t, for
it was a part of himself. The Holy Inquisition, thoroughly established as
it was in his ancestral Spain, was a portion of the regular working
machinery by which his absolute kingship and his superhuman will
expressed themselves. A tribunal which performed its functions with a
celerity, certainty, and invisibility resembling the attributes of
Omnipotence; which, like the pestilence, entered palace or hovel at will,
and which smote the wretch guilty or suspected of heresy with a precision
against which no human ingenuity or sympathy could guard--such an
institution could not but be dear to his heart. It was inevitable that
the extension and perpetuation of what he deemed its blessings throughout
his dominions should be his settled purpose. Spain was governed by an
established terrorism. It is a mistake to suppose that Philip was
essentially beloved in his native land, or that his religious and
political system was heartily accepted because consonant to the national
character. On the contrary, as has been shown, a very large proportion of
the inhabitants were either secretly false to the Catholic faith, or
descended at least from those who had expiated their hostility to it with
their lives. But the Grand Inquisitor was almost as awful a personage; as
the king or the pope. His familiars were in every village and at every
fireside, and from their fangs there was no escape. Millions of Spaniards
would have rebelled against the crown or accepted the reformed religion,
had they not been perfectly certain of being burned or hanged at the
slightest movement in such a direction. The popular force in the course
of the political combinations of centuries seemed at last to have been
eliminated. The nobles, exempt from taxation, which crushed the people to
the earth, were the enemies rather than the chieftains and champions of
the lower classes in any possible struggle with a crown to which they
were united by ties of interest as well as of affection, while the great
churchmen, too, were the immediate dependants and of course the firm
supporters of the king. Thus the people, without natural leaders, without
organisation, and themselves divided into two mutually hostile sections,
were opposed by every force in the State. Crown, nobility, and clergy;
all the wealth and all that there was of learning, were banded together
to suppress the democratic principle. But even this would hardly have
sufficed to extinguish every spark of lib