as crafty as they were unscrupulous. Already the Guises were hovering over the prey, a share of which they hoped to seize in due time by the help of Spain ; while Philip, fully alive to the peril, fomented their ambitious hopes with soft words and painfully wrung treasure, determined that, come what might, no Protestant should reign over France; and above all not the foe of his House, the popular, self-reliant Henry of Navarre. Approaches had been made to the latter more than once on Philip's behalf; and, if he had been content with Beam and Gascony, he might have had them for a kingdom without fighting. Philip's first idea had been to disintegrate France. He would give to his elder daughter, Isabel Clara Eugenia, the duchy of Britanny, to which she had a good right through her mother, Elizabeth of Valois: to his son-in-law, Duke Charles Emmanuel of Savoy he would cede the county of Provence ; while Guise should reign over central France, including Paris, under Spanish influence; and, most important of all, Picardy and French Flanders

opposite England should be added to Philip's own dominions. The Spaniards would thus through Philip and his daughter control the French Channel coast. The plan was a clever one, but Henry of Navarre would have none of it; and cajolery, threats, and bribes were alike powerless to move him. The Guises secured the withdrawal of the Edict of Toleration ; and anarchy and war at once reigned throughout France. To free himself from the Guises, Henry III caused the Duke to be murdered almost in his presence, and fled to the Huguenots (December, 1588). Paris solemnly deposed the King, and set up a provisional government under Guise's brother Mayenne. For years it had been agreed between Philip and the Guises that the former was to have a free hand in England in return for the support given by Spain to their ambition in France. But Guise was dead and Mayenne unstable; and Philip was not ready to begin a national war with France while Henry III was still alive, nor could he engage in such an adventure without a clear knowledge of how he was to benefit by it. He had his hands full at the time ; for the English attack upon Lisbon in the interests of Don Antonio was in full preparation ; and, if Drake and Norris could set the pretender on the Portuguese throne, then indeed Philip's sun had set. So he turned a deaf ear to the appeals of Mayenne and the fanatics, until the retirement of the English from Lisbon relieved his anxiety in that respect ; and the murder of Henry III precipitated events and forced upon Philip the need of throwing all his power into the scale to prevent France from becoming a Protestant power under the Huguenot Henry IV.

The first impulse of the Catholics in Paris had been to proclaim Philip King of France; but this did not suit Mayenne, who did not wish to burden the cause of the League with the domination of the foreigner. The Dukes of Savoy and Lorraine, and Mayenne himself, were greedy for the dismemberment of France in order to partake of the spoils ; but Philip was determined that, if Spanish men and money conquered France, it must be for him and not for others. The successes gained by Henry IV over the League on his march from Normandy to Paris swept away for the time the Flemish-Spanish contingents under Egmont; and, when the great victory of Ivry had been won (March 14, 1590), it was clear that, unless the Huguenot was to carry all before him and Spain be ruined, Philip's cause must be championed, not by Flemings and Walloons, with commanders of the stamp of Egmont, but by Spanish national forces under Farnese and veteran Spanish officers. Farnese had been badly treated by his cousin. A half confidence was all that was vouchsafed him; his children's claim to the Portuguese Crown had been ignored ; his own hopes of the Flemish sovereignty had been set aside; and he yearned for the reconquest of the Netherlands above all things. His conditions were therefore precise and rigid, and the Spaniards again whispered of treason ; but at length, unwillingly and with a heavy heart, he accepted

the great task of conquering France for Philip and the Church. During one brief period (August and September, 1590) it looked as if the power of Spain and the great Farnese would triumph ; and the cause of Henry of Navarre seemed well-nigh hopeless. But Mayenne was jealous and self-seeking, Farnese rough and haughty; and the attempt of Philip to cause his daughter to be crowned Queen of France caused dissensions amongst the Leaguers. So Farnese suddenly abandoned his French allies and hurried back to Flanders. Again the cause of Navarre prospered. Philip now saw that he could not force his daughter upon the throne of France ; and the idea of partition was revived-Britanny to fall to the Infanta. With this view a port on the Breton coast was seized. Elizabeth had already helped Henry; but now that a port opposite Plymouth was held by her enemy, even against Leaguers and Frenchmen, more efficacious help was sent in the form of 3000 English troops under Essex to besiege Rouen (July, 1591). Thenceforward for nearly a year the war was a scattered one, consisting indeed of several separate wars in the interests of the various parties ; while Spain hardly made a pretence of wishing to conquer all France for Philip or his daughter.

Meanwhile, affairs in Spain grew more and more desperate. The King himself was sixty-five years old, suffering under the tortures of constant gout. The only son left to him was a dull, scrofulous weakling, fourteen years of age, in whom the vices of his origin were already too apparent. The dominions of Castile were now almost utterly ruined. The Cortes might be forced or persuaded to vote more money; but money could not be wrung from beggars. The well-meant, but financially unwise sumptuary laws, which followed each other from year to year, prohibiting, with increasing but ineffectual penalties, the expenditure of money upon superfluities, reduced still more the demand for labour: while the artificial attempt to reduce the prices of commodities by forbidding the export of manufactured articles, even to the American colonies, deprived Spanish industry of its best market, and strangled the trade upon which the revenue mainly depended. The constant ineffectual attempts to prevent the exportation of bullion encouraged almost universal contraband, while the arbitrary and illegal seizures, made by the government in moments of pressure, of the private property of merchants and bankers at the principal ports, especially Seville, sapped confidence and led to the concealment or surreptitious conveyance to foreign countries of much of the wealth drawn from remittances from America and the East. The constant accumulation in the hands of the Church of land consequently exempt from regular taxation; the continuous increase of a class really or ostensibly attached to the ecclesiastical institutions, and also exempt from taxation and the operation of the civil law ; and the drain of the best and strongest men in the nation for the American settlements-these causes had towards the end

of Philip's life together produced a state of affairs in Castile that rendered the country cynically hopeless. Already the exalted faith that had carried their ancestors so far was giving way amongst Spaniards of all classes to a grosser form of slavish superstition, with which religion itself had little to do. The most rigid observance of ritual and devotional forms was gradually being blended with an almost blasphemous semi-jocose familiarity with sacred names and things, that has left its distinct mark upon the Spaniards of our own day. Religion was growing to be no longer a rule of life or a guide of conduct : it was becoming a set of formulae, the strictest observance of which might be quite compatible with a life of the blackest iniquity.

Such being the inevitable results of Philip's fiscal and political system in the portions of his dominions where the weakening of parliamentary institutions had enabled that system to work without restraint, the kingdoms where the parliamentary check was still operative naturally looked with increasing jealousy upon any attempt to enforce in them the King's conceptions of the rights of sovereigns as against those of peoples. When the King, in imposing state, had carried his younger daughter Catharine and her husband the Duke of Savoy to embark on his galley at Barcelona for the voyage to her new home in 1585, the opportunity was taken for summoning the Cortes of Aragon to take the oath of allegiance to the heir to the Crowns, Prince Philip, then seven years old ; and on the King's return journey from the coast, a united sitting of the Cortes of the three Aragonese dominions (Aragon, Catalonia, and Valencia) was called at Monzon for legislation and the voting of supplies. Philip was kept chafing in the unhealthy crowded provincial town for five months during the autumn of 1585 ; while the Aragonese deputies besieged him daily with claims and demands which he considered injurious to his prerogative. So strongly was he opposed to the assertion of popular rights, that he had entered Barcelona at dead of night in order to avoid a State reception in which the citizens would have had an opportunity of displaying their ancient privileges.

Aragon had at the time a judicial system which was unexampled in the rest of Europe and had always been a source of annoyance to Philip and his father The Chief Justice of Aragon, who was irremovable, and independent of the King, possessed the power of taking charge of any prisoner who claimed his protection, and lodging him in his own prison of the Manifestation, where he was judged by a legally constituted tribunal, defended by a qualified lawyer, and exempt from torture. Every person or authority, civil or seigniorial, was obliged to produce a prisoner in their hands and surrender him to the Chief Justice, if the demand was made ; and so soon as a person, of whatever nationality, set foot on Aragonese soil, he could claim the invaluable right of the Manifestation, ensuring him a trial in which the law of the land alone was the criterion of guilt. Thus it sufficed for any of Philip's subjects

from other portions of his dominions, if accused or suspected, to escape to Aragon, appeal to the Chief Justice, and defy arbitrary or irregular persecution ; and, as may be supposed, the King lost no opportunity of endeavouring to weaken an institution which so greatly reduced his prerogative of punishment.

Even the Inquisition in Aragon was not quite the pliant instrument that it was in Castile ; and during his long stay in Monzon in 1585 Philip found himself opposed by both the Chief Justice and the Inquisition in an attempt to appropriate the great fief of Ribagorza, as well as worried by the Cortes. The chagrin thus caused him, added to the insalubrity of the overcrowded place, threw him into an illness which threatened his life ; and when he returned to his daily round of work in Madrid in January, 1586, he was aged and broken almost beyond recognition His contemporaries were passing away ; Margaret of Parma and Cardinal de Granvelle died in 1586. Alva had died soon after his Portuguese campaign ; Ruy Gomez was gone ; and the ministers and secretaries who now surrounded the King were distinctly inferior in ability to those who had preceded them. Mateo Vasquez, the King's personal secretary, was a sly, servile scribe of obscure and doubtfully Christian birth, without the keen wit and vast ambition of the brilliant scoundrel Antonio Perez whom he had supplanted.

On the return of the King from Aragon, it was accordingly found that his infirmities would no longer allow him to deal as before with every detail of every paper ; and his methods of despatching affairs had necessarily to be changed. Instead, therefore, of each document being submitted to him with his secretary's annotations before it was sent to the particular Council which it concerned, a sort of intimate Privy Council was formed, consisting of three members-Don Juan de Idiaquez and Don Cristobal de Moura (the principal Secretaries of State), and the Count of Chinchon. This Council met every night in the palace-it was called the Council of Night in consequence-and considered the documents of the day before they were submitted to the King. Each of these ministers took charge of a special department of government, and was accorded an audience every day, in which the affairs of his department arising out of the documents of the previous night were submitted to the King ; and the execution of the policy decided upon was relegated to the various Secretaries of Councils.

The greatest loss to the bureaucratic part of Philip's government, aa well as one of the bitterest trials of his life, was the defection and escape of his chief secretary, Antonio Perez, which once more brought the King into antagonistic contact with the stubborn Aragonese and their judicial privileges. In the circumstances mentioned in an earlier page Perez had been commanded by the King to bring about the death of Escobedo, Don John's warlike secretary, killed during his visit to Spain in the summer of 1577, in order to prevent his return to Flanders, where

.his presence might have further inflamed the Prince's ambitions, and have led to a renewed rupture with the recently reconciled Catholic Flemings. The attempts to assassinate Escobedo failed at the time; but when Don John had, of his own motion, quarrelled with the States and fortified himself in Namur, and the murder of his secretary was powerless to mend matters in any way, Escobedo was stabbed by Perez' creatures in the streets of Madrid (March 81,1578). It was a matter of little consequence ; and, although doubtless the King may have marvelled somewhat that the man should have been put out of the way at such a time, the affair would have blown over but for the persistent rumours in the capital-made the most of by Secretary Vasquez- connecting the name of Perez and that of Ruy Gomez' widow, the Princess of Eboli, with the crime. The Princess, a Mendoza, was a haughty virago, who had given the King great trouble already, and who now clamoured, as did Perez, for vengeance against Secretary Vasquez for his gossip concerning her. Philip endeavoured to hush up the matter, for Perez had become necessary to him ; but at last the scandal became too public, and both the Princess and the secretary were arrested and imprisoned. The Princess never regained her liberty ; but Perez, reduced to a somewhat humbler state of mind by his disgrace, after a time once more returned to his functions as minister. He remained in Madrid when the conquest of Portugal was undertaken ,• and his fate was sealed, when the presence of Alva and his war party was necessary in the capital. Alva attributed to Perez-doubtless with reason-his own long unmerited disgrace. He knew that Don John had died neglected and broken-hearted because Perez, fearing the Prince's warlike influence, had poisoned the King's mind against him. The patient investigation of jurists in Alva's interests proved not only this, but that the Princess of Eboli had a private grudge against Escobedo ; and that Perez killed the latter when he did-by virtue of the King's previous authority-not really for State reasons that had disappeared before the deed was done, but only to avenge the woman who was his paramour.

The knowledge of his betrayal by the man whom he had trusted turned Philip's heart to the bitterest hate of Perez. For years the ex-secretary lay in prison, while every wile and threat, even torture, was employed to wring a confession from him of his motive for the murder In vain he pleaded the King's authority. This was not what Philip wanted. Perez could not well be executed for a murder done by the King's command ; but, if he could be brought to confess that he did it to avenge the Princess' quarrel, he could be put to death for the divulging of State secrets to her. Philip dared not tell the world that he had purposely abandoned Don John because he had been persuaded by his false secretary that his brother was disloyal At length, by the self-sacrifice of his heroic wife, Perez escaped from prison and fled to Aragon,

where he was safe from arbitrary action. Orders were sent that he was to be captured dead or alive and brought back to Castile in spite of Aragonese liberties ; and Perez, learning this, claimed the Manifestation. When the message came that the prisoner must be delivered to Castile, all Aragon, priests and laymen, flew to arms to protect the right of their tribunals; and Philip found himself defied by his own subjects. Perez claimed a trial, and issued a masterly statement of his case, to which Philip dared not reply without telling more of his own secrets than he desired. Again and again he demanded of the Chief Justice the delivery or death of the fugitive ; and the refusal of the Aragonese cut him to the quick. As a last resource Perez was accused of heterodoxy, and orders came that he was to be handed to the Inquisition on that charge. The judicial authorities acceded to this, as they had no personal liking for Perez, who was obviously a traitor and a rogue. But the populace rose, besieged the palace of the Inquisition, which they threatened with fire, and in a great popular tumult rescued Perez from the Holy Office, lodging him again in the prison of the Manifestation. To avoid further conflict, Perez was then hastily smuggled out of prison and over the frontier into Beam. Henry IV was (May, 1591) in the midst of his war with the League and Philip. Perez knew, as no other man had ever known, the innermost springs of Philip's policy ; and he was received by the King of France with almost royal honours. In Paris, and in London as the friend and pensioner of Essex, Perez remained during the last years of Philip's life his bitterest foe. At the disposal of the Puritan war-party in England, ever ready with his brilliant pen and subtle brain to wound his old master, he did more than any other man to drag England into the contest between Henry IV and Spain. All Philip's attempts to murder him in France and England failed ; and, so long as the religious war lasted, it was a Spaniard who tipped with poison the keenest darts that pierced the armour of Spain.

But if Philip could not reach his enemy beyond the Pyrenees, his long-pent vengeance fell upon the Aragonese who had baulked him, and upon the institutions of which they were so proud. Anarchy had been the outcome of the popular ferment ; and, with the pretext of suppressing lawlessness, an army of 15,000 Castilians, led by Alonso de Vargas, one of the veterans of Alva's school, overran Aragon. In December, 1591, the Chief Justice was suddenly seized and beheaded ; and the net of the Inquisition was cast far and wide, sweeping into the dungeons all those, high or low, who were known to have favoured the defiance to the King. A small body of Béarnais troops crossed the pass of the Pyrenees; but the Aragonese themselves joined Philip's troops in expelling them. Out of the great number of persons condemned, only six were actually burnt alive in the great square of Saragossa ; but of the fourscore who were relieved of the death penalty by the King's

clemency nearly all suifered a terrible retribution for their support of the rights of Aragon. Even Philip dared not with a stroke of the pen or sword abolish the ancient charter of the realm ; but it was made plain to the Aragonese that, when in future their rights conflicted with the sovereign's will, they must submit, not he.

In the meantime the struggle in France went on. The country was utterly exhausted with the civil war; and even Catholics were saying that a Frenchman, though of doubtful Catholicism, might be a better ruler of his country than a Spanish nominee pledged to rigid intolerance. To have been defeated in his objects in France, as he had been in the case of England and Holland, would have been to Philip the crowning catastrophe of a long life of failure ; and a despairing effort had to be made. Farnese was again summoned from his fight with the Dutchmen, but came reluctantly. By a masterly march he raised the siege of Rouen in April, 1592 ; but he soon found that the Leaguers hated the Spaniards now as bitterly as the Huguenots, and that nearly all France was against him. Wounded and broken-hearted at the jealousy and distrust with which he was treated in France and Spain, Farnese with difficulty escaped suffering heavy loss. He died in Flanders in December, 1592, abandoned as Don John had been by the sovereign he had served too well. Philip saw now that, the utmost he could hope for in France was a compromise which should leave the kingdom officially Catholic. When the Estates met at the Louvre in January, 1593, Philip's ambassador Feria was instructed to revive the idea of the young Duke of Guise as King of France, with the Infanta as his wife. But Feria, who, like all Spaniards of his time, stiffly upheld the tradition of Spain's superiority, lost too much time in pressing the Infanta's own claims to the French Crown, claims really unacceptable now even by extreme Leaguers. When it was too late, and Henry IV outside the walls had made it understood that he was not obdurate about religion, Feria brought forward the Duke of Guise. If he had done this at first, compromise or a partition might have been possible ; but in July, 1593, Henry went to mass ; and, nine months after, he entered his capital as a Catholic King. The Spanish troops by agreement marched out of the city the day after Henry's entry, leaving little love or gratitude behind them.

Of Philip's design to make himself master of Ireland and thence menace Elizabeth's English throne some account will be given in the chapter dealing with the reign of his son, who prosecuted that design to its close. The war with the French and their English and Dutch allies in the north of France continued languidly for five years after the conversion of Henry IV, but with little or no expectation of an issue favourable to Spain. Nor were the social results of Philip's lifelong effort to rule Spain as if it had been a cloister more happy than his attempts to reduce the rest of the world to his own ritual. It is true that, by means of the ubiquitous Inquisition, with its army of informers,

a certain level of devout profession had become an element of the daily life and speech of the people. Priests, monks, and friars were everywhere ; and in every concern of existence they assumed a superiority and authority over laymen which caused matters of all sorts, political, social, and even commercial, to be regarded and dealt with on considerations other than those which usually govern mundane affairs. The narrow and professionally sanctimonious view taken by churchmen of purely secular business, and their predominance in every sphere of activity, had, by the time of Philip's declining years, blighted enterprise, discouraged research, and made Spaniards generally timid and slavish in their attitude toward ecclesiastical pretensions. Philip himself in his old age became perfectly servile towards any ignorant friar, and even boasted of his humility.

While the King, in constant ill-health and impotent from gout, divided his time between exhausting devotions and office-work, his people, to whom he had become a mysterious abstraction, and his Court, which had to a great extent lost its dread of him, grew daily more undisciplined and dissolute in their ordinary conduct. The women of Spain, who had always been kept in almost oriental seclusion, had within the last twenty years scandalised propriety by their freedom of demeanour and speech. The stern decrees, so often issued, forbidding luxury, splendour, and ostentation, were constantly evaded or circumvented; and the privileged classes still lavished money corruptly obtained. Yet the streets even of the capital were unutterably filthy and almost impassable on foot ; and vagrancy and pauperism, encouraged by the convent doles, were almost universal. Of all this the recluse King probably knew or recked little. He was rarely brought into contact with realities, and saw things through the medium of documents alone. As he grew older, too, his ecclesiastical ministers became more insolent, even to him. Rodrigo Vasquez, the secretary, with his ally Friar Chaves the confessor, having between them ruined Antonio Perez, determined to depose from the most influential post in Spain, the Presidency of the Council of Castile, Count de Barajas, who had been at one time friendly with the former secretary. Vasquez coveted the great post himself, obscure upstart though he was; but Barajas was a great magnate, and Philip hesitated to dismiss him without cause. Chaves thereupon wrote to the King, saying that he would give him no absolution until he did. " For such is the command of God. I am certain that your Majesty is in a more perilous condition than any Catholic Christian living"; and, in answer to this insolence, the King humbly submitted, and disgraced Barajas, as he had been ordered to do. Such a spectacle as this made even lay grandees regardless of the King's authority ; and his attempts, constant as they were, to meddle in their private affairs were often treated with contempt. Justice was scandalously corrupt ; and murders and robbery, even in Madrid itself, were committed with perfect im-

punity if favour or bribery was resorted to. Ignorance, especially of science, was absolute amongst Spaniards; for the Inquisition opposed the cultivation of research, and the education abroad of young Spaniards was strictly forbidden. The population, even of the principal manufacturing towns, had dwindled, and large districts of the country were entirely depopulated and lying waste ; and, although Spain possesses some of the finest wheat-growing land in the world, it was found necessary to raise the prohibition of imports and introduce large quantities of grain from abroad, to prevent even the reduced populations of entire provinces from perishing from famine. On the other hand, the Court centres and the ecclesiastical institutions were overcrowded with hordes of idle, unproductive persons ; the army and the Church monopolised the strongest men whom emigration had left. So the evil was a progressive one ; for, bad as was the state of affairs produced in the last few years of Philip's life by his policy, the evils were cumulative, and the lowest depth of misery was yet to come.

Before the death of Farnese the King had sent to Flanders Count de Fuentes, who since the death of Alva had been his most efficient officer in Portugal. After a short interregnum, in which the aged Count Mansfeld and Fuentes with the assistance of Secretary Ibarra ruled the Belgic provinces, and Maurice of Nassau gained considerable successes against the Spanish forces, Philip turned again to his Austrian kinsmen to discover a figurehead for his government. His Savoyard grandsons were yet too young to be of use to him; and he had no other relatives to aid him, since he could not spare his dear elder daughter, his constant companion in his documentary labours. One of the Austrian Archdukes, Cardinal Albert, was his regent in Portugal, and had acted creditably during the abortive English invasion of 1589. His brother, Archduke Ernest, was the one chosen to succeed the great Farnese in Flanders. Albert, superior to any of his brothers, partook nevertheless of his eldest brother Rudolf's objections to marriage, which, however, as he was a churchman, was perhaps to be expected ; and Ernest, the vice-sovereign designate of Flanders, was frivolous and self-indulgent, and already, though a young man, in constant ill-health.

Instead of proceeding at once to his government Ernest spent some months in feasting and celebrations on the way, while Maurice of Nassau with his fine army was threatening Brabant. Ernest finally arrived at Brussels in January, 1594, to find the Italian regiments, unpaid as usual, in full revolt. The Archduke, expelled by these regiments from his capital, was forced to stand idly by, until his uncle could send him money from Spain to buy the reconciliation of the Italian ruffians, who had established a government of their own and were robbing and sacking without restraint. No sooner had the Archduke conciliated the mutineers than he succumbed to disease (February 20, 1595) ; and Mondragon, a fine old Spanish soldier of the school of the Emperor and Alva, stepped

into the breach in spite of his ninety-three years, and turned the Italian and Spanish infantry from a horde of brigands to an army of fighting men, such as their fathers had been in the old days under the same Mondragon, Julian Romero, Sancho de Avila, Verdugo, Frederick de Toledo, and the great Duke of Parma himself. During ,the year that Mondragon still lived, Maurice of Nassau and his splendid army were impotent for harm ; but when the last of the Emperor's men had disappeared, the link that bound the Netherlands to Spain as a possession seemed strained almost to breaking.

The defeat of the Armada, though a most terrible blow to Spanish policy, had been succeeded so closely by the even, more immediate trouble of the course of events in France, that Philip had been obliged to postpone any idea of a direct attack upon England. But the English Jesuit and extreme Catholic party were loth to abandon all hope of restoring the Faith in their native land by Spanish assistance. The more moderate Catholics were, especially since the Armada, desirous of any reasonable arrangement which should provide them, at least, with toleration under a native or even a Scottish sovereign, rather than that the now detested Spaniard should hold sway in the country that had worsted him in fair fight. After the commencement of the war in France it was impossible any longer to doubt that Philip's aims were not, as he had always so loudly proclaimed, disinterestedly religious. His open intention of placing the Infanta on the throne of England by force if the Armada were successful, and his subsequent claim on her behalf to the Crown of France, had opened the eyes of the most infatuated Catholics to the fact that, notwithstanding Philip's real devotion, religion was with him only a means for the establishment of his political supremacy in Europe ; which, in its turn, would ensure the perpetuation of the particular form of Catholicism which he championed. But the English refugees and Jesuits, though they knew this, were content to accept even a Spanish domination of their country in exchange for the establishment of their doctrines as the only faith : and after the Armada, as before it, they were ceaseless in their petitions that the King should still work by any roads, straight or devious, to root out the heretic government of Elizabeth.

The lessons of the Armada had not been entirely lost upon Philip. The period of comparative tranquillity at sea after the abortive English attempt upon Portugal in 1589 had enabled him in two or three years to collect a smaller navy of more mobile type than he had previously possessed. The fast-sailing galley-zabras, built in Havana as armed treasure-ships, were found to be eminently quick and seaworthy, and were largely adopted. In Spanish and Portuguese dockyards English plans were used in the construction of ships and guns ; and even English designers and builders were employed; so that, by the end of 1592, the navy of Spain was once more a force to be reckoned with. The news of these

preparations, duly exaggerated by spies, was a frequent source of alarm, even of panic, to Elizabeth and her people during the progress of the war in France, and especially after the seizure of Blavet in Britanny by Spain, avowedly as a base of attack against England. The English seamen were invariably in favour of crippling Spain's naval power before it could do much harm : but the cautious counsels of Elizabeth and Cecil until 1593 obliged the English mariners to content themselves with harrying the Spanish treasure-fleets in the Atlantic.

At length the Spanish naval armaments were too formidable to be ignored ; and in the English Parliament of 1593 a rousing appeal to patriotism was made in the Queen's Speech that funds should be provided to withstand the anticipated invasion. Balegh and the sailors, as usual, were for attacking the Spanish base in Britanny first of all ; and then to watch off the Spanish coast to intercept any invading fleet that might sail. As a matter of fact, there was at that time no intention or possibility of a Spanish invasion in force of England ; and Spain was much more alarmed and with better reason than Elizabeth or her ministers. Nothing was done on either side until the sending of large Spanish reinforcements to Britanny in the winter of 1593 ; and in the spring of 1594 the Spanish position at Brest was captured by the English. The favourite scheme now, indeed, both with the Spaniards for a time and with some of the English refugees, was to invade England from Scotland, in conjunction with a rising of the Scottish Catholics, many of whom at this period were ready to throw over their own King and accept a Spanish supremacy over all Britain. This phase, however, thanks mainly to the clever tergiversation of King James and the diplomacy of the Vatican, passed away. By far the most dangerous plan was that which developed through the intervention of the Munster Catholic refugees in Portugal, by means of whom Hugh O'Donnell, the chief of Tyrconnel, and at a later period his kinsman O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone, enlisted the Spanish power in their attempt to throw off the English supremacy of Ireland.

The preparation of a small force in Spain to send to the aid of the Irish chiefs was magnified in England by Essex and the Puritan party, aided by Antonio Perez : and after much hesitation Elizabeth allowed a fleet to be sent to strike a decisive blow at the Spanish navy before it could sail to injure her dominions. With infinite trouble and unwillingness a force of English ships, royal and chartered, was got together, and reinforced by a Dutch contingent. The whole expedition sailed at the beginning of June, 1596, to strike a death-blow to all that was formidable of Philip's navy, then concentrated under the surf-beaten walls of Cadiz harbour. Philip lay ill in the centre of Spain ; his blighting system had destroyed all efficiency and initiative in his local administration; and the supreme authority on the Andalusian coast was the feeble Medina Sidonia, who had led the Armada to foredoomed disaster. The secret

of the destination of the English force had been well kept ; and, when on June 20, 1596, Cadiz was surprised by the arrival of the invaders in the Bay, the place was practically defenceless. In the circumstances the result was inevitable disaster, as is related fully in another chapter ; and Cadiz was given up to systematic pillage and devastation.

Philip was almost moribund when the news of the disaster reached him, but in the despair that surrounded him he alone never lost faith. He had done his best, working all his life like a very slave, doing detail work which should have been delegated to others, centralising in his remote cell the springs of his vast empire. His own faith was immovable. He could not understand that the lessons of his youth, the maxims of his saints and sages, as well as the firm conviction of his heart, could be all wrong. It seemed impossible to him that his prayers, his fastings and self-denial, through a long life of voluntary suffering, could be quite fruitless. That this could be so was unintelligible to him, because his system was raised upon the unstable base of an assumption that he and his were in some sort partners with the higher powers for the final exaltation of the linked causes of God and Spain. But he was growing weary ; he had aged beyond his years ; and suffering had weakened him in body and mind. As in the case of his father, the taint of neurotic dementia in the blood of Castile had brought with it the morbid spiritual introspection, the yearning for relief from the things of the world, that had led the great Emperor to a cloister, and now made Philip long for his rest.

The war with Henry IV still lingered. The Béarnais was really King of France now ; even the League had made terms with him, and in January, 1595, he had felt strong enough to abandon the fiction of irregular hostilities and had declared a national war against Spain. For two years Spanish armies under Fuentes and Frias held with varying fortunes strong places in the north of France ; and, when by a stratagem Amiens fell into Spanish hands, it looked for a time as if the League might abandon Henry and rally to its early friend. At this juncture, when the balance of Europe seemed trembling, Archduke Albert marched with a strong force from Flanders to relieve the Spaniards besieged in Amiens. He failed, however, to raise the siege, was forced to retreat, and Amiens fell. It was Spain's last effort; her strength was exhausted. England could destroy her fleets, and Nassau could not only hold Holland, but take the offensive against the cities of Catholic Brabant; and, far from being able to force unity of faith upon Christendom, the only outcome of Philip's life-struggle had barely been to keep France from officially becoming Protestant.

Meanwhile, the poverty of Spain had progressively increased : the loss of treasure taken from her at sea, and more especially at Cadiz, had been a terrible blow ; and, whatever might be the result, it was impossible for the country to continue any longer the war against

France. Henry IV, on the other hand, was not less desirous of peace than Philip. France had suffered from many years of devastating war and was also exhausted : and the patriotic King saw that the first step to the consolidation of his position was to reconcile all classes of his subjects. The commissioners of the two sovereigns met at Vervins early in 1598; and Philip's main difficulty was not so much in being forced to surrender his base in Britanny (Blavet) and Calais, which his forces had seized by a clever coup de main, or even in having to abandon the Leaguers who still remained in arms against their King. All these would, it is true, be bitter humiliations, but as nothing in comparison with the conditions upon which the Dutch and English allies of France insisted before they would consent to Henry's making peace: namely, the surrender by Spain of the sovereignty over all Flanders and the Netherlands. Elizabeth had been fencing with Henry IV for some time as to the terms of a possible peace ; for his change of faith had destroyed her trust in him. But, when it became evident that as a last resource he was prepared to throw her and the Dutch over altogether and make a separate peace for himself, Burghley, almost on his death-bed, laid down as England's irreducible minimum demand that the United Provinces should be for ever secured against a Spanish attempt to subdue them. The Dutchmen themselves were equally emphatic in their demand that this should be guaranteed by the separation of the Belgic Provinces from the Crown of Spain. Essex, as usual, struggled against any compromise with Spain. The Puritan party was strong in England ; and, although Elizabeth's government acquiesced with a bad grace in the peace concluded between Henry IV and Archduke Albert (March, 1598), the state of war between England and Spain itself still nominally continued.

It was an impotent conclusion of the longest continuous war with a foreign Power in which Philip ever engaged ; but the result, tame as it was, relieved the life of the King from utter failure ; and maintained the tradition of Spain's greatness for yet another generation or thereabouts. The terrible sacrifices which had made Castile desolate, had at least secured that France would not on religious grounds join the Protestant coalition, and by adding strength to this entail a corresponding loss of prestige and power on the country which, to its own infinite misfortune, had been at once the champion and the scapegoat of an impracticable religious uniformity.

The demand of a renunciation by Spain of the sovereignty over the Belgic Provinces had been characteristically met by Philip's representatives with a suggestion that this sovereignty should pass to the King's daughter, the Infanta Isabel Clara Eugenia ; but as this was, of itself, unacceptable, a proposal was added to it that the sovereignty should be exercised jointly by the Austrian Archduke Albert and his cousin, the Infanta, whom he,should marry ; and that, in the event of no issue being born of the marriage, the Provinces should be reincorporated with the

Crown of Spain. The Infanta was probably now the only person on earth for whom Philip felt any real affection. She had been his chief companion and solace for many years ; and already the austere etiquette of the sombre Court and the strict devotion surrounding her had, in the thirty-two years of her life, withered the striking beauty which she had inherited from her French mother. Philip had failed to make her Queen of England and Queen of France; even the Duchy of Britanny, which was fairly hers, had now to be abandoned for the sake of peace. To allow of her becoming sovereign of the last foothold left to her father's House of the Burgundian heritage, a condition had to be accepted which, though for some reasons it must have been repugnant to her father's mind, must nevertheless have pleased his intriguing spirit with the almost certain knowledge that he was cheating his enemies after all. The Archduke, who was in his fortieth year, was not only a Cardinal and an Archbishop (of Toledo), and, as such, wedded only to the Church, but Philip knew that any more mundane marriage would probably, so far as Albert was concerned, remain fruitless.

The condition introduced at the instance of Spain into the Treaty of Vervins, by which Flanders would revert to the Spanish Crown in case the Archduke and the Infanta left no children, was therefore one that practically ensured the reversion to Philip's Spanish heirs within a generation. What the Infanta thought of the arrangement is not on record ; but she was a dutiful daughter, and, for the sake of the new sovereignty, accepted it without demur. The Archduke, on the other hand, was less assured. His episcopal preferment of Toledo was the richest in Christendom : he was already practically sovereign of Flanders ; and the ecclesiastical dignity gave him many advantages, all of which he would have to renounce if he contracted a marriage which he did not desire. But Philip usually had his way with his kinsmen ; and Albert reluctantly gave up his Cardinal's hat and mitre, and went home to Austria, to escort his young cousin Margaret to Spain to marry Philip's heir, while he himself wedded the Infanta and assumed the joint sovereignty of Flanders.

This was in the summer of 1598 ; and the man at whose bidding all these puppets danced, lay in his grim palace of granite on the Guadar-ramas, wearing out the last weeks of his life in a martyrdom of pain. From June to September he remained at the Escorial for fifty-three days dying, in circumstances so repulsive, in agony so horrible, as to move any heart to pity. Yet he bore all his humiliation and anguish without a plaint. His only words were those of resignation and assurance of Divine forgiveness. Night and day in the bare room where he lay, overhanging the high altar of the Cathedral, the propitiatory offices of the Church went on ; and through the dreary, hopeless hours, the eyes of the King were fixed in ecstasy on the saintly relics and emblems of the Divine passion that never left his sight. The papal blessing, plenary absolution, and extreme unction-all that the Church could do for poor

humanity at the last hour-came to Philip as he lingered week after week, in unspeakable bodily torment.

When the end seemed approaching he took his last farewell of his heir. "I should have wished," he said, "to save you this trial; but I want you to see how the monarchies of this earth end. Behold ! God has stripped me of all the glory and majesty of sovereignty that they may pass to you. In a few hours I shall be covered only with a poor shroud, and girded with a coarse rope. The kingly crown is already falling from my brows, and death will soon set it upon yours. Two things I especially commend to you : one is that you always keep faithful to the Holy Catholic Church, and the other is that you treat your subjects justly. The crown will one day fall from your head, as it now falls from mine. You are young, as I too have been. My day draws to a close ; the tale of yours God alone can see ; but it must end like mine." This was Philip's farewell to the world, for he concerned himself no more with things mundane. The future of his son alone gave him occasional apprehension. Philip, the heir, was only twenty years of age. He had been brought up even more rigidly than his father, and had seen nothing of the world but through the eyes of monks and priests. He was kindly and well-meaning ; but the piles of official papers, the endless procrastination and discussion, which formed part of his father's system, had confused his dull wits, and alarmed his pleasure-loving nature ; and already the King had foreseen with distress the danger that his son's indolence would lead to his becoming a tool of favourites. Philip's last legacy to his son was a carefully made copy of the exhortations of St Louis to his heir ; and, when he took a last farewell of young Philip and his half-sister, the Infanta, the only words he could murmur through his weakness, were one more prayer to them to keep inviolate the Catholic faith in the dominions under their sway.

So, patient to the end, in serene confidence and unshaken faith that his life had been well spent in God's service, Philip II passed from the world in the early dawn of September 13, 1598, while through the chamber rang the chant of morning mass in the Cathedral far below. Grasping in one hand the rough-hewn crucifix which he loved best, and in the other a sacred taper, Philip of Spain died as he had lived, in the firm conviction which no disappointment or misfortune could daunt that he and his were set apart from the rest of mortals to lead the host of the righteous in the fight against the powers of evil. The results of his policy had been to ruin his country in material resources, as it had enfeebled the faith that alone had made his people potent. He had terrorised his realm into a monkish theocracy, and in doing so had turned the majority of his subjects into ribald scoffers at the reality, while they were slaves to the symbols, of sacred things. Yet his people revered him as a saint, and still cherish his memory as a great King, not for what he did, but for what he dreamed.