There can be no doubt that the ruin of this celebrated man was decreed on evidence which would have been listened to only by a secret tribunal of unscrupulous enemies. It may be that some of his printed theology contained--what theology does not?--passages capable of interpretations neither intended nor foreseen by the writer; it may be that he had pillaged the writings of reformers, whose persons he would willingly have given to the flames. But it is certain that he was a man of unambitious nature, of active benevolence, and, according to the notions of that age, of exemplary life; that he was a scholar and theologian of practised and consummate skill, a wary shepherd of the faithful, a relentless butcher of heretics; that he carried his reluctance to the mitre so far beyond the bounds of decent clerical coyness, as to recommend three eminent rivals to Philip II., as more fit and proper than himself for the primacy; and that one of his first acts, as archbishop, was to advise the king to appropriate the revenues of a canonry in every cathedral in Spain to the use of the Inquisition. Setting aside, therefore, the palpable personal hatred which betrayed itself in all the proceedings against him, it seems probable that he spoke the plain truth, when he made his dying declaration, that he had never held any of the heretical opinions of which he had been accused. In after days, when enduring the sickness of deferred hope in his prison at Valladolid or at Rome, the archbishop perhaps regarded it as one of the mischances which marked the ebb of his fortunes, that he reached Yuste too late either to explain to the emperor the circumstances of his promotion, or to remove the suspicion which had been cast on his faith. On the evening of his arrival, Charles was too ill to receive him, and the day following, although he was thrice admitted into the sick room, he found occasion to utter only a few words. Those words, few and simple as they were, were some weeks after reported to the Holy Office, with, as it seems, gross exaggeration, by the confessor, father Regla.