We should pause here to note that it was during Charles’s reign that Spain’s history became inextricably mingled with or touched upon that of every great division of the world, and that the emperor held possessions in Asia, Africa, Europe, North and South America. [Illustration] CHAPTER XVI. SPAIN’S RELIGIOUS WARS. The keynote of Philip’s character was bigotry. Trained in diplomacy by his imperial father, brought up in the atmosphere of royal courts, born to intrigue and bred to dissimulation, he early gave promise of a great future which he never fulfilled. When, at his abdication, in 1555, Charles admonished his son to “fear God, live justly, respect the laws; above all, cherish the interests of religion,” he really meant, as the codicil to his will expressed, in 1558: “Keep alive the fires of the Inquisition, and exterminate every heretic in the kingdom.” And, so far as it lay in his power, the filial son obeyed the precepts of his father to the letter! Born in 1527, at twelve years of age he lost his mother by death, and at twenty–seven, or in 1554, he was married to “Bloody Mary,” Queen of England, and thus became titular King of the British Isles, though never actually and actively engaged in the affairs of that kingdom during the fourteen months of his residence there. Indirectly, the result of this alliance was a fearful persecution of Mary’s Protestant subjects, and the burning at the stake of martyrs like Latimer and Cranmer, and more than three hundred others, before she died in 1558. Fortunately for England, no children were born of this alliance, the evil results of which were shown by the war with France, into which Mary was drawn by Philip, and the loss of Calais to the English. “When I am dead, Calais will be found written on my heart,” said the unhappy queen; but the faithless husband, for whom she sacrificed so much, was not inconsolable at her death, and soon again embarked in matrimony. In truth, Philip was already a widower when he espoused Mary Tudor, for he had been married to Maria, daughter of King John of Portugal, in 1543, who died within two years, leaving a son, Don Carlos, who became an object of suspicion to his unnatural father, by whom he was imprisoned, and probably poisoned, in 1568.