ed miracles to be
accomplished by the mere private assertion of his will. It was so easy to
conquer realms the writing table.

"I don't say," continued Farnese, "if I could have entered France with a
competent army, well paid and disciplined, with plenty of artillery, and
munitions, and with funds enough to enable Mayenne to buy up the nobles
of his party, and to conciliate the leaders generally with presents and
promises, that perhaps they might not have softened. Perhaps interest and
fear would have made that name agreeable which pleases them so little,
now that the very reverse of all this has occurred. My want of means is
causing a thousand disgusts among the natives of the country, and it is
this penury that will be the chief cause of the disasters which may
occur."

Here was sufficiently plain speaking. To conquer a war-like nation
without an army; to purchase a rapacious nobility with an empty purse,
were tasks which might break the stoutest heart. They were breaking
Alexander's.

Yet Philip had funds enough, if he had possessed financial ability
himself, or any talent for selecting good financiers. The richest
countries of the old world and the new were under his sceptre; the mines
of Peru and Mexico; the wealth of farthest Ind, were at his disposition;
and moreover he drove a lucrative traffic in the sale of papal bulls and
massbooks, which were furnished to him at a very low figure, and which he
compelled the wild Indians of America and the savages of the Pacific to
purchase of him at an enormous advance. That very year, a Spanish carrack
had been captured by the English off the Barbary coast, with an assorted
cargo, the miscellaneous nature of which gives an idea of royal
commercial pursuits at that period. Besides wine in large quantities
there were fourteen hundred chests of quicksilver, an article
indispensable to the working of the silver mines, and which no one but
the king could, upon pain of death, send to America. He received,
according to contract; for every pound of quicksilver thus delivered a
pound of pure silver, weight for weight. The ship likewise contained ten
cases of gilded mass-books and papal bulls. The bulls, two million and
seventy thousand in number, for the dead and the living, were intended
for the provinces of New Spain, Yucatan, Guatemala, Honduras, and the
Philippines. The quicksilver and the bulls cost the king three hundred
thousand florins, but he sold them for five million.