To such a dissolution that monarchy was peculiarly liable.  The King, and the King alone, held it together.  The populations which acknowledged him as their chief either knew nothing of each other, or regarded each other with positive aversion.  The Biscayan was in no sense the countryman of the Valencian, nor the Lombard of the Biscayan, nor the Fleeting of the Lombard, nor the Sicilian of the Fleeting.  The Arragonese had never ceased to pine for their lost independence.  Within the memory of many persons still living the Catalans had risen in rebellion, had entreated Lewis the Thirteenth of France to become their ruler with the old title of Count of Barcelona, and had actually sworn fealty to him.  Before the Catalans had been quieted, the Neapolitans had taken arms, had abjured their foreign master, had proclaimed their city a republic, and had elected a Loge.  In the New World the small caste of born Spaniards which had the exclusive enjoyment of power and dignity was hated by Creoles and Indians, Mestizos and Quadroons.  The Mexicans especially had turned their eyes on a chief who bore the name and had inherited the blood of the unhappy Montezuma.  Thus it seemed that the empire against which Elizabeth and Henry the Fourth had been scarcely able to contend would not improbably fall to pieces of itself, and that the first violent shock from without would scatter the ill-cemented parts of the huge fabric in all directions.

But, though such a dissolution had no terrors for the Catalonian or the Fleming, for the Lombard or the Calabrian, for the Mexican or the Peruvian, the thought of it was torture and madness to the Castilian.  Castile enjoyed the supremacy in that great assemblage of races and languages.  Castile sent out governors to Brussels, Milan, Naples, Mexico, Lima.  To Castile came the annual galleons laden with the treasures of America.  In Castile was ostentatiously displayed and lavishly spent great fortunes made in remote provinces by oppression and corruption.  In Castile were the King and his Court.  There stood the stately Escurial, once the centre of the politics of the world, the place to which distant potentates looked, some with hope and gratitude, some with dread and hatred, but none without anxiety and awe.  The glory of the house had indeed departed.  It was long since couriers bearing orders big with the fate of kings and commonwealths had ridden forth from those gloomy portals.  Military renown, maritime ascendency, the policy once reputed so profound, the wealth once deemed inexhaustible, had passed away.  An undisciplined army, a rotting fleet, an incapable council, an empty treasury, were all that remained of that which had been so great.  Yet the proudest of nations could not bear to part even with the name and the shadow of a supremacy which was no more.  All, from the grandee of the first class to the peasant, looked forward with dread to the day when God should be pleased to take their king to himself.  Some of them might have a predilection for Germany; but such predilections were subordinate to a stronger feeling.  The paramount object was the integrity of the empire of which Castile was the head; and the prince who should appear to be most likely to preserve that integrity unviolated would have the best right to the allegiance of every true Castilian.