only, to second his vast mental power with his indomitable bodily energy. But no sooner was the elasticity of early manhood gone than he too sank into despairing lethargy and religious mysticism. Philip’s mother, the Empress Isabel, came from the same stock, and was the offspring of several generations of consanguineous marriages. The curse which afflicted Philip’s progenitors, and was transmitted with augmented horror to his descendants, could not be expected to pass over Philip himself; and the explanation of his attitude towards the political events of his time must often be sought in the hereditary gloom which fell upon him, and in the unshakable belief that he was in some sort a junior partner with Providence, specially destined to link his mundane fortunes with the higher interests of religion. His slow laboriousness, his indomitable patience, his marble serenity, all seem to have been imitated, perhaps unconsciously, from the relentless, resistless action of divine forces.

On the other hand, his inherited characteristics were accentuated by his education and training. From the time of his birth his father was continually at war with infidels and heretics, and the earliest ideas that can have been instilled into his infant mind were that he and his were fighting the Almighty’s battles and destroying His enemies. In his first years he was surrounded by the closest and narrowest devotees, for ever beseeching the divine blessing on the arms of the absent emperor; and when the time came for Philip to receive political instruction from his father, at an age when most boys are frank and confiding, he was ceaselessly told that his great destiny imposed upon him, above all, the supreme duty of self-control, and of listening to all counsellors whilst trusting none. No wonder, then, that Philip, lacking his father’s bodily vigour, grew up secret, crafty, and over-cautious. No wonder that his fervid faith in the divinity of his destiny and the sacredness of his duty kept him uncomplaining amidst calamities that would have crushed men of greater gifts and broader views. No wonder that this sad, slow, distrustful man, with his rigid methods and his mind for microscopic detail, firm in his belief that the Almighty was working through him for His great ends, should have been hopelessly beaten in the fight with nimble adversaries burdened with no fixed convictions or conscientious scruples, who shifted their policy as the circumstances of the moment dictated. Philip thought that he was fittingly performing a divine task by nature’s own methods. He forgot that nature can afford to await results indefinitely, whilst men cannot.

Philip was born at the house of Don Bernardino de Pimentel, near the church of St. Paul in Valladolid, on May 21, 1527. His mother was profoundly impressed with the great destiny awaiting her offspring, and thought that any manifestation of pain or weakness during her labour might detract from the dignity of the occasion. One of her Portuguese ladies, fearing that this effort of self-control on the part of the empress would add to her sufferings, begged her to give natural vent to her feelings. “Silence!” said the empress, “die I may, but wail I will not,” and then she ordered that her face should be hidden from the light, that no involuntary sign of pain should be seen.

In this spirit of self-control and overpowering majesty the weak, sickly baby was reared by his devout mother. Two other boy infants who were born to her died of epilepsy in early childhood, and Philip, her first-born, remained her only son.

In the midst of the rejoicings that heralded his birth news came to Valladolid that the emperor’s Spanish and German troops had assaulted and sacked Rome, and that Pope Clement VII. was surrounded by infuriated soldiery, a prisoner in his own castle of St. Angelo. In the long rivalry which Charles had sustained with the French king, Francis I., who had competed with him for the imperial crown, one of the main factors was the dread of the entire domination of Italy by Spain, by virtue of the suzerainty of the empire over the country. The excitable and unstable pontiff, Clement VII., thought that his own interests were threatened, and made common cause with Francis. The emperor’s troops were commanded by Charles de Montpensier, Duke of Bourbon, who had quarrelled with his own sovereign, and was in arms against him, and he unquestionably exceeded the emperor’s wishes in the capture and sacking of the eternal city, the intention having been to have held the pontiff in check by terror rather than to degrade him in the eyes of the world. Charles made what amends he could for the blunder committed by Bourbon, and at once suspended the rejoicings for the birth of his heir. But the gossips in Valladolid gravely shook their heads, and prophesied that the great emperor’s first-born was destined to be a bane to the papacy in years to come. It will be seen in the course of the present book that during the whole of his life Philip regarded the papacy and the persons of the pontiffs without any superstitious awe, and mainly as instruments in his hands to achieve the great work entrusted to him by Providence.

In April 1528, when Philip was eleven months old, he received the oath of allegiance as heir to the crown from the Cortes of Castile, and from that time until the return of his father to Spain in 1533 the royal infant remained under the care of his mother and one of her Portuguese ladies, Doña Leonor de Mascarenhas, to whom Philip in after-life was devotedly attached. He was even then a preternaturally grave and silent child, with a fair pink-and-white skin, fine yellow hair, and full blue lymphatic eyes, rather too close together. It is no uncommon thing for princes to be represented as prodigies, but Philip seems, in truth, to have been really an extraordinary infant, and exhibited great aptitude for certain studies, especially mathematics. Charles on his arrival in Spain decided to give to his heir a separate household and masters who should prepare him for the duties of his future position. A list was made of the principal priestly professors of the Spanish universities, which was gradually reduced by elimination to three names. These were submitted to the empress for her choice, and she selected Dr. Juan Martinez Pedernales (which name = flints, he ingeniously Latinised into Siliceo), a professor of Salamanca, who was appointed tutor to the prince, with a salary of 100,000 maravedis a year. The emperor probably knew little of the character of his son’s tutor. He had intended in the previous year to appoint to the post a really eminent scholar, the famous Viglius, but did not do so. Whatever may have been Siliceo’s virtues, and according to priestly historians they were many, the emperor had subsequently a very poor opinion of the way in which he had performed his duty.

In a private letter from Charles to his son ten years afterwards, to which other reference will be made, the emperor says that “Siliceo has certainly not been the most fitting teacher for you. He has been too desirous of pleasing you. I hope to God that it was not for his own ends”; and again, “He is your chief chaplain, and you confess to him. It would be bad if he was as anxious to please you in matters of your conscience as he has been in your studies.” But Philip evidently liked his tutor, for later he made him Archbishop of Toledo and Primate of Spain. The prince must have been an apt pupil in the studies which most attracted him. He was never a linguist of any proficiency, but could read and write Latin well at quite an early age, and certainly understood French and Italian. But he was a Spaniard of Spaniards, and nothing shows the strict limitations of his capacity more than the clumsiness with which he expressed himself even in his own language,