No opposition was likely from the ranks of the clergy. The new bishoprics founded by Philip II had been reconstituted and the bishops selected by the king exercised strict discipline in their dioceses. Besides, all religious orders were now united by the necessity of opposing a common front to the attacks of the Protestants, and they felt that the fate of the religion was intimately bound up with that of the dynasty. The principle of the Divine right of Kings was opposed to the doctrine of the right of the people to choose their monarch propounded by the Monarchomaques, and Roman Catholics were, by then, attached to the monarchy just as Calvinists were attached to the Republic. The experiences of the last century prevented any return to the situation existing under Charles V, when, on certain questions, the clergy were inclined to side with the people against the prince. The close alliance of Church and State had now become an accomplished fact, and was destined to influence Belgian politics right up to modern times. The loyalty of the people was even stimulated by this alliance, the work of public charity being more and more taken from the communal authorities to be monopolized by the clergy. Attendance at church and, for children, at catechism and Sunday school was encouraged by benevolence, the distribution of prizes and small favours, while religious slackness or any revolutionary tendency implied a loss of all similar advantages. Here, again, the skilful propaganda against heresy constituted a powerful weapon in the hands of the State. It must, in all fairness, be added that charity contributed greatly to relieve the misery so widespread during the first years of the century, and that the people were genuinely grateful to such orders as the Recollets and the Capuchins, who resumed the work undertaken with such enthusiasm by the Minor Orders in the previous centuries. They visited the prisoners and the sick, sheltered the insane and the destitute, and even undertook such public duties as those of firemen. These efforts soon succeeded in obliterating the last traces of Calvinist and republican tendencies, which had never succeeded in affecting the bulk of the population. As a modern sovereign, bent on increasing the power of the State, Archduke Albert resented the encroachments of the clergy, as Charles V had done before him. But he was as powerless to extricate himself from the circumstances which identified the interests of his internal policy with those of the Church, as to liberate himself from the severe restrictions with which the Spanish regime paralysed his initiative in foreign matters. CHAPTER XIX RUBENS