Parliaments and Protestants, all saw that they had to do not only with a strong-willed king, but with a judicious and clearsighted man, a true French patriot, who was sincerely concerned for the public interest, and who had won his spurs in the art of governing parties by making for each its own place in the state.  It was scarcely five years ago that the king who was now publishing the edict of Nantes had become a Catholic; the Parliaments enregistered the decree.  The Protestant malcontents resigned themselves to the necessity of being content with it.  Whatever their imperfections and the objections that might be raised to them, the peace of Vervins and the edict of Narrtes were, amidst the obstacles and perils encountered at every step by the government of Henry IV., the two most timely and most beneficial acts in the world for France.

Four months after the conclusion of the treaty of Vervins, on the 13th of September, 1598, Philip II. died at the Escurial, “prison, cloister, and tomb all in one,” as M. Rosseeuw St. Hilaire very well remarks [Histoire d’Espagne, t. x. pp. 335-363], situated eight leagues from Madrid.  Philip was so ill, and so cruelly racked by gout and fever, that it was doubted whether he could be removed thither; “but a collection of relics, amassed by his orders in Germany, had just arrived at the Escurial, and the festival of consecration was to take place within a few days.  ’I desire that I be borne alive thither where my tomb already is,’ said Philip.”  He was laid in a litter borne by men who walked at a snail’s pace, in order to avoid all shaking.  Forced to halt every instant, he took six days to do the eight leagues which separated him from his last resting-place.  There he died in atrocious agonies, and after a very painful operation, endured with unalterable courage and calmness; he had ordered to be placed in front of his bed the bier in which his body was to lie and the crucifix which his father, Charles V., at his death in the monastery of Yuste, had held in his hand.  During a reign of forty-two years Philip II. was, systematically and at any price, on the score of what he regarded as the divine right of the Catholic church and of his own kingship, the patron of absolute power in Europe.  Earnest and sincere in his faith, licentious without open scandal in his private life, unscrupulous and pitiless in the service of the religious and political cause he had embraced, he was capable of any lie, one might almost say of any crime, without having his conscience troubled by it.  A wicked man and a frightful example of what a naturally cold and hard spirit may become when it is a prey to all the temptations of despotism and to two sole passions, egotism and fanaticism.