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perhaps justifiably, restrained him. His mad passion for travelling was exasperated, and he formed wild schemes of escape. His incoherent talk often turned on the revolt of the Flemings, with whom he sometimes affected a fellow-feeling; while, on other occasions, he professed an ambition to command the army against them. When the duke of Alva took his leave to repair to that command, Carlos said, “My father ought to have appointed me."-" Doubtless," said Alva, "his majesty considered your life as too precious." Carlos drew his dagger, and attempted to stab Alva; adding, "I will hinder your journey to Flanders, for I will pierce your heart before you set out."

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Towards the end of 1567 his phrensy seemed to rage more fiercely, mingled with much of that cunning which sometimes, for a moment, covers madness with a false appearance of reason. He declared to his confessors that he was resolved to take the life of a man. In reply to their enquiries, who it was, he said that he aimed at a man of the highest quality; and after much importunate examination, he at length uttered, My father!" His father, attended by the chief officers of state, went at midnight in armour to arrest him. Philip, acting on his fatal notions of the boundless rights of kings and fathers, did not shrink from communicating his proceedings to the great corporations of Spain, and to the principal catholic states of Europe. His subjects and his allies interceded for Carlos. Their intercessions were withstood by the iron temper, the unbending policy, and the misguided conscience of Philip, although he was occasionally haunted by the unquenchable feelings of nature. The commissioners appointed to try Carlos reported, that he was guilty of having meditated, and, at his arrest, attempted parricide; and that he had conspired to usurp the sovereignty of Flanders. They represented the matter as too high for a sentence; but insinuated that mercy might be dictated by prudence, and threw out a hint, that the prince was no longer responsible for his actions.

Men of more science than the Spanish commissioners and more secure in their circumstances, might be perplexed by the intrinsic difficulty of ascertaining the precise truth, in a case where the malignant rage of Carlos often approached to insanity, and might sometimes be inflamed to such a degree as to be transformed into utter alienation of mind. The clouds which always darkened his feeble reason, might sometimes quench it. The subtle and shifting transformations of wild passion into maniacal disease, the returns of the maniac to the scarcely more healthy state of stupid anger, and the character to be given to acts done by him when near the varying frontier which separates lunacy from malignity, are matters which have defied all the experience and sagacity of the world. At this point the records of the commission close with a note made by their secretary, stating shortly that the prince died of his malady, which hindered a judgment. A dark veil conceals the rest of these proceedings from the eyes of mankind. It is variously related. Philip is said to have ordered that advantage should be taken of the distempered appetites of Carlos, which after he had confined himself to iced water for a time, were wont to hurry him into voraciously swallowing monstrous quantities of animal food; that his excesses should be allowed, if not encouraged; and that he should thus be betrayed into becoming his own executioner. Another narrative, not quite irreconcilable with the former, describes the prince of Eboli and the cardinal Espinosa as having intimated to Olivarez, the physician of Carlos (as darkly as John spoke to Hubert), that it was necessary for him to execute the sentence of death, which the king had pronounced on the wretched patient, in such a manner that his decease might seem to be natural. When he felt himself to be in the agonies of death, he desired to see his father, and to receive his blessing. Philip sent his blessing, but by the advice of the confessor declined to disturb the dying devotions of Carlos. Vanquished by nature, however, he stole into the chamber, and, standing unseen, spreading his

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.* An 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 misled 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 punishThough it was then thought that a good prince

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This narrative is abridged from Llorente, Histoire de l'Inquisition d'Espagne, c. xxxi. vol. iii. p. 127-182. Thuanus, lib. xliii. c. 8., corrobo rates 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 thirteenth 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 a 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 mo nasteries and colleges where the poor scholars of all European nations were mingled.

2 March, 1545. Archbishop Spotswood, 81.

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