of the master.”  In almost every letter he expressed vague generalities of excuse, or even approbation, while he chronicled each daily fact which occurred to their discredit.  The facts he particularly implored the King to keep to himself, the vague laudation he as urgently requested him to repeat to those interested.  Perpetually dropping small innuendos like pebbles into the depths of his master’s suspicious soul, he knew that at last the waters of bitterness would overflow, but he turned an ever-smiling face upon those who were to be his victims.  There was ever something in his irony like the bland request of the inquisitor to the executioner that he would deal with his prisoners gently.  There was about the same result in regard to such a prayer to be expected from Philip as from the hangman.  Even if his criticisms had been uniformly indulgent, the position of the nobles and leading citizens thus subjected to a constant but secret superintendence, would have been too galling to be tolerated.  They did not know, so precisely as we have learned after three centuries, that all their idle words and careless gestures as well as their graver proceedings, were kept in a noting book to be pored over and conned by rote in the recesses of the royal cabinet and the royal mind; but they suspected the espionage of the Cardinal, and they openly charged him with his secret malignity.

The men who refused to burn their fellow-creatures for a difference in religious opinion were stigmatized as demagogues; as ruined spendthrifts who wished to escape from their liabilities in the midst of revolutionary confusion; as disguised heretics who were waiting for a good opportunity to reveal their true characters.  Montigny, who, as a Montmorency, was nearly allied to the Constable and Admiral of France, and was in epistolary correspondence with those relatives, was held up as a Huguenot; of course, therefore, in Philip’s eye, the most monstrous of malefactors.

Although no man could strew pious reflections and holy texts more liberally, yet there was always an afterthought even in his most edifying letters.  A corner of the mask is occasionally lifted and the deadly face of slow but abiding vengeance is revealed.  “I know very well,” he wrote, soon after his fall, to Viglius, “that vengeance is the Lord’s-God is my witness that I pardon all the past.”  In the same letter, nevertheless, he added, “My theology, however, does not teach me, that by enduring, one is to enable one’s enemies to commit even greater wrongs.  If the royal justice is not soon put into play, I shall be obliged to right myself.  This thing is going on too long-patience exhausted changes to fury.  ’Tis necessary that every man should assist himself as he can, and when I choose to throw the game into confusion I shall do it perhaps more notably than the others.”  A few weeks afterwards, writing to the same correspondent, he observed, “We shall have to turn again, and rejoice together.