his dominions he was "an absolute king." It was to realize
this idea of unshackled power that he crushed the liberties of Aragon,
as his father had crushed the liberties of Castille, and sent Alva to
tread under foot the constitutional freedom of the Low Countries. His
bigotry went hand in hand with his thirst for rule. Catholicism was the
one common bond that knit his realms together, and policy as well as
religious faith made Philip the champion of Catholicism. Italy and Spain
lay hushed beneath the terror of the Inquisition, while Flanders was
being purged of heresy by the stake and the sword.

[Sidenote: Philip and Elizabeth.]

The shadow of this gigantic power fell like a deadly blight over Europe.
The new Protestantism, like the new spirit of political liberty, saw its
real foe in Philip. It was Spain, rather than the Guises, against which
Coligni and the Huguenots struggled in vain; it was Spain with which
William of Orange was wrestling for religious and civil freedom; it was
Spain which was soon to plunge Germany into the chaos of the Thirty
Years War, and to which the Catholic world had for twenty years been
looking, and looking in vain, for a victory over heresy in England. Vast
in fact as Philip's resources were, they were drained by the yet vaster
schemes of ambition into which his religion and his greed of power, as
well as the wide distribution of his dominions, perpetually drew him. To
coerce the weaker States of Italy, to command the Mediterranean, to keep
a hold on the African coast, to preserve his influence in Germany, to
support Catholicism in France, to crush heresy in Flanders, to despatch
one Armada against the Turk and another against England, were aims
mighty enough to exhaust even the power of the Spanish monarchy. But it
was rather on the character of Philip than on the exhaustion of his
treasury that Elizabeth counted for success in the struggle which had so
long been going on between them. The king's temper was slow, cautious
even to timidity, losing itself continually in delays, in hesitations,
in anticipating remote perils, in waiting for distant chances; and on
the slowness and hesitation of his temper his rival had been playing
ever since she mounted the throne. The agility, the sudden changes of
Elizabeth, her lies, her mystifications, though they failed to deceive
Philip, puzzled and impeded his mind. The diplomatic contest between the
two was like the fight which England was soon to