Countries, and forms of government far different. It was scarcely
to be doubted that the absolute monarch of so many peoples would
look with a jealous eye on the institutions of those provinces
which placed limits to his power; and the natural consequence was
that he who was a legitimate king in the south soon degenerated
into a usurping master in the north.

But during the reign of Charles the danger was in some measure
lessened, or at least concealed from public view, by the apparent
facility with which he submitted to and observed the laws and
customs of his native country. With Philip, the case was far
different, and the results too obvious. Uninformed on the Belgian
character, despising the state of manners, and ignorant of the
language, no sympathy attached him to the people. He brought
with him to the throne all the hostile prejudices of a foreigner,
without one of the kindly or considerate feelings of a compatriot.

Spain, where this young prince had hitherto passed his life, was
in some degree excluded from European civilization. A contest of
seven centuries between the Mohammedan tribes and the descendants
of the Visigoths, cruel, like all civil wars, and, like all those
of religion, not merely a contest of rulers, but essentially of
the people, had given to the manners and feelings of this unhappy
country a deep stamp of barbarity. The ferocity of military
chieftains had become the basis of the government and laws. The
Christian kings had adopted the perfidious and bloody system of
the despotic sultans they replaced. Magnificence and tyranny,
power and cruelty, wisdom and dissimulation, respect and fear,
were inseparably associated in the minds of a people so governed.
They comprehended nothing in religion but a God armed with