onist found himself. When he had first arrived in the provinces, his
exchequer was overflowing, and he was even supposed to devote a
considerable portion of the military funds to defray the expenses of his
magnificent housekeeping at Brussels. But those halcyon days were over. A
gigantic fraud, just perpetrated by Philip; had descended like a
thunderbolt upon the provinces and upon all commercial Europe, and had
utterly blasted the unfortunate viceroy. In the latter days of the
preceding year the king had issued a general repudiation of his debts.

He did it solemnly, too, and with great religious unction, for it was a
peculiarity of this remarkable sovereign that he was ever wont to
accomplish his darkest crimes, whether murders or stratagems, as if they
were acts of virtue. Perhaps he really believed them to be such, for a
man, before whom so many millions of his fellow worms had been writhing
for half a century in the dust, might well imagine himself a deity.

So the king, on the 20th November, 1596, had publicly revoked all the
assignments, mortgages, and other deeds by which the royal domains;
revenues, taxes, and other public property had been transferred or
pledged for moneys already advanced to merchants, banker, and other
companies or individuals, and formally took them again into his own
possession, on the ground that his exertions in carrying on this long war
to save Christianity from destruction had reduced him to beggary, while
the money-lenders, by charging him exorbitant interest, had all grown
rich at his expense.

This was perfectly simple. There was no attempt to disguise the villany
of the transaction. The massacre of so many millions of Protestants, the
gigantic but puerile attempts to subjugate the Dutch republic, and to
annex France, England, and the German empire to his hereditary dominions,
had been attended with more expense than Philip had calculated upon. The
enormous wealth which a long series of marriages, inheritances,
conquests, and maritime discoveries had heaped upon Spain had been
exhausted by the insane ambition of the king to exterminate heresy
throughout the world, and to make himself the sovereign of one undivided,
universal, catholic monarchy. All the gold and silver of America had not
sufficed for this purpose, and he had seen, with an ever rising
indignation, those very precious metals which, in his ignorance of the
laws of trade, he considered his exclusive property flowing spe