These and a few more meagre items only sufficed to stretch his
income to a total of one million three hundred and thirty thousand far
the two years, against an expenditure calculated at near eleven millions.
"Thus, there are nine millions, less three thousand ducats, deficient,"
he concluded ruefully (and making a mistake in his figures in his own
favor of six hundred and sixty-three thousand besides), "which I may look
for in the sky, or try to raise by inventions already exhausted."

Thus, the man who owned all America and half of Europe could only raise a
million ducats a year from his estates. The possessor of all Peru and
Mexico could reckon on "nothing worth mentioning" from his mines, and
derived a precarious income mainly from permissions granted his subjects
to carry on the slave-trade and to eat meat on Fridays. This was
certainly a gloomy condition of affairs for a monarch on the threshold of
a war which was to outlast his own life and that of his children; a war
in which the mere army expenses were to be half a million florins
monthly, in which about seventy per cent. of the annual disbursements was
to be regularly embezzled or appropriated by the hands through which it
passed, and in which for every four men on paper, enrolled and paid for,
only one, according to the average, was brought into the field.

Granvelle, on the other hand, gave his master but little consolation from
the aspect of financial affairs in the provinces. He assured him that
"the government was often in such embarrassment as not to know where to
look for ten ducats." He complained bitterly that the states would meddle
with the administration of money matters, and were slow in the granting
of subsidies. The Cardinal felt especially outraged by the interference
of these bodies with the disbursement of the sums which they voted. It
has been seen that the states had already compelled the government to
withdraw the troops, much to the regret of Granvelle. They continued,
however, to be intractable on the subject of supplies. "These are very
vile things," he wrote to Philip, "this authority which they assume, this
audacity with which they say whatever they think proper; and these
impudent conditions which they affix to every proposition for subsidies."
The Cardinal protested that he had in vain attempted to convince them of
their error, but that they remained perverse.

It was probably at this time that the plan for debasing the coin,
sugge