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.”

As a matter of course, he was a firm opponent of the national rights of the Netherlands, however artfully he disguised the sharp sword of violent absolutism under a garland of flourishing phraseology.  He had strenuously warned Philip against assembling the States-general before his departure for the sake of asking them for supplies.  He earnestly deprecated allowing the constitutional authorities any control over the expenditures of the government, and averred that this practice under the Regent Mary had been the cause of endless trouble.  It may easily be supposed that other rights were as little to his taste as the claim to vote the subsidies, a privilege which was in reality indisputable.  Men who stood forth in defence of the provincial constitutions were, in his opinion, mere demagogues and hypocrites; their only motive being to curry favor with the populace.  Yet these charters were, after all, sufficiently limited.  The natural rights of man were topics which had never been broached.  Man had only natural wrongs.  None ventured to doubt that sovereignty was heaven-born, anointed of God.  The rights of the Netherlands were special, not general; plural, not singular; liberties, not liberty; “privileges,” not maxims.