s whose names
have been preserved by capricious Accident as heroes and legislators. Yet
there is no doubt that, while comparatively powerless for good, the
individual despot is capable of almost infinite mischief. There have been
few men known to history who have been able to accomplish by their own
exertions so vast an amount of evil as the king who had just died. If
Philip possessed a single virtue it has eluded the conscientious research
of the writer of these pages. If there are vices--as possibly there are
from which he was exempt, it is because it is not permitted to human
nature to attain perfection even in evil. The only plausible
explanation--for palliation there is none--of his infamous career is that
the man really believed himself not a king but a god. He was placed so
high above his fellow-creatures as, in good faith perhaps, to believe
himself incapable of doing wrong; so that, whether indulging his passions
or enforcing throughout the world his religious and political dogmas, he
was ever conscious of embodying divine inspirations and elemental laws.
When providing for the assassination of a monarch, or commanding the
massacre of a townfull of Protestants; when trampling on every oath by
which a human being can bind himself; when laying desolate with fire and
sword, during more than a generation, the provinces which he had
inherited as his private property, or in carefully maintaining the flames
of civil war in foreign kingdoms which he hoped to acquire; while
maintaining over all Christendom a gigantic system of bribery,
corruption, and espionage, keeping the noblest names of England and
Scotland on his pension-lists of traitors, and impoverishing his
exchequer with the wages of iniquity paid in France to men of all
degrees, from princes of blood like Guise and Mayenne down to the
obscurest of country squires, he ever felt that these base or bloody
deeds were not crimes, but the simple will of the godhead of which he was
a portion. He never doubted that the extraordinary theological system
which he spent his life in enforcing with fire and sword was right, 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
Omnipote