all. It did not change his nature-because his mind. was fastened on the theological aspect of it. He was cruel, sensual, covetous, unscrupulous. In his hunger for gold he had exterminated whole races and nations in the New World. But his avarice was like the avarice of the spendthrift. Of the careful concentration of his faculties in the pursuit of wealth by industrious methods, he was incapable. The daily occupation of the Fleming was with his ledger or his factory-the Spaniard passed from the mass and the confessional to the hunting-field, the tilt-yard, or the field of battle. The most important of the national characteristics were combined in the person of Philip II. The energy, the high-mettled spirit, the humour, the romance, the dash and power of the Spanish character had no place in him. He was slow, hesitating, and in common matters uncertain. If not deficient in personal courage, he was without military taste or military ambition. But he had few vices. During his marriage with Mary Tudor, he indulged, it is said, in some forbidden pleasures; but he had no natural tendencies to excess, and if he did not forsake his faults in this way, he was forsaken by them. He was moderate in his habits, careful, businesslike, and usually kind and conciliatory. He could under no circumstances have been a great man; but with other opportunities he might have passed muster among sovereigns as considerably better than the average of them: he might have received credit for many negative virtues, and a conscientious application to the common duties of his office. He was one of those limited but not ill-meaning men, to whom religion furnishes usually a healthy principle of action, and who are ready and eager to submit to its authority. In the unfortunate conjuncture at which he was set to reign, what ought to have guided him into good became the source of those actions which have made his name infamous. With no broad intelligence to test or correct his superstitions, he gave prominence, like the rest of his countrymen, to those particular features of his creed which could be of smallest practical value to him. He saw in his position and in his convictions a call from Providence to restore through Europe the shaking fabric of the Church, and he lived to show that the most cruel curse which can afflict the world is the tyranny of ignorant conscientiousness, and that there is no crime too dark for a devotee to perpetrate under the seeming sanction of his creed. Charles V., in whom Burgundian, German, and Spanish blood were mixed in equal proportions, was as much broader in his sympathies than Philip as he was superior to him in intellect. He too had hated heresy, but as Emperor of Germany he had been forced to bear with it. His edict for the suppression of the new opinions in the Netherlands was as cruel as the most impassioned zealot could desire, and at times and places the persecution had been as sanguinary as in Spain: but it was limited everywhere by the unwillingness of the local magistrates to support the bishops; in some of the States it was never enforced at all, and everywhere the Emperor's difficulties with France soon com pelled him to let it drop. The war outlived him. The peace of Cambray found Philip on the throne, ready to take advantage of the leisure which at last had arrived. Charles, in his dying instructions, commended to his son those duties which he had himself neglected. He directed him to put away the accursed thing, to rebuild the House of the Lord, which, like another David, he was himself unfit to raise. Philip received the message as a divine command. When the Emperor died he was at Brussels. He had ten thousand Spanish troops with him, a ready-made instrument for the work. He set himself at once to establish more bishops in the Provinces, with larger inquisitorial powers. It was not to be the fault of the sovereign if the bill of spiritual health was not as clean in his northern dominions as in Arragon and Castile. But each year of delay had made the problem more difficult of solution. Protestantism, while it left the higher classes untouched, had spread like a contagion among the commons. The congregations of artisans in every great town and seaport numbered their tens of thousands. The members of them were the very flower of the provincial industry; and the edicts contemplated their extermination by military force, acting as the uncontrolled instrument of improvised illegal tribunals. The ordinary local courts were to be superseded by mere martial law; and the Netherland nobles did not choose to surrender themselves bound hand and foot to Spanish despotism. Their constitutional rights once suspended for their spiritual purgation, might be lost for ever; and without professing any sympathy with heresy, with the most eager declaration that they desired as ardently as Philip the re-establishment of orthodoxy, they refused to allow the location of foreign garrisons among them. They claimed their right to deal with their own people by their own laws; and Philip, after a burst of passion, had been compelled to yield. The Spanish troops were sent home, and the King, leaving his sister, the Duchess of Parma, to do her best without them, returned to Madrid, to bide his time. Seven years passed before an opportunity arrived to reopen the question. The Regent Margaret, assisted by her faithful minister, the Bishop of Arras, laboured assiduously to do her brother's pleasure. Notwithstanding the opposition, she found instruments more or less willing to enforce the edicts-some sharing Philip's bigotry, some anxious to find favour in his eyes. Men capable of great and prolonged efforts of resistance are usually slow to commence struggles of which they, better than any one, foresee the probable consequences. Year after year some hundreds of poor men were racked, and hanged, and burnt, but no blessing followed, and the evil did not abate. The moderate Catholics, whose humanity had not been extinguished by their creed, became Lutherans in their recoil from cruelties which they were unable to prevent; and Lutheranism, face to face with its ferocious. enemy, developed quickly into Calvinism. The hunted workmen either passed into France to their Huguenot brothers, or took service with the privateers, or migrated by thousands into England with their families, carrying with them their arts and industries. Factories were closed, trade was paralyzed, or was transferred from the Scheldt to the Thames. The spirit of disaffection went deeper and deeper into the people, and the hard-headed and indifferent man of business was converted by his losses into a patriot. To the petitions for the moderation of the edicts the Duchess of Parma could answer only that she had no power, or that she must consult her brother; and the noblemen, who had first interposed to prevent the continuance of the Spaniards among them, began to consult what further steps might be possible. Foremost among these were the Stadtholders of the different provinces, William of Nassau Prince of Orange, Count Egmont the hero of Gravelines and St Quentin, Montigny, Horn, and the Marquis Berghen. The Prince of Orange was still under thirty and capable of new impressions, his friends were middle-aged men, unlikely to change their creed, but unwilling to sit by and see their fellow-countrymen murdered. thing they were able to effect for a time, by impeding the action of their own courts; but local remedies were partial and difficult to carry out. The vague powers of the bishops superseded the laws of the States, and the laws themselves had been formed in Catholic times when heresy was universally regarded as a serious offence: the Stadtholders could not alter them without open revolt against the Sovereign, which as yet they had not contemplated. They could but solicit Philip therefore to moderate the violence of the administration, and suspend the edicts till milder measures had been tried. Some |