tion,
England and Scotland; it would have aided it in the reconquest of the
Netherlands and of France. No formal bond indeed, such as the Calvinists
believed to exist, bound Mary and Pius and Philip and Catharine of
Medicis together in a vast league for the restoration of the Faith;
their difference of political aim held France and Spain obstinately
apart both from each other and from Mary Stuart, and it was only at the
Vatican that the great movement was conceived as a whole. But
practically the policy of Mary and Philip worked forward to the same
end. While the Scottish Queen prepared her counter-reformation in
England and Scotland, Philip was gathering a formidable host which was
to suppress Calvinism as well as liberty in the Netherlands. Of the
seventeen provinces which Philip had inherited from his father, Charles,
in this part of his dominions, each had its own constitution, its own
charter and privileges, its own right of taxation. All clung to their
local independence; and resistance to any projects of centralization was
common to the great nobles and the burghers of the towns. Philip on the
other hand was resolute to bring them by gradual steps to the same level
of absolute subjection and incorporation in the body of the monarchy as
the provinces of Castille. The Netherlands were the wealthiest part of
his dominions. Flanders alone contributed more to his exchequer than all
his kingdoms in Spain. With a treasury drained by a thousand schemes
Philip longed to have this wealth at his unfettered disposal, while his
absolutism recoiled from the independence of the States, and his bigotry
drove him to tread their heresy under foot. Policy backed the impulses
of greed and fanaticism. In the strangely-mingled mass of the Spanish
monarchy, the one bond which held together its various parts, divided as
they were by blood, by tradition, by tongue, was their common faith.
Philip was in more than name the "Catholic King." Catholicism alone
united the burgher of the Netherlands to the nobles of Castille, or
Milanese and Neapolitan to the Aztec of Mexico and Peru. With such an
empire heresy meant to Philip political chaos, and the heresy of Calvin,
with its ready organization and its doctrine of resistance, promised not
only chaos but active revolt. In spite therefore of the growing
discontent in the Netherlands, in spite of the alienation of the nobles
and the resistance of the Estates, he clung to a system of government
wh