Matters were still extremely strained between Philip and the pope, Paul IV., when, almost simultaneously with the king’s departure from Flanders, the pontiff died (August 15, 1559), and during most of the rule of his successor, Pius IV. (Angelo de Medici), Philip had a ready and pliant instrument in the chair of St. Peter. The gradual slackening of the bonds which bound the Spanish Church to the papacy, and the laxity of the ecclesiastical control which was a consequence, had brought about scandalous corruption amongst the higher and cloistered clergy. The general tone of religion, indeed, at the time seems to have been one of extreme looseness and cynicism, accompanied by a slavish adherence to ritual and form. The terms in which the king and his ambassadors in their correspondence refer to the pontiffs and to the government of the Church in Rome, are often contemptuous in the last degree. They are always regarded as simple instruments for forwarding the interests of “God and your Majesty,” the invariable formula which well embodies Philip’s own conception of his place in the universe. Nothing is more curious than the free way in which religious matters were spoken of and discussed with impunity, so long as the speakers professed profound and abject submission to the Church, which in this case really meant the semi-political institution in Spain. The Inquisition had from the first been jealously guarded from any real effective interference on the part of the pope, and by the time of Philip’s return to Spain had already begun to assume its subsequent character as a great political instrument in the hands of the monarch, working on ecclesiastical lines. So far as Philip’s personal experience extended, nearly all resistance to authority had begun with heresy, and, with his views as to the identity of his interests with those of the Almighty, it was evidently a duty to crush out ruthlessly any manifestation of a spirit which tended to his prejudice.