There was no doubt as to his profound and varied learning, nor as to his natural quickness and dexterity.  He was ready witted, smooth and fluent of tongue, fertile in expedients, courageous, resolute.  He thoroughly understood the art of managing men, particularly his superiors.  He knew how to govern under the appearance of obeying.  He possessed exquisite tact in appreciating the characters of those far above him in rank and beneath him in intellect.  He could accommodate himself with great readiness to the idiosyncrasies of sovereigns.  He was a chameleon to the hand which fed him.  In his intercourse with the King, he colored himself, as it were, with the King’s character.  He was not himself, but Philip; not the sullen, hesitating, confused Philip, however, but Philip endowed with eloquence, readiness, facility.  The King ever found himself anticipated with the most delicate obsequiousness, beheld his struggling ideas change into winged words without ceasing to be his own.  No flattery could be more adroit.  The bishop accommodated himself to the King’s epistolary habits.  The silver-tongued and ready debater substituted protocols for conversation, in deference to a monarch who could not speak.  He corresponded with Philip, with Margaret of Parma, with every one.  He wrote folios to the Duchess when they were in the same palace.  He would write letters forty pages long to the King, and send off another courier on the same day with two or three additional despatches of identical date.  Such prolixity enchanted the King, whose greediness for business epistles was insatiable.  The painstaking monarch toiled, pen in hand, after his wonderful minister in vain.  Philip was only fit to be the bishop’s clerk; yet he imagined himself to be the directing and governing power.  He scrawled apostilles in the margins to prove that he had read with attention, and persuaded himself that he suggested when he scarcely even comprehended.  The bishop gave advice and issued instructions when he seemed to be only receiving them.  He was the substance while he affected to be the shadow.  These tactics were comparatively easy and likely to be triumphant, so long as he had only to deal with inferior intellects like those of Philip and Margaret.  When he should be matched against political genius and lofty character combined, it was possible that his resources might not prove so all-sufficient.

His political principles were sharply defined in reality, but smoothed over by a conventional and decorous benevolence of language, which deceived vulgar minds.  He was a strict absolutist.  His deference to arbitrary power was profound and slavish.  God and “the master,” as he always called Philip, he professed to serve with equal humility.  “It seems to me,” said he, in a letter of this epoch, “that I shall never be able to fulfil the obligation of slave which I owe to your majesty, to whom I am bound by so firm a chain;—­at any rate, I shall never fail to struggle for that end with sincerity.”