An arms over his son, prayed for a blessing on the expiring youth. The father withdrew, bathed in tears, and Carlos not many hours after breathed his last.* historian, who wrote from original documents, adds to a narrative otherwise not dissimilar, the significant words, "if indeed violence was not employed +." However terrific the sound of this may be on other occasions, in the circumstances of Carlos, it rather relieves the mind, by intimating that his agonies were cut short, and can hardly be said to insinuate an aggravation of a tale so tragic, that, if proved to be real, it would be still too horrible, and too wide a deviation from the general truth of nature, for the verisimilitude required in history. With whatever just horror a modern reader may contemplate such events, there is no reason to doubt that, throughout the whole course of conduct thus inhuman, Philip was unhappily supported by the approbation of a Imisled and deluded conscience. He and his contemporaries carried the notions of parental power to extremities, the practical assertion of which the laws of well ordered commonwealths would repress by condign punishment. Though it was then thought that a good prince *This narrative is abridged from Llorente, Histoire de l'Inquisition d'Espagne, c. xxxi. vol. iii. p. 127-182. Thuanus, lib. xliii. c. 8., corroborates the main circumstances from the testimony of De Foix, a French architect, then superintending the erection of the palace of the Escurial, who was employed to block up Carlos's windows, and to take away the locks of his apartment, on the night before the arrest. + Qua in custodia, infelix princeps, post sex menses, quum nullis aut Europæ principum legationibus, aut Hispaniæ regnorum precibus placaretur immotus pater, ex morbo ob alimenta, partim obstinate recusata, partim intemperanter adgesta nimiamque nivium refrigerationem, super animi ægritudinem (si modo vis abfuit) in Divi Jacobi pervigilio extinctus est."-Strada de Bello Belg. lib. vii. p. 213–218. edit. 4to. Mog. 16. Philip was falsely charged with the murder of his wife Elizabeth, who died in childbed in the following October. The story of her amour with Carlos is also false. It was indeed stipulated in the preliminaries of the treaty of Câteau Cambresis, that a marriage should take place between Carlos and Elizabeth. But they were secret, and the death of Mary Tudor, together with queen Elizabeth's refusal, induced Philip to substitute himself for his son in the definitive treaty. Carlos and Elizabeth were both in their thirteen.th year at the time of the secret agreement for their union in the prelimina ries of Câteau Cambresis, which were so speedily cancelled by the definitive treaty as to be unknown to both till a period long subsequent. A despatch of Phayer, the English minister, from Madrid, some years after the treaty, reports that Carlos was then in the habit of reproaching his father with his loss of Elizabeth. should leave the ordinary exercise of criminal justice to their judges, it was held also that kings, who were armed with the sword by God himself, were not bound to abstain from exercising their sacred right in such a mode as the circumstances of extraordinary cases might require. The rules and forms of law were thought to be desirable, but not indispensable parts of an act of regal justice. In the instance of Don Carlos, the father considered a secret execution as the only expedient for reconciling the deliverance of the nation from the rule of a monster, with the inviolable majesty of the royal line. The milder mode of pronouncing a lunatic to be incapable of succession to the throne probably appeared to him an open and dangerous invasion of the divine right of inheritance in a monarchy. He must also have been influenced by the more worldly policy of not keeping up a source of discord, and leaving behind him a pretence for usurpation which might deluge his mighty empire with blood. CHAP. II. SCOTTISH AFFAIRS UNTIL THE RETREAT OF MARY INTO ENGLAND. 1560-1568. THE safety of the British government depended on & protestant establishment. Protestantism could not be secure in England if it were oppressed and extinguished in the neighbouring countries; the foreign policy of the queen can hardly, therefore, be distinguished from her domestic administration: this has already appeared in two remarkable instances; it will appear on a larger scale, and during a longer time, in her transactions with Scotland. By its position in the same island, and by a language mutually understood, that nation possessed means of annoyance which gave it an importance and consideration with Elizabeth, to which its smallness and poverty would not otherwise have entitled it. The community of language formed a strong tie between the reformed preachers of both countries, the leaders of the people in that age of religious revolution. During the reign of Francis II. the duke of Guise and the cardinal of Lorrain, who were the rulers of France, governed Scotland by the hand of their sister the queen dowager*; a princess endowed with the capacity of her family, who was taught, by her feeble means, that she must stoop to prudence, and purchase some ascendant over events by occasionally yielding to their course. « She was compelled sometimes to lean on the protestant party as it grew in strength, with the same species of trimming policy which induced Catherine de Medicis in France to make occasional use of the Huguenots, to balance the aspiring house of Lorrain. The seeds of the reformation had been early scattered among the Scots, where they found a soil very favourable to their growth in the hot temper and disputatious spirit which were in that age regarded as peculiarly distinguishing the Scottish nation.† The blood of martyrs nourished the enthusiasm of the rising religion. Cardinal Beaton, archbishop of St. Andrew's, a man who united a dissolute life with a zeal for the faith shown chiefly in persecution, caused George Wishart, a pious and humble ecclesiastic, to be burnt alive for heresy, and went himself to witness the horrible death that was inflicted by his sentence. He and his dignitaries, clothed in their most gorgeous apparel, seated on velvet cushions, under a purple canopy, contemplated the lengthened agonies of Wishart, until his powers of life were destroyed by the flames. The very perilous though specious doctrine of tyrannicide was called into practice by these atrocities of men in authority. A Mary of Guise, duchess dowager of Longueville, espoused James V.; and, after some struggles with cardinal Beaton and with the house of Hamilton, became regent of Scotland in 1554. Acta Parl. Scot, ii, 603. +"Scoti ad iram naturâ paullo propensiores."...." Subita ingenia et ad ultionem prona, ferociaque. Ostentant plus nimio nobilitatem suam, ita, ut, in summa egestate, genus suum ad regiam stirpem referant. Nec non dialecticis argutiis sibi blandiuntur." Pref. Mich. Serveti ad Ptolemæi Geogr. Lugd. 1535. The very remarkable notions of national character to be found in the preface of Servetus had probably been collected at the monasteries and colleges where the poor scholars of all European nations were mingled. 2 March, 1545. Archbishop Spotswood, 81. body of persons, some of whom were of high rank, and none of the lowest, resolved to revenge the martyr by the slaughter of the cardinal. * They procured an entry into the castle of St. Andrew's by one of the falsehoods called stratagems, and they executed their purpose on a defenceless man, with all the precipitate rage which commonly attends such deeds.+ Though the queen regent had employed protestants as her occasional instruments, she could habitually trust none but catholics; and the rapid progress of the reformation obliged her to resort to French succour, -a measure too insidious and unpopular to be adopted without imminent danger. The lords of the congregation (so the protestant nobility were called) were driven by an imperious necessity to address themselves to England as soon as that kingdom was ruled by a protestant princess. Their success in Scotland was indispensable to the safety of Elizabeth: hence arose her inducement to favour them, and hence also sprung her justification for entering into a connection with them. Although Scotland was represented at Câteau-Cambresis by the French plenipotentiaries, and had been expressly comprehended in the general pacification concluded at that place, yet the pretensions, not renounced, of Mary to the crown of England, kept up an irritation and caused hostilities between the two courts, of which the particulars are sufficiently narrated by the historians of Scotland. English troops entered Scotland to protect the protestants against the French auxiliaries who were employed by the queen: the death of that princess, in June, 1560, contributed to prolong the Scottish troubles; while that of Henry II., in the summer of 1559, hastened the approach of civil war in France, by * Among them were two Leslies, the son and brother of the earl of Rothes, together with Kirkaldy of Grange. The court of Henry VIII. had previously assured the conspirators against Beaton of a secure asylum. Hamilton Papers, quoted by Robertson. Knox vindicates the slaughter on the same principle with the famous exclamation of Cicero, "Omnes boni, quantum in se fuit, Cæsarem occiderunt!" Sir David Lindsay expresses the general feelings of protestants :"Although the loun (fellow) was well away, 1559. The deed was foully done." Dumont, Corps Diplom. v. part. i. 28. 12th March, 2d and 3d April, giving full scope to the vast projects of the family of Guise. The progress of the reformation was rapid and universal in Scotland. The ignorant multitude continued to frequent the churches of their establishment long after most of them had caught a vague inclination towards the reformed faith, easily combining in their unreflecting practice what was irreconcilable in principle. The ascendancy of the protestant lords, and the presence of an English force, encouraged them to throw off the mask, and to give the rein to their strong preference for the reformation. The Scottish nation, which had one day appeared faithful to the church of Rome, on the next day took up arms for the protestant cause. The commerce of the Lowlands with England and Flanders naturally spread the new opinions in those more cultivated and better peopled provinces. It is not so easy to discover how the Highlanders, instead of imitating their Irish brethren in attachment to traditional opinions, transferred their veneration so lightly to novelties which might have been expected to be unacceptable to rude and uninquisitive mountaineers. They seemed to be secured from the contagion of innovation by their language, which was radically different from that of their southern neighbours, and marked them as belonging to a perfectly different race of men. But the few natives, who were thinly scattered over a rugged country, in which a parish was often as large as a diocese, and among whom the religious houses were too rare to supply the want of parochial care, were so slightly tinctured with religious opinions, or rather with superstitious usages, that they without difficulty followed the fashion of their chiefs, who were themselves partly tempted to assume the name of protestant by the lure of a share in the spoils of the church, and were possibly also influenced by the example of the southern barons, from whom the greater part of the Highland chiefs professed to derive their pedigree. In the summer of 1560, the princes of Lorrain, anxious to prepare, by the concentration of all their force, for |