sovereigns. And this applied not only to the foreign dominions of their Catholic Majesties, but also, although in a lesser degree, to their Spanish States, which countries, with the exception of their religious dogma, disagreed in almost every other respect. Castille, Aragon, Navarre, dealt with each other commercially, as if they were ruled by different sovereigns. The Basque provinces, while burdening with onerous duties the merchandises imported or exported to the Castilles, imported and exported duty-free, foreign and national products and manufactures.

A jealous investigator of the customs and morals of the clergy in general, a diligent prier into the conduct and individual qualities of every ecclesiastic, Philip knew the instruction, capacity, and morality of all those able to pretend to prebends and dignities. And for this reason, and by his system of giving precedence in those elections to merit over birth, during his reign very virtuous and learned men obtained mitres and prelacies. With such policy, assisted by his prodigious memory, when persons were proposed for the bishoprics, and other ecclesiastical dignities, he used to object to them, either on the ground of recent slips, with which he was perfectly acquainted, or old frailties of their youth, that all but he had already forgotten. He remembered everything at the moment, and his memory appears more extraordinary if we take into consideration that the clergy were most numerous, and their morals in general not very pure and edifying.

He exercised not only with the clergy this sort of royal inquisitorial policy, he extended it to all classes and offices of the State, and had his spies in his own palace, as well as in foreign courts. This explains, to a certain point, the enormous amount of information Philip ac

quired, concerning the public and individual intrigues, and ambitions of foreign and national courtiers, favourites, ministers, pretenders, statesmen and diplomatists. This explains, likewise, to a certain point, how so exceedingly cautious a monarch should have written down in his own handwriting, in the minutes and offices to his ministers, views, designs, advices, hints, injunctions, which convey so mean and repulsive an idea of his character, and which at the time, no doubt, he thought would remain for ever unfathomed arcana, but which in aftertimes became known.

The geographical and historic description, together with the statistics of the wealth and population, which he ordered to be made of all the countries of Spain and the Indies, is a good proof of his organizing administrative genius, although nothing of any value was done. The principal responsibility for which rests on his inept and indolent successors, who disregarded his plans or recommendations on the subject. Moved by this same spirit of order and regularity, he ordered to be kept and arranged in the fortress of Simancas, all the old writings which were disseminated throughout different places of Castille, and which became the beginning and foundation of those wealthy national archives which are there now preserved, and have been copiously increased since that time. The idea which originated with Cisneros, was accepted and patronized by Charles the Fifth, and realized by his son.

Philip was an indefatigable worker. Were it possible to put together all that he wrote with his own hand in letters, warrants, schedules, instructions, decrees, minutes, remarks, monitions, additions, suppressions, corrections, marginal and interlineal notes, &c. &c., volumes could be filled. The communications of his teachers inform us of his improve

ments in the study of languages, and the authors of Latin poems used to consult him, and listened with respect to his opinion. He esteemed learned men, and was in correspondence with the lettered men of the time. Of his fondness for books he gave testimony by his commissions to Antonio de Gracian to buy the works of el Abulense (el Tostado), to Arias Montanus for the acquisition of Hebrew MSS. at Rome, and to other learned men; and, above all, by the library which he began to form in the Escorial. According to Prescott, "Philip had given a degree of attention to the study of the fine arts seldom found in persons of his condition. He was a connoisseur in painting, and, above all, in architecture, making a careful study of its principles, and occasionally furnishing designs with his own hand. No prince of his time left behind him so many proofs of his taste and magnificence in building."

His internal policy was admirably adapted to his suspicious, artful, and dissembling nature. Purposely allowing his counsellors a certain freedom to speak out their opinions, in order to know them better; encouraging with calculating affability those who transacted business with him; listening without any sign of displeasure to the remonstrances addressed, with face rarely either cheerful or angry, almost always serene, and never out of temper, as a person who is always on his guard; more courtier-like than his courtiers, as he was more minister-like than his ministers, it was difficult for his counsellors to know with certainty when they had succeeded in acquiring the favour or the disfavour of their king; their sentence of banishment, imprisonment, or death, came suddenly when they were least prepared for it. His system was to foment or maintain alive rivalry among them in order

better to dominate them. Thus did he behave with the Duke of Alva, Cardinals Espinosa and Quiroga, Don Juan de Austria, Ruy Gomez, Marquis de los Velez, and secretaries Santoyo, Vazquez and Perez. Very rarely did he elevate his imagination to the level of his power and the magnitude of his ambition. Very rarely did he display that energetic activity which demands a great conception, and assures success. Many enterprises miscarried through the slowness of the detailed instructions on incidents of little moment. He was as slow in coming to a resolution, as his father was quick to act. In the time required by Philip to answer or consider the advice of his council, Charles the Fifth conquered a kingdom.

Unlike his father, who wanted to be everywhere at the same time, Philip preferred the loss of a kingdom to incurring the trouble of a long voyage.

Charles the Fifth principally esteemed military teemed military gentlemen; his son, on the contrary, much indebted as he was to them, never showed the least sympathy towards them. Philip possessed the talent of obscuring, to a certain point, the statesmen whose advice he most frequently followed or consulted: they have remained up to the present comparatively obscure; he knew how to appropriate their opinions, and produce or recommend them as his own conceptions. Perhaps this was the calculated result of the mysterious secrecy with which he surrounded all his affairs. He wanted to become the ubiquitous autocrat of his subjects, making them feel as far as possible, without declaring it verbally, as the French despot of the following century did, that he only was the Government, and all the Government. His policy was to obscure and humble every one around him, standing

up before the world in the more exalted, imposing and unrivalled majesty.

Very seldom do we find in his heart a tender feeling. That gloomy reservedness, that cold indifference, that unalterable serenity of face; without a smile in prosperous times, without anger under misfortune, which neither the spectacle of punishment altered, nor the prayers of the unfortunate moved, nor the moans of the victims changed, revealed a heart inaccessible to human pity and compassion. The secrecy with which he premeditated the general punishment and persecution of a whole country and race; the perseverance with which he prosecuted for years with the most profound dissemblance, and through the most tenebrous means, his schemes of national and personal revenge, and the insensible hardness with which he passed a fatal sentence against a stranger, a confidant, a brother, a son-discovered a soul with which we should not like to see any man endowed. As imperturbably would he listen to the news of the victory of Lepanto, as to the news of the defeat of the "Invincible."

Philip was more inclined to destroy and render useless, slowly, and by degrees, the very things which he feigned to respect, than to level at them violent and decisive blows. During his reign the Cortes met more than twelve times, and, in some of the periods, remained assembled for many years. He began by not complying with some of their petitions, answering others with those ambiguous words, so natural to his character, promising to consider them and decide afterwards what he should think convenient. Successively his concessions decreased. Afterwards the propositions which received from him a favourable answer became very rare. Then he determined to let years

elapse before answering them; and many times the new Cortes met without having received any answer to the recommendation of the former Cortes. After this he adopted the system of fatiguing them by keeping them assembled for long periods, although the members complained of the damage and detriment which that caused. From this he passed on to issue ordinances and laws of his own authority, without taking the advice. of the Cortes, even when they were sitting. When he saw that the representatives of the nation begged of him most submissively that, at least, he would have the consideration or courtesy to consult their opinion, he could congratulate himself on having reduced them to a perfect state of harmlessness, impotency, and nullity, without noise or violence, having converted them, so to say, by extenuation, to a sort of caricature of national representatives.

In spite of the exertions of Charles and Philip to corrupt the integrity, purity, and independence of the procuradores, they always denounced with courage the extralimitations of the royal authority, and constantly repeated to the king that he was transgressing all laws, when imposing and gathering taxes by his own power, without the assent and authorization of the assembled representatives of the nation. Philip excused himself, arguing the necessity of defending the Catholic faith.

Contemplating the best and surest manner of putting an untimely end to the Aragonese liberties, as unwillingly supported by him as those of Castille, he took advantage of the riots and revolt of the citizens of Saragossa, caused by the wellknown process against Antonio Perez. He did not let slip the opportunity, and acting ab irato first against the men, and then

against the institutions, he began by sending to the scaffold the Justicia Mayor and the leader of the revolted people, and afterwards put an end to the Aragonese fueros. Always hypocritical, the royal army was already entering Saragossa, and yet the king affirmed and asserted that he sent his soldiers there to restore the free enjoyment and working of the fueros. The son terminated at the Cortes of Tarazona what the father began at the Cortes of Coruña. All the information and proceedings against the most respectable of all magistrates, el Justicia Mayor de Aragon, were these words, Prendereis á Don Juan de Lanuza, y hareis luego cor tar la cabeza." "Take hold of Don Juan de Lanuza, and order his head to be lopped off without delay."

Philip was the first to establish definitively, in a fixed point of the Peninsula, his court and the residence of the Supreme Government, renouncing, so to speak, the wandering life of his ancestors. His resolution met with many disadvantages, and was, no doubt, during his reign and those of his descendants, one of the causes of the wars and insurrections in some of the provinces under his sway on both sides of the Pyrenees. Most likely to the Catalan and Aragonese people, his having rendered an insignificant town of New Castille the capital and official head-quarters of the vast political and administrative machinery, proved as distasteful as it would have been to the Low Countries and the Italian kingdoms.

For this reason they began to watch more jealously what was going on in the councils of the king of Castile, and to examine and protect more carefully, and give more importance than before, to the fueros and special laws which prevailed among them. Up to the

time of the Austrian dynasty those fueros had been instrumental in preserving and extending the liberties of the subject against the encroachments of their own native princes; henceforth they must also secure them against foreign domination, for foreign they reputed, if not exactly the king, at least his royal secretaries and counsellors, and all the Castilian gentlemen in general. Then, not only did all these fueros or privileges begin to be exaggerated in every sense, and ostentatious works were published, the design of which was manifest to the most short-sighted, but no one took the trouble to impugn them in the respective places where they became popular, because the old royalist or loyalist party in those countries dwindled to comparative insignificance with the absence of the monarch. Those, or the descendants of those, who in former centuries had maintained the prerogatives of the crown against the excessive pretensions of nobles and commons, for the most part made common cause with the champions of the old fueros, who were considered by the majority of their countrymen as the defenders of the national independence and traditional customs against the hated preponderance of the Castilian lieges and their king in the local affairs of the commonalty. To put some order and rule into elements so contrary, and make them move regularly, without collisions and hitches of any kind, it was necessary to create a strong and lasting government, which should manage to conciliate, as far as possible, the peculiar organization of every kingdom with the general interests of the monarchy. How to attract to a common centre the principles of life and action, which agitated the Peninsula in opposite directions, was the problem which had occupied the attention of Ferdinand the

Catholic, Cisneros, and Charles the Fifth, before the reign of Philip the Second. All of them acted on the principle that to succeed in their attempts it was indispensable to increase in every direction the royal power, rendering it stronger than it had ever been before in those countries. In this they appear to have been in accordance with the ideas prevailing throughout Europe. All the kings of the time attempted to organize, more or less sucessfully, the monarchical system according to the same plan. None of them appears to have been over scrupulous about the means employed. By the establishment of the Inquisition, the permanent militia, the almost general creation of corregidores, the expulsion of the nobility of the Castilian Cortes, the annexions to the Crown of the grand masterships of the powerful and troublesome military orders of Alcantara, Calatrava, and St. James, and other less noticeable changes, the predecessors of Philip had paved the way to the final realization of his ambitious and despotic schemes. The lawyers, most influential in the council of the Crown since the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, favoured also the royal preferences or tendencies in that direction. study of the Roman law, then very general, their own personal interests or ambitions as a class, and the disturbances and dissensions of the feudal era, then of recent date, induced them to increase the prerogatives of the head of the State.

The

Convinced of the serious drawbacks of the former regime, and of the necessity for creating another better adapted to the new order of things, the Catholic kings began this work after the union of the crowns of Castile and Aragon. Charles the Fifth and his son completed this organization, giving it

fixity, solidity, and stability. The Councils (Consejos) of the dffierent kingdoms established at the court, became the principal wheels of the governmental machinery; they were generally composed of persons well acquainted with the peculiar laws and customs of those kingdoms, either because they were born there, a condition very commonly required, or through having filled there important places. At the head of each Council was the King, in his capacity of ruler of the particular country with the interests of which the Council was charged. The affairs were administered in conformity with the fueros of those countries, and the execution of their resolutions devolved on the ordinary functionaries. In the councils of Castile, Aragon, Portugal, Flanders, Italy and the Indies, the affairs were attentively examined, and their resolutions made known to the Sovereign in the form of consulta or advice. A large number of Secretaries, among whom was divided the expediting of the affairs, but without any more authority than that which their name indicated, communicated to the prince these consultas. Sometimes, nevertheless, the king, assisted by his secretaries, decided what was to be done without the intervention of the Councils, sending his resolutions directly to the viceroys and other highest representatives of the monarch within the different countries under his sway; this happened seldom at the beginning, but it became very common in aftertimes, although it always appears to have been blamed and viewed with displeasure.

The general interests of the monarchy demanded cares common to all the parts which composed it. They originated another sort of Councils very different in their functions and aims. They were not charged with the government of any