His exchequer, so full when he ascended the throne as to excite the awe of contemporary financiers, was reduced before his death to a net income of some four millions of dollars. His armies; which had been the wonder of the age in the earlier period of his reign for discipline, courage, and every quality on which military efficiency depends, were in his later years a horde of starving, rebellious brigands, more formidable to their commanders than to the foe. Mutiny was the only organised military institution that was left in his dominions, while the Spanish Inquisition, which it was the fell purpose of his life from youth upwards to establish over the world, became a loathsome and impossible nuisance everywhere but in its natal soil.
If there be such a thing as historical evidence, then is Philip ii., convicted before the tribunal of impartial posterity of every crime charged in his indictment. He lived seventy-one years and three months, he reigned forty-three years. He endured the martyrdom of his last illness with the heroism of a saint, and died in the certainty of immortal bliss as the reward of his life of evil.
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A despot really keeps
no accounts, nor need to do so
All Italy was in his
hands
Every one sees what
you seem, few perceive what you are
God of wrath who had
decreed the extermination of all unbeliever
Had industry been honoured
instead of being despised
History is but made
up of a few scattered fragments
Hugo Grotius
Idle, listless, dice-playing,
begging, filching vagabonds
Ignorance is the real
enslaver of mankind
Innocent generation,
to atone for the sins of their forefathers
Intelligence, science,
and industry were accounted degrading
Labour was esteemed
dishonourable
Man had no rights at
all He was property
Matters little by what
name a government is called
Moral nature, undergoes
less change than might be hoped
Names history has often
found it convenient to mark its epochs
National character,
not the work of a few individuals
Proceeds of his permission
to eat meat on Fridays
Rarely able to command,
having never learned to obey
Rich enough to be worth
robbing
Seems but a change of
masks, of costume, of phraseology
Selling the privilege
of eating eggs upon fast-days