of subjugating or at least dismembering the great kingdom of France were to, be attempted with any hope of success, at least it might have been expected that the man employed to consummate the deed would be furnished with more troops and money than would be required to appropriate a savage island off the Caribbean, or a German. principality.  But Philip expected miracles to be accomplished by the mere private assertion of his will.  It was so easy to conquer realms the writing table.

“I don’t say,” continued Farnese, “if I could have entered France with a competent army, well paid and disciplined, with plenty of artillery, and munitions, and with funds enough to enable Mayenne to buy up the nobles of his party, and to conciliate the leaders generally with presents and promises, that perhaps they might not have softened.  Perhaps interest and fear would have made that name agreeable which pleases them so little, now that the very reverse of all this has occurred.  My want of means is causing a thousand disgusts among the natives of the country, and it is this penury that will be the chief cause of the disasters which may occur.”

Here was sufficiently plain speaking.  To conquer a war-like nation without an army; to purchase a rapacious nobility with an empty purse, were tasks which might break the stoutest heart.  They were breaking Alexander’s.

Yet Philip had funds enough, if he had possessed financial ability himself, or any talent for selecting good financiers.  The richest countries of the old world and the new were under his sceptre; the mines of Peru and Mexico; the wealth of farthest Ind, were at his disposition; and moreover he drove a lucrative traffic in the sale of papal bulls and massbooks, which were furnished to him at a very low figure, and which he compelled the wild Indians of America and the savages of the Pacific to purchase of him at an enormous advance.  That very year, a Spanish carrack had been captured by the English off the Barbary coast, with an assorted cargo, the miscellaneous nature of which gives an idea of royal commercial pursuits at that period.  Besides wine in large quantities there were fourteen hundred chests of quicksilver, an article indispensable to the working of the silver mines, and which no one but the king could, upon pain of death, send to America.  He received, according to contract; for every pound of quicksilver thus delivered a pound of pure silver, weight for weight.  The ship likewise contained ten cases of gilded mass-books and papal bulls.  The bulls, two million and seventy thousand in number, for the dead and the living, were intended for the provinces of New Spain, Yucatan, Guatemala, Honduras, and the Philippines.  The quicksilver and the bulls cost the king three hundred thousand florins, but he sold them for five million.  The .price at, which the bulls were to be sold varied-according to the letters of advice found in the ships—­from two to four reals a piece, and the inhabitants of those conquered regions were obliged to buy them.  “From all this,” says a contemporary chronicler; “is to be seen what a thrifty trader was the king.”