apsed heretic, Henry IV., blasted this hope
by laying siege to Paris. On the side of the Catholic states of Europe
his affairs went on most prosperously. He had acquired Portugal, with
all her American and East India provinces. But in these new
acquisitions he was not safe from the assaults of the heretics. The
Dutch robbed him of Brazil, and of the Cape of Good Hope, and of the
islands of Ceylon and Java in the East Indies. When his missionary
emissaries had excited an insurrection by which he might have acquired
Japan in a religious war, the Dutch were there with their ships, and,
laying them alongside the rebel camp, they cannonaded it, while the
imperial army on the land side utterly destroyed together emissary
priests and rebels, and forever excluded Spain and her emissaries from
the islands, and even England after the negotiation of a Spanish
marriage. Nor were his treasure-ships safe from these audacious Dutch,
who prowled about the West Indies and seized his galleons. The ships
from Goa, laden with the treasures of the East, had to take a
circuitous route to avoid the Dutch, who were continually on the
look-out at the Cape of Good Hope. As if this was not enough, the
failure of his great armada sent against England, and the ravaging of
his own coasts by Essex, increased his hatred against the heretics to
something like a mania.

These are sufficient reasons for accounting for the zeal of Philip II.
on the subject of religion, and his blindness to the consequences of
thus abandoning his empire and his people as common plunder to a
merciless horde of plunderers, who bound his empire most firmly
together, but it was in the bands of national ruin. This, too, may
account for his often-repeated remark that he would not shield his own
son if he should incur the censure of the Inquisition. When his eldest
son and heir openly avowed his hatred to the Inquisition, we find him
dying a mysterious death. It has already been remarked that there can
be no such thing as reliance upon historical truth in a country where
the Inquisition is in full authority. But it does not follow from this
that we ought to adopt the popular surmise that Philip was privy to the
murder of his son, or even that he was actually murdered. It may have
been a murder, as the inquisitorial assassins were numerous, or it may
have been a natural death, as represented in books that have been
published by permission of the censors. All that we know is, that