The external affairs of the kingdom certainly required at this time counsel of the greatest sagacity, and action of the greatest promptitude and courage. War was raging on the frontier of the Netherlands, and it was threatened on the frontier of Navarre. Coligny, at the head of a considerable army, was laying waste Flemish Artois; and Henry the Second was preparing forces for still greater operations. Although Anthony of Navarre was still engaged in treating about an amicable cession of his rights to the actual possessor of his kingdom, he was suspected to be secretly treating with France for aid to enable him to regain Pamplona by the strong hand. The duke of Alburquerque was charged with the defence of Navarre; and in Flanders, where the more important battles were to be fought, Philip the Second had wisely committed his cause to the military genius of the duke of Savoy.

Italy also presented grave causes for anxiety. Had the power of the Roman see equalled the fury of Paul the Fourth, the house of Austria would long ago have found its neck beneath the heel of that fierce old pontiff. The duke of Guise, with a gallant army, was now in the states of the church, and advancing upon the confines of Naples. The insolent incapacity of the Caraffas, and the inefficiency of their warlike preparations, had not as yet cooled the ardour of their French allies, nor become fully evident to their antagonist, the duke of Alba. At the beginning of this year's campaign, fortune had frowned on the Spanish arms. The papal forces, led by Strozzi, had recovered Ostia, and had driven the Castillians out of Castel-Gandolfo, Palestrina and other strongholds, by which they had hoped to bridle both the pope and the Frenchman. Even the duke of Pagliano, Caraffa as he was, had stormed

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Vicovaro and put the Spanish garrison to the sword.' Alba, therefore, was acting strictly on the defensive, being unwilling to waste blood and treasure on fields. where nothing was to be gained but dry blows and barren glory, or, as he said, 'to stake the crown of Naples against the brocade surcoat of the duke of Guise."

The aid of the great Turk enabled the most christian king to attack his most catholic brother by sea as well as by land, and to harass him at many points of his extended shores. For the second time within a few years, Christendom was scandalized by seeing St. Denis, St. Peter, and Mahomet leagued against St. James. Solyman the Magnificent had ascended the throne of the east in the same year when Charles the Fifth became emperor of the west. His reign was no less active and eventful, and far more uniform in its prosperity. By the capture of Rhodes, he had driven back the outpost of Christendom to Malta; he had performed moslem worship in the cathedral of Buda, and had pushed his ravages to the gates of Vienna; his power was now acknowledged far up the Adriatic; and by his judicious protection of the pirates of Africa and the Egean isles, his influence was paramount in the Mediterranean.

The growth which this piracy was permitted to attain is a striking proof of the mutual jealousy and distrust. which rendered the christian powers incapable of any combined and sustained effort for the common interests of Christendom. From Cadiz to Patras there was hardly a spot which had not suffered, and none which felt itself safe, from the wild marauders from the shores of Numidia.

1 Alex. Andrea: De la guerra de Roma y de Napoles, Año de MD. LVI y LVII, 4to. Madrid: 1589, pp. 146, 151.

2 J. A. Vera y Figueroa: Resultas de la vida de Don Fern. Alvarez de Toledo, duque de Alba, 4to. Milan: 1643, p. 66.

Better built, and better manned and equipped than any other vessels on the ocean, their light galleots and brigantines were ready at all seasons, put out in all weathers, and stooping on their prey with the swiftness and precision of the cormorant, overbore resistance or baffled pursuit. Sailing in great fleets, they laid waste entire districts and carried off whole populations. A few years before, Barbarossa had sold at one time, at his beautiful home on the Bosphorus, where his white tomb still gleams amongst its cypresses, no less than sixteen thousand christian captives into slavery. It was not only the seaman, the merchant, or the traveller who was exposed to this calamitous fate. The peasant of Aragon or Provence, who returned at sunset from pruning his vines or his olives far from the sound of the waves, might on the morrow be ploughing the main, chained to a Barbary oar. Sometimes a whole brotherhood of friars, from telling their beads at ease in Valencia, found themselves hoeing in the rice-fields of Tripoli; sometimes the vestals of a Sicilian nunnery were parcelled out amongst the harems of Fez. The blood-red flag ventured fearlessly within range of the guns of St. Elmo or Monjuich; it had actually floated on the walls of Gaeta; and when it appeared off the Ligurian shore, the persecuted duke of Savoy wisely fled inland from his castle of Nice. Yet Europe continued to endure these outrages, as it might have endured a visitation of earthquakes or of locusts; and the white-robed fathers of mercy annually set forth on their beneficent pilgrimages with a ransom of itself sufficient to perpetuate the evils which the order of redemption was intended to relieve. Meanwhile, with such a navy at his disposal as that of Tunis, and Tripoli, and Algiers, and such commanders as Barbarossa, Sala, or Mami the Arnaut, the sultan wielded the greatest maritime power in the Mediterranean, and was the most

formidable of the foes against whom the wisdom of Charles was now called to defend Spain.

Flanders, however, appeared to be the point upon which it was advisable that the strength of the crown should be first concentrated. Ruy Gomez de Silva had been instructed to raise eight thousand Castillians for the army of the duke of Savoy. But the treasury of Valladolid being already drained to its last ducat, it became necessary to look elsewhere for the sinews of war. The emperor was of opinion that it was now time to apply for aid to the church. The primate of Spain, cardinal Siliceo, was very infirm and very loyal, and his tenure of the second wealthiest see in Europe had been sufficiently long to make him very rich. To his money bags it was therefore determined first to apply the lancet, and the operator at once set off for Toledo.

The good old prelate bled freely, and without a murmur, pouring into the royal coffers, in the shape of a benevolence, or loan which had but slender chance of being paid, no less a sum than four hundred thousand ducats. The archbishop of Zaragoza, who was next applied to, was also tolerably generous, contributing, from revenues of no great magnificence, twenty thousand ducats. The bishop of Cordova was less tractable. Although his see was very rich, and he himself an illegitimate scion of the house of Austria, it was not until he had received several hints from the emperor himself that he consented to advance one hundred thousand ducats. Fernando de Valdés, archbishop of Seville, was, however, the prelate who strove with most spirit against the spoliations of the king's envoy. Magnificent to the church, and mean to all the rest of the world, profligate, selfish, and bigoted, with some refinement of taste, and much dignity of manner, he was a fair specimen of the great ecclesiastic of the sixteenth

century. In spite of his seventy-four years, his abilities and energies were unimpaired, while his selfishness and bigotry were daily becoming more intense. The splendid mitre of St. Isidore was the sixth that had pressed his politic brows; for beginning his episcopal career in the little Catalonian see of Helna, he had intrigued his way not only to the throne of Seville, but to the chair of grand inquisitor at Valladolid.' He left, as the principal memorials of his name, as archbishop, the crown of masonry and the weather-cock Faith on the beautiful belfry of his cathedral at Seville; and as inquisitor, two thousand four hundred death-warrants in the archives of the holy office of Spain.

When this astute prelate received from Ruy Gomez de Silva the unwelcome notice that the king expected his aid in the shape of mundane coin as well as of spiritual fire, he adopted the truly Castillian tactics of delay, and allowed two months to elapse without returning any definite reply. At length the emperor himself addressed him in a letter similar in style to that which had opened the purse-strings of the bishop of Cordova. It was with much surprise, said Charles, that he found an old servant of the crown, who had held great preferment for so many years, thus backward with his offering when the emergency was so grave and the security so good. The archbishop, seeing the affair growing serious, now left the court and retired to the monastery, a few leagues off, of St. Martin de la Fuente. From this retreat he penned a reply, than which nothing could be more temperate, plausible, dignified, and evasive. Professing the profoundest reverence for his catholic Cæsarean majesty, and gratitude for his past favours, he

1 D. Ortiz de Zuñiga: Annales de Sevilla, fol. Madrid: 1677, pp. 503,