In face of such wholesale crimes, of these forty years of bloodshed, it is superfluous to refer to such isolated misdeeds as his repeated attempts to procure the assassination of the Prince of Orange, crowned at last by the success of Balthazar Gerard, nor to his persistent efforts to poison the Queen of England; for the enunciation of all these murders or attempts at murder would require a repetition of the story which it has been one of the main purposes of these volumes to recite.

For indeed it seems like mere railing to specify his crimes.  Their very magnitude and unbroken continuity, together with their impunity, give them almost the appearance of inevitable phenomena.  The horrible monotony of his career stupefies the mind until it is ready to accept the principle of evil as the fundamental law of the world.

His robberies, like his murders, were colossal.  The vast, system of confiscation set up in the Netherlands was sufficient to reduce unnumbered innocent families to beggary, although powerless to break the spirit of civil and religious liberty or to pay the expenses of subjugating a people.  Not often in the world’s history have so many thousand individual been plundered by a foreign tyrant for no crime, save that they were rich enough to be worth robbing.  For it can never be too often repeated that those confiscations and extortions were perpetrated upon Catholics as well as Protestants, monarchists as well as rebels; the possession of property making proof of orthodoxy or of loyalty well-nigh impossible.

Falsehood was the great basis of the king’s character, which perhaps derives its chief importance, as a political and psychological study, from this very fact.  It has been shown throughout the whole course of this history, by the evidence of his most secret correspondence, that he was false, most of all, to those to whom he gave what he called his heart.  Granvelle, Alva, Don John, Alexander Farnese, all those, in short, who were deepest in his confidence experienced in succession his entire perfidy, while each in turn was sacrificed to his master’s sleepless suspicion.  The pope himself was often as much the dupe of the Catholic monarch’s faithlessness as the vilest heretic had ever been.  Could the great schoolmaster of iniquity for the sovereigns and politicians of the south have lived to witness the practice of the monarch who had most laid to heart the precepts of the “Prince,” he would have felt that he had not written in vain, and that his great paragon of successful falsehood, Ferdinand of Arragon, had been surpassed by the great grandson.  For the ideal perfection of perfidy, foreshadowed by the philosopher who died in the year of Philip’s birth, was thoroughly embodied at last by this potentate.  Certainly Nicholas Macchiavelli could have hoped for no more docile pupil.  That all men are vile, that they are liars; scoundrels, poltroons, and idiots alike—­ever ready to deceive and yet easily to be duped, and that he only is fit to be king who excels his kind in the arts of deception; by this great maxim of the Florentine, Philip was ever guided.  And those well-known texts of hypocrisy, strewn by the same hand, had surely not fallen on stony ground when received into Philip’s royal soul.