cherished hope of the great inheritance; and, as we shall see in the course of this history, Victor-Amadeus of Savoy and his kin brought, therefore, abounding sorrow to his god-son and to Spain. When the infant, too, was denuded of his rich adornments for the ceremony, and they were deposited upon the solid silver bed that had been erected in the church for the purpose, some of the great personages, who alone could have had access to the precious objects, stole them all, and the heir of Spain, Prince Philip Dominic, who entered the church with his tiny body covered with gems, left it as unadorned as ascetic St. Dominic himself could have wished.[13]

Philip's dedication

Thus, in a whirlwind of squandering waste, surrounded by pompous pride, unscrupulous dishonesty, and ecstatic devotion, Philip from his birth was pledged to the hopeless task of extirpating religious dissent from Christendom: the task that had been too great for the Emperor and his steadfast son, that had drained to exhaustion the wealth of the Indies, had turned Castile into a wilderness, and was to drag the Spanish Empire to ruin and dissolution under the sceptre of the babe whose christening we have witnessed. The life-story of the unhappy monarch which we have to tell is one of constant struggle amidst the antagonistic circumstances that surrounded his baptism; against the impossibility of reconciling the successful performance of the work, to which devotional pride and not national interest had bound him, with the poverty and exhaustion that had forced Philip III. and Lerma to seek peace with Protestants, and had made the victor of the Invincible Armada an honoured guest when the heir of Catholic Spain was dedicated to the ideal of Dominic. For, in good truth, it was from no lack of either devotion or pride that Philip III. had been forced to parley with the thing that he had been taught to look upon as accursed of God. Almost the only policy in which he was ever vehemently energetic was the attempt in the first days of his reign to invade Ireland in the interests of the Catholics, and to secure the control of the Crown of England by means of the anti-Jacobite party.[14] He was, as Llorente truly says, more fit himself for a Dominican friar's frock than a regal mantle; and if rigid obedience to the directions of his spiritual guides had enabled him to root out Protestant dissent from Christendom, as he rooted out the Moriscos from his realms, Philip III. would have succeeded where his greater father and grandfather failed.

The Philips compared

But devotion was not enough to secure the triumph of Spain; fervent belief in the divine approval was not enough. Both Philip II. and the Spaniards of his time possessed those qualities to excess, and yet they had failed. What was needed now, even to avert catastrophe, were orderly organisation, industry, celerity in council and in action, economical adaptation of ways and means, ready resource and a flexible conscience; in short, statesmanship,—and these were the very qualities which Philip III. conspicuously lacked. With the accession of Philip III. (1598) the weak point in the system of the Emperor and his son had come out; and their laboriously constructed political machine had broken down. Under Philip II. himself, in his later recluse years, it had grown rusty and sluggish, but whilst the mainspring, the monarch, had laboured ceaselessly, treating his ministers as clerks, and raising them from the gutter that they might be his tools alone, the wheels at least went round; but when the monarch in whom all motion was centred left off working, and did nothing but dance and pray alternately, then came paralysis and consequent disaster. "Ah! Don Cristobal; I fear they will rule him," groaned Philip II. on his agonised deathbed; and, though too late, he had guessed his son's character aright. Thenceforward the favourite, Lerma or another, was monarch in all but name; and each problem of government as it arose, or was submitted to the King, was considered by Philip III. not in its broad political aspects, but as a case of private conscience to be quibbled over by confessors and theologians, and finally decided with timorous heart-searching on grounds apart from national interests or expediency.

Philip II. himself had all his life been sternly conscientious, according to his lights, and his inflexibility had been one of the main causes of the partial failure of his policy and the exhaustion of his country. He was a strong, slow, persistent man, unwavering in his methods, as he was consistent in his objects; but he was withal a statesman of vast ability, with the power of self-persuasion that all great statesmen must possess, and he played the game of international politics with mundane pieces, though he convinced himself and others that they were divine. His son and grandson, as will be seen in the course of this book, had not his power of self-conviction; they lived in an age of growing national disillusionment, and were swayed mainly by sentimental, traditional, and devotional considerations. They were for ever unlocking with trembling hands the secret closet of their conscience, to assure themselves that indeed no stain rested there. Having seen that all was spotless in their own breasts, they were content to sit with crossed hands, in almost Oriental fatalism, throwing the whole responsibility for what happened, or failed to happen, upon the divine decrees. They had satisfied their confessor and their conscience in the course they had taken, and if things went awry after that it was not their fault.[15] This was no doubt all very saintly and good; but it meant calamity as a system of government when its professors were pitted against rivals unhampered by such scruples and limitations.

It may seem paradoxical to assert that the more purely religious character of the motives that swayed Philip III. and Philip IV., than of those which influenced Philip II., resulted from a weakening of the exalted devotional faith that had dominated Spain during the greater part of the sixteenth century; and yet, if it be carefully considered, such will prove to be the case. A faith so fervent as that which carried the men-at-arms and explorers of the Emperor and his son triumphant through the world left no room for doubt. What they did could not be wrong, because they were chosen to do God's own work; and for that all means were sanctified. They did not need to be for ever pulling their consciences up by the roots to satisfy themselves that the fruit was good. If Philip II. ordered murder to be committed, or the Emperor seized private or ecclesiastical property for his own purposes; if hundreds of inconvenient political persons were consigned to a living tomb in the galleys and dungeons of the Inquisition, we may be assured that no qualms of conscience were felt in consequence by the first two sovereigns of the Spanish house of Austria; for the spiritual fervour, which was the secret of the unity and power of their realms, made all things right which were done in furtherance of objects which were considered sacred: and throughout the Reformation period the Spanish sovereigns quite honestly and unhesitatingly employed religious