heir pretended
spirit of reasoning and inquiry was in reality nothing but a new species
of implicit faith, the prince took the alarm, as if so institutions
could be secure from the temerity of their researches. The emperor
Charles, who proposed to augment his authority under pretence of
defending the Catholic faith, easily adopted these political principles;
and notwithstanding the limited prerogative which he possessed in the
Netherlands, he published the most arbitrary, severe, and tyrannical
edicts against the Protestants; and he took care that the execution of
them should be no less violent and sanguinary. He was neither cruel nor
bigoted in his natural disposition; yet an historian, celebrated for
moderation and caution, has computed, that in the several persecutions
promoted by that monarch, no less than a hundred thousand persons
perished by the hands of the executioner.[*] But these severe remedies;
far from answering the purposes intended, had rather served to augment
the numbers as well as zeal of the reformers; and the magistrates of the
several towns, seeing no end of those barbarous executions, felt their
humanity rebel against their principles, and declined any further
persecution of the new doctrines.

* Grotii Annal. lib. i. Father Paul, another great
authority, computes, in a passage above cited, that fifty
thousand persons were put to death in the Low Countries
alone.

When Philip succeeded to his father's dominions, the Flemings were
justly alarmed with new apprehensions, lest their prince, observing the
lenity of the magistrates, should take the execution of the edicts
from such remiss hands, and should establish the inquisition in the Low
Countries, accompanied with all the iniquities and barbarities which
attended it in Spain. The severe and unrelenting character of the man,
his professed attachment to Spanish manners, the inflexible bigotry of
his principles; all these circumstances increased their terror; and when
he departed the Netherlands, with a known intention never to return, the
disgust of the inhabitants was extremely augmented, and their dread of
those tyrannical orders which their sovereign, surrounded with Spanish
ministers, would issue from his cabinet at Madrid. He left the duchess
of Parma governess of the Low Countries, and the plain good sense and
good temper of that princess, had she been intrusted with the sole
power, would have preserved the submission of