still more, the Archbishop of Toledo and the Marquis de Los Valez.
He is so clever and capable that he must become the king's
principal minister. He is thin, of delicate health, rather
extravagant, and fond of his advantages and pleasures. He is
tenacious of being thought much of, and of people offering him
presents."

To gratify, by one dreadful blow, a cruel king and a guilty passion, he
murdered his friend. The depth of his misery soon rivalled and exceeded
the eminence of his prosperity. Hurled from his offices and dignities,
deprived of the very title of nobility, condemned by the civil, and
excommunicated by the ecclesiastical tribunals, cast into prison, loaded
with irons, put to the torture, hunted like a wild beast out of his own
country and many a nook of refuge in other lands, Perez, who had been
"the most powerful personage in the Spanish monarchy," was, when we
first meet him in the company of Bacon, an exile in penury. And so he
died, an impoverished outcast, leaving to posterity a name which befits,
if it cannot adorn, a tale, and may well point a moral.

The "bloody" Perez was the natural son of Gonzalo Perez, who was for a
long time Secretary of State to Charles V. and Philip II. Of his mother
nothing is known. The conjectures of scandal are heightened and
perplexed by the fact that he was ennobled when a child, and that,
amidst all the denunciations of his overbearing behaviour and
insufferable arrogance, he is never reproached with the baseness of his
maternal lineage. Legitimated in infancy by an imperial diploma, Antonio
was literally a courtier and politician from his cradle.

"Being of a quick understanding, an insinuating character, and a
devotedness which knew neither bounds nor scruples, full of
expedients, a nervous and elegant writer, and expeditious in
business, he had gained the favour of Philip II., who had gradually
given him almost his entire confidence. He was, with Cayas, one of
the two secretaries of the council of state, and was charged
principally with the _despacho universal_; that is, with the
counter-sign and the conduct of the diplomatic correspondence and
the royal commands. Philip imparted to him his most secret designs,
initiated him into his private thoughts; and it was Perez who, in
deciphering the despatches, separated the points to be communicated
to the council of state for their opi