The Burgundian and Austrian elements of his blood seemed to have evaporated, and his veins were filled alone with the ancient ardor, which in heroic centuries had animated the Gothic champions of Spain.  The fierce enthusiasm for the Cross, which in the long internal warfare against the Crescent, had been the romantic and distinguishing feature of the national character, had degenerated into bigotry.  That which had been a nation’s glory now made the monarch’s shame.  The Christian heretic was to be regarded with a more intense hatred than even Moor or Jew had excited in the most Christian ages, and Philip was to be the latest and most perfect incarnation of all this traditional enthusiasm, this perpetual hate.  Thus he was likely to be single-hearted in his life.  It was believed that his ambition would be less to extend his dominions than to vindicate his title of the most Catholic king.  There could be little doubt entertained that he would be, at least, dutiful to his father in this respect, and that the edicts would be enforced to the letter.

He was by birth, education, and character, a Spaniard, and that so exclusively, that the circumstance would alone have made him unfit to govern a country so totally different in habits and national sentiments from his native land.  He was more a foreigner in Brussels, even, than in England.  The gay, babbling, energetic, noisy life of Flanders and Brabant was detestable to him.  The loquacity of the Netherlanders was a continual reproach upon his taciturnity.  His education had imbued him, too, with the antiquated international hatred of Spaniard and Fleming, which had been strengthening in the metropolis, while the more rapid current of life had rather tended to obliterate the sentiment in the provinces.

The flippancy and profligacy of Philip the Handsome, the extortion and insolence of his Flemish courtiers, had not been forgotten in Spain, nor had Philip the Second forgiven his grandfather for having been a foreigner.  And now his mad old grandmother, Joanna, who had for years been chasing cats in the lonely tower where she had been so long imprisoned, had just died; and her funeral, celebrated with great pomp by both her sons, by Charles at Brussels and Ferdinand at Augsburg, seemed to revive a history which had begun to fade, and to recall the image of Castilian sovereignty which had been so long obscured in the blaze of imperial grandeur.

His education had been but meagre.  In an age when all kings and noblemen possessed many languages, he spoke not a word of any tongue but Spanish, —­although he had a slender knowledge of French and Italian, which he afterwards learned to read with comparative facility.  He had studied a little history and geography, and he had a taste for sculpture, painting, and architecture.  Certainly if he had not possessed a feeling for art, he would have been a monster.  To have been born in the earlier part of the sixteenth century, to have been a king, to have had Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands as a birthright, and not to have been inspired with a spark of that fire which glowed so intensely in those favored lands and in that golden age, had indeed been difficult.