Catholic King exceeded those of Rome when Rome was
at the zenith of power. But the huge mass lay torpid and helpless, and
could be insulted or despoiled with impunity. The whole administration,
military and naval, financial and colonial, was utterly disorganized.
Charles was a fit representative of his kingdom, impotent physically,
intellectually and morally, sunk in ignorance, listlessness and
superstition, yet swollen with a notion of his own dignity, and quick to
imagine and to resent affronts. So wretched had his education been that,
when he was told of the fall of Mons, the most important fortress in
his vast empire, he asked whether Mons was in England. [291] Among the
ministers who were raised up and pulled down by his sickly caprice, was
none capable of applying a remedy to the distempers of the State. In
truth to brace anew the nerves of that paralysed body would have been a
hard task even for Ximenes. No servant of the Spanish Crown occupied a
more important post, and none was more unfit for an important post, than
the Marquess of Gastanaga. He was Governor of the Netherlands; and in
the Netherlands it seemed probable that the fate of Christendom would
be decided. He had discharged his trust as every public trust was
then discharged in every part of that vast monarchy on which it was
boastfully said that the sun never set. Fertile and rich as was the
country which he ruled, he threw on England and Holland the whole charge
of defending it. He expected that arms, ammunition, waggons, provisions,
every thing, would be furnished by the heretics. It had never occurred
to him that it was his business, and not theirs, to put Mons in a
condition to stand a siege. The public voice loudly accused him of
having sold that celebrated stronghold to France. But it is probable
that he was guilty of nothing worse than the haughty apathy and
sluggishness characteristic of his nation.

Such was the state of the coalition of which William was the head. There
were moments when he felt himself overwhelmed, when his spirits
sank, when his patience was wearied out, and when his constitutional
irritability broke forth. "I cannot," he wrote, "offer a suggestion
without being met by a demand for a subsidy." [292] "I have refused
point blank," he wrote on another occasion, when he had been importuned
for money, "it is impossible that the States General and England can
bear the charge of the army on the Rhine, of the army in Piedmont, and