PHILIP II. AND THE INQUISITION.
The Inquisition burned with renewed flames under Philip II. from precisely the same cause that had made it tolerable to his father. To the troubles caused by the Reformation he attributed the election of his uncle Maximilian "King of the Romans," and his own consequent loss of the Germanic empire. But, as a compensation for this loss, he had substantially acquired England by his marriage with Queen Mary, and had the satisfaction of having his soldiers mingled with those of England in his war against France, and of seeing his own Archbishop of Toledo preside in the tribunal that condemned to the flames the Protestant bishops of England. The autos da fe of Smithfield were weeding out heresy and liberty from England, which he already began to look upon as a province of his empire, when his wife died, and the avowed heresy of Elizabeth blasted his hopes in that quarter. The heretic Prince of Nassau had raised insurrection in the Netherlands, which deprived him of Holland. When the French Catholic League, which he had so long subsidized, was about to declare him, or at least his daughter, sovereign of France, the relapsed heretic, Henry IV., blasted this hope by laying siege to Paris. On the side of the Catholic states of Europe his affairs went on most prosperously. He had acquired Portugal, with all her American and East India provinces. But in these new acquisitions he was not safe from the assaults of the heretics. The Dutch robbed him of Brazil, and of the Cape of Good Hope, and of the islands of Ceylon and Java in the East Indies. When his missionary emissaries had excited an insurrection by which he might have acquired Japan in a religious war, the Dutch were there with their ships, and, laying them alongside the rebel camp, they cannonaded it, while the imperial army on the land side utterly destroyed together emissary priests and rebels, and forever excluded Spain and her emissaries from the islands, and even England after the