unanimously agreed that there should be no more blood publicly shed.
Most of the councillors were in favor of slow poison. Montigny's meat
and drink, they said, should be daily drugged, so that he might die by
little and little. Philip, however, terminated these disquisitions by
deciding that the ends of justice would not thus be sufficiently
answered. The prisoner, he had resolved, should be regularly executed,
but the deed should be secret, and it should be publicly announced that
he had died of a fever.

This point having been settled; the King now set about the arrangement
of his plan with all that close attention to detail which marked his
character. The patient industry which, had God given him a human heart
and a love of right, might have made him a useful monarch, he now devoted
to a scheme of midnight murder with a tranquil sense of enjoyment which
seems almost incredible. There is no exaggeration in calling the deed
a murder, for it certainly was not sanctioned by any law, divine or
human, nor justified or excused by any of the circumstances which are
supposed to palliate homicide. Nor, when the elaborate and superfluous
luxury of arrangements made by Philip for the accomplishment of his
design is considered, can it be doubted that he found a positive pleasure
in his task. It would almost seem that he had become jealous of Alva's
achievements in the work of slaughter. He appeared willing to prove to
those immediately about him, that however capable might be the Viceroy of
conducting public executions on a grand and terrifying scale, there was
yet a certain delicacy of finish never attained by Alva in such business,
and which was all his Majesty's own. The King was resolved to make the
assassination of Montigny a masterpiece.

On the 17th August, 1570, he accordingly directed Don Eugenio de Peralta,
concierge of the fortress of Simancas, to repair to Segovia, and thence