always heedless of their interests. In the fierce struggle between
old ideas and new, every weapon was employed, and the talents and
dispositions of all kinds of men were made available by the great
managers who had the casting of the performers in the numerous tragedies
that were played. There was not a country in which assassination was
unknown; and in most countries it was common, kings and churchmen being
its patrons, and not unfrequently perishing by the very arts which under
their fostering care had been carried to the highest pitch of artistic
perfection. Philip II. was the most powerful monarch of those days. His
regal career began just as the Reformation was at its height, and when
the Reaction was about to begin. He was a sort of Christian Old Man of
the Mountain; and assassination was with him a regular business, a
portion of his mode of governing the many races that owned his sway.
Mignet, in his "Antonio Perez et Philippe II.," after mentioning that
Philip gave instructions to put Escovedo to death, says,--"This order
would appear strange on the part of the King, if we did not call to mind
the practices as well as the theories of that violent age, so fertile in
assassinations. Death was then the last argument of belief, the extreme,
but frequent means employed by parties, kings, and subjects. They were
not satisfied with killing; they believed they had the right. Certain
casuists attributed this right, some to princes, others to the people.
Here is what the friar Diego de Chaves, Philip's confessor, wrote upon
the very subject of Escovedo's death: 'According to my view of the laws,
the secular prince, who has power over the life of his inferiors or
subjects, even as he can deprive them of it for a just cause and by
judgment in form, may also do so without all this, since superfluous
forms and all judicial proceedings are no laws for him who may dispense
with them. It is, consequently, no crime on the part of a subject who by
a sovereign order has put another subject to death. We must believe that
the prince has given this order for a just cause, even as the law always
presumes that there is one in all the actions of the sovereign.'" When
such a king as Philip II. has such a ghostly father as Diego de Chaves,
assassination may become common. Escovedo was murdered; but there were
others besides the King concerned in his taking off, one of them being
the Princess of Eboli, widow of Philip's first favorite, Ruy Go