d feel
safe in issuing decrees and pragmatic edicts; thus reducing the ancient
legislative and consultative bodies to nullity, and substituting the will
of an individual for a constitutional fabric. To criticise the expenses
of government or to attempt interference with the increase of taxation
became a sorry farce. The forms remained in certain provinces after the
life had long since fled. Only in Arragon had the ancient privileges
seemed to defy the absolute authority of the monarch; and it was reserved
for Antonio Perez to be the cause of their final extirpation. The
grinning skulls of the Chief Justice of that kingdom and of the boldest
and noblest advocates and defenders of the national liberties, exposed
for years in the market-place, with the record of their death-sentence
attached, informed the Spaniards, in language which the most ignorant
could read, that the crime of defending a remnant of human freedom and
constitutional law was sure to draw down condign punishment. It was the
last time in that age that even the ghost of extinct liberty was destined
to revisit the soil of Spain. It mattered not that the immediate cause
for pursuing Perez was his successful amour with the king's Mistress, nor
that the crime of which he was formally accused was the deadly offence of
Calvinism, rather than his intrigue with the Eboli and his assassination
of Escovedo; for it was in the natural and simple sequence of events that
the last vestige of law or freedom should be obliterated wherever Philip
could vindicate his sway. It must be admitted, too, that the king seized
this occasion to strike a decisive blow with a promptness very different
from his usual artistic sluggishness. Rarely has a more terrible epigram
been spoken by man than the royal words which constituted the whole trial
and sentence of the Chief Justice of Arragon, for the crime of defending
the law of his country: "You will take John of Lanuza, and you will have
his head cut off." This was the end of the magistrate and of the
constitution which he had defended.

His power, was unlimited. A man endowed with genius and virtue, and
possessing the advantages of a consummate education, could have perhaps
done little more than attempt to mitigate the general misery, and to
remove some of its causes. For it is one of the most pernicious dogmas of
the despotic system, and the one which the candid student of history
soonest discovers to be false, that the masses of mank