So far as the aristocracy, the rich burghers, and the cultivated classes were concerned, Protestantism had made little if any headway in spite of the wide corruption of the Church, but among the peasants and the ignorant, particularly in the great cities, it had taken firm hold. To Philip it was both a damnable heresy and a civil menace; he hated it as his father had hated it, but Charles V was of a different mould and temper. Philip was a Spanish Catholic, and therein (at that time) lay all the difference. To him with his cold mind and pitiless temper there was only one question: how to root out this accursed and poisonous growth. The answer was at hand in the shape of the peculiar type of inquisition which had been invented in Spain for the sole purpose of completing the expulsion of the Moors and Jews from the Peninsula after the final defeat of the Mohammedan invaders. It had proved its efficiency to admiration, and, though it had never been used against Christian heretics, Philip felt (as others have felt after him) that both the righteous State and the Catholic Church were, through the King, fighting for their lives, and that he had no right to balk at any means that offered when it was a question of life or death. The old “Papal” Inquisition, which came into existence toward the end of the Middle Ages, and was the corollary of the dawning spirit of the Renaissance with which it synchronised, was legitimate enough, if you hold, as every one held then, that spiritual evil is as wicked as material evil, and just as worthy of formal punishment. Trials were conducted according to civil law, they were public, and the secular arm alone inflicted punishment. The “Spanish” Inquisition, which is the form so bitterly condemned to-day, was a creature of the Renaissance in its fulness. It was an engine of the most diabolical efficiency, for its proceedings were secret, its finding irrevocable, its penalties merciless and as cruel as English criminal law in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, though it lacked certain of the refinements of torture that were first developed under “Good King Hal” when he was waging his war against the monks and monasteries of his own England.