among them, and none should be without a cruise of holy oil to administer to them the sacrament of Extreme Unction when their sickness was dangerous. His private almoner was Bernabe de Vibanco, already mentioned as the writer of an unpublished Memoir of his reign. By his hand he used to pay monthly pensions to poor nobles, and widows of noble families; and he was so punctual in doing this, that, when the day came round, he used to ask for the administrator of his charity, and making as it were a debt of what was a gratuitous gift, he would say, "pay for me what I owe to such an one."* His fleet in the Mediterranean had captured on shipboard the library of Muley Zidan, the prince who ruled in Morocco, a collection of 3000 volumes in the Arabic language, treating of Medicine, Philosophy, and Jurisprudence. Muley offered a large sum in gold for his books. Cardinal Ximenes would probably have burnt them for Korans. Not so Philip the Pious. He made answer, he would not take money; but would restore all his literary treasures, if the Moor would give up all his Christian captives. To this fair proposal Muley's reply was somewhat evasive: he would do so as soon as he had put down some insurgent chiefs opposed to him in Morocco. Finding that his pious purpose was not likely to be effected, Philip sent the whole collection to the library of the Escorial.+ There it remained, till unfortunately the best portion * Davila, 174. + Davila, Grandezas, 68. of it was destroyed by a conflagration in the palace in the last century.* (99.) Although, as we have seen, he honoured his most Catholic father, his merciful nature busied itself, among the earliest acts of his reign, in doing what he could to efface the memory of the cruelties perpetrated by that monarch in the kingdom of Arragon. This is another portion of the history of Philip II., on which we must deplore the loss of Prescott's faithful pen to guide us to a true estimate. Some late writers have spoken in much too favourable a tone of that clever miscreant Antonio Perez. Essex was more intimate with him, than became a right-aiming English nobleman. Richelieu seems to have consulted him, and has recorded his treacherous advice, against his own country rather than against his master, with great relish. But our wiser and more generous Burleigh would not give him audience. A bad man, however, may sometimes persuade the good and true to espouse his cause. He had the art to persuade the Arragonese, among whom he had sought refuge, that it was necessary to undertake his protection as an assertion of their old constitutional liberties. They did so; and drew upon themselves the ruthless vengeance of Philip II. and his instruments, in public executions, confiscations, and exile of the principal nobles and gentlemen of the province. Philip III., soon after his accession, * Conde, Xerif Aledris XVIII. Test. Politique, part. ii. sect. 5. Camden, Elis. ii. 76. on visiting Zaragoza, ordered the heads of the slain nobles to be taken down from the city gates, on which they had been exposed, the inscriptions recording their sentences to be effaced, annulled the processes by which they had been condemned, and declared that none of them had been guilty of treason against the state, but had acted as their duty was in defence of the rights of their country.* It may, however, be doubted, whether Llorente says truly, that the merciful King was only withheld by the Inquisitors from recalling Perez. The Inquisitors now in office were no parties to what was done in the preceding reign. Perez himself complains, and in bitterly abusive language, in one of his Letters, not of the Inquisitors, but of Rodrigo Vazquez, as his unrelenting enemy. But Vazquez also was sent into retirement soon after the accession of Philip III., and the next President of the Council was the virtuous Miranda. The just inference is, that there was nothing in the character, or in the cause, of Antonio Perez, to propitiate the favour of the good among his own countrymen. He was left to die in exile and neglect at Paris, not long after the death of Henri IV., in November, 1611. All that Philip the Pious did after his death was to make a dutiful, but of course an ineffectual, attempt, to collect and burn the libels against his father's memory, which Perez had dispersed in the northern provinces of Europe. But, with a just and discriminating compas * Cabrera, 42. Llorente, cap. xxxv. 5, 25. sion, he had long before set at liberty, and restored to their property, the excellent wife and children of the treacherous Secretary, whom Philip II. had vindictively kept in prison from the time of the escape of their father. (100.) As to the Inquisition, it does not appear that Philip III. was ever present to take part in the public spectacles prepared in compliance with the rules of this odious institution, as his predecessor was, or as his two next successors were. He might have thought of it, as most Spaniards at that time did, as a necessary defence of Catholicism, and means of repressing heresy and imposture, but he had no relish for the stupid bigotry and cruelty which made the Autos become, like a bull-fight or a tournament, a scene for the nobles to attend with their retainers in all their best array, and the populace to expect as a time of joyful and triumphal holiday. Gongora has a vile sonnet, speaking in a tone of disappointment because a spectacle of this kind at Granada furnished only one victim to undergo the extreme penalty. The people at Seville were disappointed, when Archbishop Sandoval countermanded an Auto which had been appointed there. These things shew how an evil custom stifles in the people's hearts the compunctious visitings of nature. (101.) But, on the other hand, it seems impossible to give credit to the probability of the estimates of Llorente, as to the number of persons who suffered under the different tribunals of the Inquisition during this reign. There was scarcely any celebrated cause in the whole time of Philip III. That which Llorente selects, the case of the witches and wizards of Logroño in 1610, was followed by a Letter of Instruction from Archbishop Sandoval to the Provincial Boards of Inquisition, of which the whole purport was to mitigate the zeal for witch-finding.* And this result, the historian tells us, was attained. But as far as one can judge from the abstract of the evidence taken in this case, the prisoners were a vile crew of poisoners and secret murderers, beguiling dupes into their atrocious mysteries, as the old leaders of the congregations of Bacchanals at Rome, or the Fraticelli of Italy in later days. They were worthily condemned to the highest penalties. (102.) A late judicious American writer on Spain has remarked with much calm impartiality on the degree of credibility due to Llorente.† It is not, however, so much to be objected to him, that he destroyed the records of criminal processes, which mercy may have wished to have buried in oblivion,+ as that he seems to have made his calculations on very uncertain data, taking general averages for a * Llorente, c. xxxvii. ii. 51. It must be remembered that if the Inquisitors at Logroño burnt six wizards or witches, Matthew Hopkins in England a few years later burnt one hundred and nine. S. T. Wallis, Institutions of Spain. Lond. 1853, p. 270. |