be no more blood publicly shed.  Most of the councillors were in favor of slow poison.  Montigny’s meat and drink, they said, should be daily drugged, so that he might die by little and little.  Philip, however, terminated these disquisitions by deciding that the ends of justice would not thus be sufficiently answered.  The prisoner, he had resolved, should be regularly executed, but the deed should be secret, and it should be publicly announced that he had died of a fever.

This point having been settled; the King now set about the arrangement of his plan with all that close attention to detail which marked his character.  The patient industry which, had God given him a human heart and a love of right, might have made him a useful monarch, he now devoted to a scheme of midnight murder with a tranquil sense of enjoyment which seems almost incredible.  There is no exaggeration in calling the deed a murder, for it certainly was not sanctioned by any law, divine or human, nor justified or excused by any of the circumstances which are supposed to palliate homicide.  Nor, when the elaborate and superfluous luxury of arrangements made by Philip for the accomplishment of his design is considered, can it be doubted that he found a positive pleasure in his task.  It would almost seem that he had become jealous of Alva’s achievements in the work of slaughter.  He appeared willing to prove to those immediately about him, that however capable might be the Viceroy of conducting public executions on a grand and terrifying scale, there was yet a certain delicacy of finish never attained by Alva in such business, and which was all his Majesty’s own.  The King was resolved to make the assassination of Montigny a masterpiece.

On the 17th August, 1570, he accordingly directed Don Eugenio de Peralta, concierge of the fortress of Simancas, to repair to Segovia, and thence to remove the Seigneur Montigny to Simancas.  Here he was to be strictly immured; yet was to be allowed at times to walk in the corridor adjoining his chamber.  On the 7th October following, the licentiate Don Alonzo de Avellano, alcalde of Valladolid, was furnished with an order addressed by the King to Don Eugenio de Peralta, requiring him to place the prisoner in the hands of the said licentiate, who was charged with the execution of Alva’s sentence.  This functionary had, moreover, been provided with a minute letter of instructions, which had been drawn up according to the King’s directions, on the 1st October.  In these royal instructions, it was stated that, although the sentence was for a public execution, yet the King had decided in favor of a private one within the walls of the fortress.  It was to be managed so that no one should suspect that Montigny had been executed, but so that, on the contrary, it should be universally said and believed that he had died a natural death.  Very few persons, all sworn and threatened into secrecy, were therefore to be employed.