INFLUENCE OF TRADITION 75
increase and intensify the national traits to which we have referred. The discovery of America flooded Europe with gold, and making the better class of Spaniards the richest people in the world naturally heightened their pride and arrogance. The long and eventful religious wars of Charles V. and Philip II. gave employment and distinction to thousands of families whose vanity was nursed by the royal favor, and whose ferocious self-will was fed and pampered by the blood of heretics and the spoil of rebels.
The national qualities of superstition and pride made the whole cavalier class a wieldy and effective weapon in the hands of the monarch, and the use he made of them reacted upon these very traits, intensifying and affirming them.
So terrible was this absolute command of the spiritual and physical forces of the kingdom possessed by the monarchs of that day, that when the Reformation flashed out, a beacon in the northern sky of political and religious freedom to the world, its light could not penetrate into Spain. There was a momentary struggle there, it is true. But so apathetic was the popular mind that the effort to bring it into sympathy with the vast movement
76 CASTILIAN DAYS
of the age was hopeless from the beginning. The axe and the fagot made rapid work of the heresy. After only ten years of burnings and beheadings Philip II. could boast that not a heretic lived in his borders.
Crazed by his success and his unquestioned omnipotence at home, and drunken with the delirious dream that God's wrath was breathing through him upon a revolted world, he essayed to crush heresy throughout Europe; and in this mad and awful crime his people undoubtingly seconded him. In this he failed, the stars in their courses fighting against him, the God that his worship slandered taking sides against him. But history records what rivers of blood he shed in the long and desperate fight, and how lovingly and adoringly his people sustained him. He killed, in cold blood, some forty thousand harmless people for their faith, besides the vastly greater number whose lives he took in battle.
Yet this horrible monster, who is blackened with every crime at which humanity shudders, who had no grace of manhood, no touch of humanity, no gleam of sympathy which could redeem the gloomy picture of his ravening life, was be-