tunity of conversing with him, partly, it seems, to upbraid
him with his new honors, and partly in order to ascertain how far these
reports were well founded. William, one of his barbers, related that he
had heard his majesty say, "When I gave Carranza the bishopric of the
Canaries, he refused it; now he accepts Toledo. We shall see what we are
to think of his virtue." In this frame of mind, he had been expecting
the unconscious prelate for some time; these feelings of dislike being,
no doubt, strengthened by his confessor, father Regla, a bitter enemy,
and one of the foremost accusers of Carranza.

There can be no doubt that the ruin of this celebrated man was decreed
on evidence which would have been listened to only by a secret tribunal
of unscrupulous enemies. It may be that some of his printed theology
contained--what theology does not?--passages capable of interpretations
neither intended nor foreseen by the writer; it may be that he had
pillaged the writings of reformers, whose persons he would willingly
have given to the flames. But it is certain that he was a man of
unambitious nature, of active benevolence, and, according to the notions
of that age, of exemplary life; that he was a scholar and theologian of
practised and consummate skill, a wary shepherd of the faithful, a
relentless butcher of heretics; that he carried his reluctance to the
mitre so far beyond the bounds of decent clerical coyness, as to
recommend three eminent rivals to Philip II., as more fit and proper
than himself for the primacy; and that one of his first acts, as
archbishop, was to advise the king to appropriate the revenues of a
canonry in every cathedral in Spain to the use of the Inquisition.
Setting aside, therefore, the palpable personal hatred which betrayed
itself in all the proceedings against him, it seems probable that he
spoke the plain truth, when he made his dying declaration, that he had
never held any of the heretical opinions of which he had been accused.

In after days, when enduring the sickness of deferred hope in his prison
at Valladolid or at Rome, the archbishop perhaps regarded it as one of
the mischances which marked the ebb of his fortunes, that he reached
Yuste too late either to explain to the emperor the circumstances of his
promotion, or to remove the suspicion which had been cast on his faith.
On the evening of his arrival, Charles was too ill to receive him, and
the day following, although he was thrice ad