magnificent housekeeping at Brussels. But those halcyon days were over.
A gigantic fraud, just perpetrated by Philip; had descended like a
thunderbolt upon the provinces and upon all commercial Europe, and had
utterly blasted the unfortunate viceroy. In the latter days of the
preceding year the king had issued a general repudiation of his debts.

He did it solemnly, too, and with great religious unction, for it was a
peculiarity of this remarkable sovereign that he was ever wont to
accomplish his darkest crimes, whether murders or stratagems, as if they
were acts of virtue. Perhaps he really believed them to be such, for a
man, before whom so many millions of his fellow worms had been writhing
for half a century in the dust, might well imagine himself a deity.

So the king, on the 20th November, 1596, had publicly revoked all the
assignments, mortgages, and other deeds by which the royal domains;
revenues, taxes, and other public property had been transferred or
pledged for moneys already advanced to merchants, banker, and other
companies or individuals, and formally took them again into his own
possession, on the ground that his exertions in carrying on this long
war to save Christianity from destruction had reduced him to beggary,
while the money-lenders, by charging him exorbitant interest, had all
grown rich at his expense.

This was perfectly simple. There was no attempt to disguise the villany
of the transaction. The massacre of so many millions of Protestants,
the gigantic but puerile attempts to subjugate the Dutch republic, and to
annex France, England, and the German empire to his hereditary dominions,
had been attended with more expense than Philip had calculated upon.
The enormous wealth which a long series of marriages, inheritances,
conquests, and maritime discoveries had heaped upon Spain had been