their consciences would be for violating their sworn faith to heretics.
Men knew, even if the easy-going and uxorious emperor, into which
character the once busy and turbulent Archduke Matthias had subsided,
might be willing to keep his pledges, that Ferdinand of Styria, who would
soon succeed him, and Maximilian of Bavaria were men who knew their own
minds, and had mentally never resigned one inch of the ground which
Protestantism imagined itself to have conquered.

These things seem plain as daylight to all who look back upon them
through the long vista of the past; but the sovereign of England did not
see them or did not choose to see them. He saw only the Infanta and her
two millions of dowry, and he knew that by calling Parliament together
to ask subsidies for an anti-Catholic war he should ruin those golden
matrimonial prospects for his son, while encouraging those "shoemakers,"
his subjects, to go beyond their "last," by consulting the
representatives of his people on matters pertaining to the mysteries of
government. He was slowly digging the grave of the monarchy and building
the scaffold of his son; but he did his work with a laborious and
pedantic trifling, when really engaged in state affairs, most amazing to
contemplate. He had no penny to give to the cause in which his nearest
relatives mere so deeply involved and for which his only possible allies
were pledged; but he was ready to give advice to all parties, and with
ludicrous gravity imagined himself playing the umpire between great
contending hosts, when in reality he was only playing the fool at the
beck of masters before whom he quaked.

"You are not to vilipend my counsel," said he one day to a foreign envoy.
"I am neither a camel nor an ass to take up all this work on my
shoulders. Where would you find another king as willing to do
it as I am?"