ly to feed the ocean."[432] To add to the calamity,
more than a thousand persons perished in this shipwreck.[433]

The king, without delay, took the road to Valladolid; but on arriving at
that capital, whether depressed by his late disaster, or from his
habitual dislike of such empty parade, he declined the honors, with
which the loyal inhabitants would have greeted the return of their
sovereign to his dominions. Here he was cordially welcomed by his
sister, the Regent Joanna, who, long since weary of the cares of
sovereignty, resigned the sceptre into his hands, with a better will
than that with which most persons would have received it. Here, too, he
had the satisfaction of embracing his son Carlos, the heir to his
empire. The length of Philip's absence may have allowed him to see some
favorable change in the person of the young prince, though, if report be
true, there was little change for the better in his disposition, which,
headstrong and imperious, had already begun to make men tremble for the
future destinies of their country.

Philip had not been many days in Valladolid when his presence was
celebrated by one of those exhibitions, which, unhappily for Spain,
maybe called national. This was an _auto da fe_, not, however, as
formerly, of Jews and Moors, but of Spanish Protestants. The Reformation
had been silently, but not slowly, advancing in the Peninsula; and
intelligence of this, as we have already seen, was one cause of Philip's
abrupt departure from the Netherlands. The brief but disastrous attempt
at a religious revolution in Spain is an event of too much importance to
be passed over in silence by the historian.

[Sidenote: THE REFORMED DOCTRINES.]

Notwithstanding the remote position of Spain, under the imperial sceptre
of Charles she was brought too closely into contact with the other
states of Europe not to feel the shock of the great religious reform
which was shaking those states to their foundations. Her most intimate
relations, indeed, were with those very countries in which the seeds of
the Reformation were first planted. It was no uncommon thing for
Spaniards, in the sixteenth century, to be indebted for some portion of
their instruction to German universities. Men of learning, who
accompanied the emperor, became familiar with the religious doctrines so
widely circulated in Germany and Flanders. The troops gathered the same
doctrines from the Lutheran soldiers, who occasionally served with them