all, 42,396,348 reals, or about 400,000l. The discovery of America, and the intercourse between the several portions of the monarchy, had given a rapid impulsion to the commercial activity of Spain; her mercantile marine reckoned, towards the close of the fifteenth century, nearly 1000 vessels. Still greater was the progress and the opulence of the Flemish provinces, then said to contain 350 walled towns, and more than 6000 small towns or burghs. Antwerp boasted of 100,000 inhabitants; and even the Venetian ambassador, in spite of his national predilections, did not scruple to compare that city to the Queen of the Adriatic. Such was the activity of the manufacturing population in these towns of Flanders, that, according to Guicciardini, children of five or six years old were profitably employed; and in the rural districts, amidst fields tilled and watered as carefully as the plain of Grenada, the intellectual culture of the people was so diffused, that, if we may believe the same authority, it was rare to meet a peasant who could not read and write. Thus, in the Spanish empire, the arts of war and the arts of peace flourished with equal splendour; and the same sovereign had at his disposal the gold of Mexico and Peru, the infantry of Spain, the industry of Flanders, the science, the taste, and the statecraft of Italy.

These resources lay at his disposal, in Spain at least, without contention and without control. Ferdinand and Isabella, in the first instance, after them Charles V.,- had vanquished the adversaries, and crushed the obstacles, which had formerly limited the authority of the Crown. No divisions existed between the kingdoms of Spain. No unbelievers shared the territory with the Christian people. With the exception of Portugal, marriage and conquest had reduced the Peninsula to a single state. Unity had triumphed in the government as well as in the territory. The Mendozas, the Guzmans, the Ponces de Leon,those haughty nobles who could arm, one against the other, a thousand pikemen, ten thousand men-at-arms, and who burned in Seville fifteen hundred houses of their foes, had been subdued by the Crown, and were now arrayed about it for its honour and its service. The Commons of Castille, and that heroic pair who had marched at their head-Don Juan de Padilla and Doña Maria Pacheco, his wife, - had failed, in 1522, in their struggle for liberty. Neither the feudal nobility nor the municipal bodies of Spain had accurately measured their pretensions by their strength; both these orders had been wanting in political intelligence and in the spirit of organisation and of accommodation which can alone insure that success which is not won without difficulty by the best of causes. Neither by

aristocrats nor by democrats, neither by a nobility nor by a people, can the wants of an age, the essential conditions of social order, and the gradation of the respective ranks of society be overlooked with impunity. A just sympathy hangs over the memory of these generous defenders of ancient rights and of public liberty in Spain; but their defeat was natural; and if they had for a moment conquered Ferdinand or Charles V., they must soon have lost a power which they had not the wisdom or the strength to exercise.

Philip II., then, succeeded at once to a vast monarchy and to a victorious and unlimited monarchical power. And no man was more fitted by nature to enjoy without diminution this double inheritance. Able, laborious, persevering, firm, sagacious, skilful in the use of men, and skilful in dispensing with those who had served him best, he had not that ardent impetuosity, that intemperance of ambition and activity, which incites to wild and various undertakings, and which develops, but consumes, all the powers of the mind. Addicted to work, he was not less averse to movement; journeys-frequent and rapid changes of abode, of society, or of habits-bodily fatigue and the sudden incidents of war-intercourse with the people and all the great and exciting scenes of public life and human society, were objects of his antipathy. He lived at once in pomp and in silence, in business and in repose, in government and in solitude. On all occasions he was slow and secret; the most important events, the most exalted persons, the most urgent questions, could wring from him for many weeks no answer. When he entered a city where he was obliged to appear amongst his subjects, he flung himself back in his carriage to avoid their gaze. He was a sovereign of the closet, never extending his confidence beyond the narrow sphere of his own instruments, and even within that sphere suspicious of them; but though he would never have conquered either the dominions, or the power, or the greatness which he inherited, he seemed born to preserve them in their integrity, and his life was devoted to their retention. He possessed for this purpose one great qualification which had been wanting to his father, he was really and thoroughly a Spaniard. Born and bred in Flanders, Charles V. was at first, and long remained, a Fleming. When he ascended the throne of Spain, great and general was the irritation against his Flemish habits and predilections. At a later period, passing his life in constant intercourse with all the States of Europe, Charles V. became less Flemish, but not more Spanish. He spoke German, French, Italian, Flemish just as well and as readily as the Spanish tongue; and notwithstanding his retreat

to the mountains of Estremadura, Flanders ever remained the home and country of his heart. Philip II. never had, either by birth or by affection, any other country than Spain: he spent in it the first twenty-one years of his life; he never left it but upon the most pressing occasions; he returned to it as soon as he could do so without extreme political peril; and he constantly evaded, during the last thirty-nine years of his reign, the reasons and the entreaties which summoned him to other parts of his dominions. He knew neither the German nor the Flemish languages; indifferently the Italian and the French. The Spanish was almost his only tongue, as Spain was his favourite abode. He found pleasure and confidence among Spaniards only. Between their faith and his faith-between their manners and his manners-between their tastes and his tastes. the harmony became every day more complete. Spaniards alone were summoned to his councils at Madrid, even to conduct the affairs of his other possessions; and when, in 1559, at the States-General of the Low Countries assembled at Ghent, the Flemings asked him to send away the Spanish troops and Cardinal Granvelle, because they were foreigners, he rejected their prayer with the ungracious reply: I, too, am a foreigner.' For Spain and for its Sovereign, what elements were these of strength and of success! What pledges of a powerful and glorious future!

The condition of the Spanish monarchy in the middle of the sixteenth century will appear still more advantageous if it be compared to that of the two monarchies with which its relations were most frequent and most important that of France and that of England. Francis I. had been succeeded on the throne of France by a feeble prince, -rash, vain, equally ready to plunge into great undertakings and to recoil before obstacles or reverses. Charles V., before his abdication, had taken care to ensure to his son, by the truce of Vaucelles, concluded for five years, an interval of repose not less needed by France than by Spain; but very few months had elapsed-perhaps, indeed, the negotiation of the truce was hardly terminated when Henry II. allied himself to the Pope and the Sultan to make war on the most Catholic King; and by his orders the truce was abruptly broken in Italy by the Duc de Guise, in Flanders by Admiral de Coligny. On every point the fortune of war turned against France; in spite of the skill of Guise, the veteran experience of Montmorency, the heroism of Coligny, the battles of St. Quentin and Gravelines were lost; St. Quentin was taken by the Spaniards; Italy was evacuated by the French; and, after two years of a ruinous contest, in which

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the recovery of Calais was the only stroke of enterprise and of success, Henry II. hastened to conclude the inglorious peace of Cateau Cambresis, and to promise in marriage to the Infant Don Carlos, of tragical celebrity, that daughter of France who was some months afterwards to wed, in lieu of the Infant, Philip himself, a widower by the death of Queen Mary of England. The affairs of France were not more ably or more prosperously conducted at home than abroad. The Reformation was rapidly spreading there—not enough to secure its triumph, but enough to prolong the contest and to survive its defeat. Persecution grew more violent-civil war broke out-religious passion prevailed over national honour-faith spoke louder than patriotism-Catholics and Protestants invoked alike foreign aid. The Catholics despatched frequent messages to Philip II., the bearers of their apprehensions and their entreaties. The Spanish ambassador in Paris, Perrenot de Chantonnay, the brother of Cardinal Granvelle, denounced to his master the weakness of Catherine de Medicis towards the Protestants. You may

' reckon,' wrote he, that whatever is done at Geneva, as well in the pulpit as in the administration of the sacraments, the like may be done with equal impunity throughout this kingdom, beginning with the King's palace.' When Catherine obtained with difficulty that the Queen of Spain, her daughter, should come to meet her at Bayonne, the Duke of Alva was about her person, and repeated in the name of his master, and with his natural harshness, that a prince can do nothing more ⚫ scandalous or more injurious to his interests than to allow his 'people to live according to their conscience; that it was necessary before all things, by severe remedies, and without sparing 'steel or fire, to extirpate this evil to the root, since mildness and sufferance could not fail to increase it; that if the Queen 'was wanting in this her so just duty, his Catholic Majesty had resolved to sacrifice everything, and even his life, to stop the course of a plague which he considered alike menacing to France and to Spain.' But whether Catherine followed or did not follow these counsels, France became more and more a prey to religious and civil discord, and Spanish influence, sometimes combined with the Court, sometimes combined with those fanatic malcontents who were ere long to establish the Ligue, extended its supremacy over the country.

Over England, and its new Queen Elizabeth, Philip II. had less hold. On the death of Mary he had attempted to contract the same tie with her sister, and still to remain King Consort of England. Elizabeth evaded without absolutely rejecting the proposal. Philip renewed it; but he charged his am

bassador, the Duke of Feria, to speak out in the matter of ' religion, and to declare that he could only marry a Catholic 'Queen resolved to uphold the Catholic faith.' Elizabeth declined altogether; but under the pretext that she did not intend to marry at all. Though, however she resolved not to unite herself to Philip, she was not disposed to quarrel with him at once, and without absolute necessity. She knew too well the difficulties and perils which encompassed her to provoke the hostility she already anticipated. A Protestant by her position, by policy, by patriotism, and also to a certain extent in belief, she was called upon at the same time to maintain and to repress the Protestant party. She had to deal both with Catholics reluctant to resign that ascendancy which Mary had restored to them, and with Puritans who aspired in the State as well as in the Church to a far bolder and broader reformation. On the morrow of her accession, on the frontiers of her kingdom, in the same island, a Catholic Queen, powerful by her connexions and by the charms of her person, had already assumed the attitude of a rival, usurped the title of Queen of England, and commenced against her a series of conspiracies, which was to end thirty years later by a catastrophe fatal to the life of Mary Stuart, and scarcely less fatal to the glory of Elizabeth. And amidst these internal difficulties the Queen was, in spite of all her prudence, engaged abroad, with no support but that of a jealous though loyal Parliament and people, in the great struggle of the two principles which were contending throughout Christendom for authority and for freedom.

Thus, then, Philip II. found himself at the commencement of his reign the undisputed sovereign of the widest and richest of the monarchies of Europe, the absolute master of his dominions, intimately united to the faith, the prejudices, and the manners of the land of his birth and of his predilection; whilst his neighbours and his rivals were States torn by religious and political dissensions, and princes incapable of empire, or inexperienced women on disputed thrones.

Let us pass at once from the middle to the end of the sixteenth century-from the accession of Philip II. to his death. Without tracing the slow and sinuous course of events, let us weigh the result of this whole period. We have seen in what condition Philip II. took the Spanish monarchy: let us inquire in what state he left it, and what that monarchy became under forty years of his government.

The scene is completely changed, both in the internal condition of the three monarchies, and in their mutual relations of strength, of activity, of European influence and greatness.