Charles, Henry, and Hercules. Of which, although three of them became kings, and were married to beautiful and virtuous ladies; yet were they, one after another, cast out of the world, without stock or seed. And notwithstanding their subtilty and breach of faith, with all their massacres upon those of the religion, and great effusion of blood, the crown was set on his head whom they all laboured to dissolve, the protestants remain more in number than ever they were, and hold to this day more strong cities than ever they had.

Let us now see, if God be not the same God in Spain, as in England and France. Towards whom we will look no farther back than to don Pedro of Castile; in respect of which prince, all the tyrants of Sicily, our Richard the Third, and the great Evan Vasilowick of Muscovy, were but petty ones; this Castilian, of all Christian and heathen kings, having been the most merciless. For besides those of his own blood and nobility, which he caused to be slain in his own court and chamber; as Sancho Ruis, the great master of Calatrava, Ruis Gonsales, Alphonso Tello, and don John of Arragon, whom he cut in pieces, and cast into the streets, denying him Christian burial; I say, besides these, and the slaughter of Gomes Manriques, Diego Peres, Alphonso Gomes, and the great commander of Castile; he made away the two infants of Arragon, his cousin-germans, his brother don Frederick, don John de la Cerde, Albuquerques, Nugnes de Guzman, Cornel, Cabrera, Tenorio, Mendes de Toledo, Guttiere his great treasurer, and all his kindred, and a world of others. Neither did he spare his two youngest brothers, innocent princes; whom, after he had kept in close prison from their cradles, till one of them had lived sixteen years, and the other fourteen, he murdered them there. Nay, he spared not his mother, nor his

wife, the lady Blanch of Bourbon. Lastly, as he caused the archbishop of Toledo and the dean to be killed, of purpose to enjoy their treasures; so did he put to death Mahomet Aben Alhamar1, king of Barbary, with seven and thirty of his nobility, that came unto him for succour, with a great sum of his money, to levy (by his favour) some companies of soldiers to return withal. Yea, he would needs assist the hangman with his own hand, in the execution of the old king; insomuch as pope Urban declared him an enemy both to God and man. But what was his end? Having been formerly beaten out of his kingdom, and reestablished by the valour of the English nation, led by the famous duke of Lancaster, he was stabbed to death by his younger brother the earl of Astramara, who dispossessed all his children of their inheritance; which, but for the father's injustice and cruelty, had never been in danger of any such thing.

If we can parallel any man with this king, it must be duke John of Burgoigne; who, after his traitorous murder of the duke of Orleans, caused the constable of Armagnac, the chancellor of France, the bishops of Constance, Bayeux, Eureux, Senlis, Saintes, and other religious and reverend churchmen, the earl of Grandpré, Hector of Chartres, and, in effect, all the officers of justice, of the chamber of accounts, treasury, and request, (with sixteen hundred others to accompany them,) to be suddenly and violently slain. Hereby, while he hoped to govern, and to have mastered France, he was soon after strucken with an axe in the face, in the presence of the dauphin m; and, without any leisure to repent his misdeeds, presently slain. These were the lovers of other men's miseries, and misery found them out. Now for the kings of Spain, which lived both with Henry

1 Hist. of Spain.

m French Invent. in anno 1418.

the Seventh, Henry the Eighth, queen Mary, and queen Elizabeth; Ferdinand of Arragon was the first; and the first that laid the foundation of the present Austrian greatness. For this king did not content himself to hold Arragon by the usurpation of his ancestor, and to fasten thereunto the kingdom of Castile and Leon, which Isabel his wife held by strong hand, and his assistance, from her own niece, the daughter of the last Henry; but most cruelly and craftily, without all colour or pretence of right, he also cast his own niece out of the kingdom of Navarre; and, contrary to faith, and the promise that he made to restore it, fortified the best places, and so wasted the rest, as there was no means left for any army to invade it. This king, I say, that betrayed also Ferdinand and Frederick, kings of Naples, princes of his own blood, and by double alliance tied unto him, sold them to the French; and with the same army, sent for their succour under Gonsalvo, cast them out; and shared their kingdom with the French, whom afterwards he most shamefully betrayed.

This wise and politic king, who sold heaven and his own honour to make his son, the prince of Spain, the greatest monarch of the world, saw him die in the flower of his years; and his wife, great with child, with her untimely birth, at once and together buried. His eldest daughter, married unto don Alphonso, prince of Portugal, beheld her first husband break his neck in her presence; and being with child by her second, died with it: a just judgment of God upon the race of John, father to Alphonso, now wholly extinguished, who had not only left many disconsolate mothers in Portugal, by the slaughter of their children, but had formerly slain, with his own hand, the son and only comfort of his aunt, the lady Beatrix, duchess of Viseo. The second daughter of Ferdinand, married to

the archduke Philip, turned fool, and died mad and deprived. His third daughter, bestowed on king Henry the Eighth, he saw cast off by the king, the mother of many troubles in England; and the mother of a daughter, that, in her unhappy zeal, shed a world of innocent blood; lost Calais to the French; and died heart-broken without increase. To conclude, all those kingdoms of Ferdinand have masters of a new name, and by a strange family are governed and possessed.

Charles the Fifth, son to the archduke Philip, in whose vain enterprises upon the French, upon the Almaines, and other princes and states, so many multitudes of Christian soldiers and renowned captains were consumed, who gave the while a most perilous entrance to the Turks, and suffered Rhodes, the key of Christendom, to be taken, was, in conclusion, chased out of France; and, in a sort, out of Germany; and left to the French, Metz, Toul, and Verdun, places belonging to the empire; stole away from Inspruck, and scaled the Alps by torch-light, pursued by duke Maurice; having hoped to swallow up all those dominions, wherein he concocted nothing save his own disgraces. And having, after the slaughter of so many millions of men, no one foot of ground in either, he crept into a cloister ", and made himself a pensioner of an hundred thousand ducats by the year to his son Philip, from whom he very slowly received his mean and ordinary maintenance.

His son again, king Philip the Second, not satisfied to hold Holland and Zealand, (wrested by his ancestors from Jaqueline, their lawful princess,) and to possess in peace many other provinces of the Netherlands, persuaded by that mischievous cardinal of Granvil, and other Romish tyrants; not only

n Nether. Hist. 1. 7. p. 313.

forgot the most remarkable services done to his father the emperor by the nobility of those countries; not only forgot the present, made him upon his entry, of forty millions of florins, called the Noval aid; nor only forgot that he had twice most solemnly sworn to the general states, to maintain and preserve their ancient rights, privileges, and customs, which they had enjoyed under their thirty and five earls before him, conditional princes of those provinces; but, beginning first to constrain them, and enthral them by the Spanish inquisition, and then to impoverish them by many new devised and intolerable impositions; he lastly, by strong hand and main force, attempted to make himself, not only an absolute monarch over them, like unto the kings and sovereigns of England and France; but, Turk-like, to tread under his feet all their national and fundamental laws, privileges, and ancient rights. To effect which, after he had easily obtained from the pope a dispensation of his former oaths, (which dispensation was the true cause of all the war and bloodshed since then,) and after he had tried what he could perform, by dividing of their own nobility under the government of his base sister Margaret of Austria and the cardinal Granville, he employed that most merciless Spaniard don Ferdinand Alvarez of Toledo, duke of Alva, followed with a powerful army of strange nations, by whom he first slaughtered that renowned captain the earl of Egmont, prince of Gavare, and Philip Montmorency, earl of Horn, made away Montague, and the marquis of Bergues; and cut off in those six years, (that Alva governed,) of gentlemen and others, eighteen thousand and six hundred, by the hands of the hangman, besides all his other barbarous murders and massacres. By whose ministry, when he could not yet bring