sums by individuals, with the permission of his Holiness, for the liberty of abstaining from the Church fasts, was estimated at five hundred thousand ducats.  These and a few more meagre items only sufficed to stretch his income to a total of one million three hundred and thirty thousand far the two years, against an expenditure calculated at near eleven millions.  “Thus, there are nine millions, less three thousand ducats, deficient,” he concluded ruefully (and making a mistake in his figures in his own favor of six hundred and sixty-three thousand besides), “which I may look for in the sky, or try to raise by inventions already exhausted.”

Thus, the man who owned all America and half of Europe could only raise a million ducats a year from his estates.  The possessor of all Peru and Mexico could reckon on “nothing worth mentioning” from his mines, and derived a precarious income mainly from permissions granted his subjects to carry on the slave-trade and to eat meat on Fridays.  This was certainly a gloomy condition of affairs for a monarch on the threshold of a war which was to outlast his own life and that of his children; a war in which the mere army expenses were to be half a million florins monthly, in which about seventy per cent. of the annual disbursements was to be regularly embezzled or appropriated by the hands through which it passed, and in which for every four men on paper, enrolled and paid for, only one, according to the average, was brought into the field.

Granvelle, on the other hand, gave his master but little consolation from the aspect of financial affairs in the provinces.  He assured him that “the government was often in such embarrassment as not to know where to look for ten ducats.”  He complained bitterly that the states would meddle with the administration of money matters, and were slow in the granting of subsidies.  The Cardinal felt especially outraged by the interference of these bodies with the disbursement of the sums which they voted.  It has been seen that the states had already compelled the government to withdraw the troops, much to the regret of Granvelle.  They continued, however, to be intractable on the subject of supplies.  “These are very vile things,” he wrote to Philip, “this authority which they assume, this audacity with which they say whatever they think proper; and these impudent conditions which they affix to every proposition for subsidies.”  The Cardinal protested that he had in vain attempted to convince them of their error, but that they remained perverse.

It was probably at this time that the plan for debasing the coin, suggested to Philip some time before by a skilful chemist named Malen, and always much approved of both by himself and Ruy Gomez, recurred to his mind.  “Another and an extraordinary source of revenue, although perhaps not a very honorable one,” wrote Suriano, “has hitherto been kept secret; and on account of differences of opinion between the King and his confessor, has been discontinued.”