did come, were for the most part
vague and unsatisfactory.

"Everything goes on with Philip," writes Chantonnay, formerly minister
to France, to his brother Granvelle,--"Everything goes on from
to-morrow to to-morrow; the only resolution is, to remain
irresolute.[660] The king will allow matters to become so entangled in
the Low Countries, that, if he ever should visit them, he will find it
easier to conform to the state of things than to mend it. The lords
there are more of kings than the king himself.[661] They have all the
smaller nobles in leading-strings. It is impossible that Philip should
conduct himself like a man.[662] His only object is to cajole the
Flemish nobles, so that he may be spared the necessity of coming to
Flanders."

"It is a pity," writes the secretary, Perez, "that the king will manage
affairs as he does, now taking counsel of this man, and now of that;
concealing some matters from those he consults, and trusting them with
others, showing full confidence in no one. With this way of proceeding,
it is no wonder that despatches should be contradictory in their
tenor."[663]

It is doubtless true, that procrastination and distrust were the
besetting sins of Philip, and were followed by their natural
consequences. He had, moreover, as we have seen, a sluggishness of
nature, which kept him in Madrid when he should have been in
Brussels,--where his father, in similar circumstances, would long since
have been, seeing with his own eyes what Philip saw only with the eyes
of others. But still his policy, in the present instance, may be
referred quite as much to deliberate calculation as to his natural
temper. He had early settled it as a fixed principle never to concede
religious toleration to his subjects. He had intimated this pretty
clearly in his different communications to the government of Flanders.
That he did not announce it in a more absolute and unequivocal form may
well have arisen from the apprehension, that, in the present irritable
state of the people, this might rouse their passions into a flame. At
least, it might be reserved for a last resort. Meanwhile, he hoped to
weary them out by maintaining an attitude of cold reserve; until,
convinced of the hopelessness of resistance, they would cease altogether
to resist. In short, he seemed to deal with the Netherlands like a
patient angler, who allows the trout to exhaust himself by his own
efforts, rather than by a violent movement risk the l