Turning now to the portrait of the king we find there too the traces of a wavering purpose. The original conception was dark as Erebus. In the first act, more especially in the first act as originally printed, the King of Spain is painfully suggestive of a wicked ogre swooping in upon a nursery of naughty children. Such an insanely jealous, swaggering, domineering, cruel fanatic is too loathsome to be interesting. Then came the thought, suggested partly by the reading of Brantôme and Ferrera, of presenting Philip's character in a more favorable light and making him the center of tragic interest,--a thought which was neither given up nor consistently carried out. In October, 1785, Schiller wrote to Körner that he was reading Watson and that 'weighty reforms were threatening his own Philip and Alva.' The Rev. Robert Watson's history by no means idealizes Philip, but it credits him with sincerity, vigilance, penetration, self-control, administrative capacity and a 'considerable share of sagacity' in the choice of ministers and generals,--not an altogether mean list of kingly qualities. On the other hand, in Mercier's book[72] Philip appears as the embodiment of all those qualities which the Age of Enlightenment regarded as odious in a ruler. Thus, just as in the case of Fiesco, Schiller found himself pulled this way and that by his authorities; and the result of his attempt to graft an impressive monarch upon the stock furnished by St. Réal's jealous husband is a Philip who does not fully satisfy either the historic sense or the poetic imagination. For Schiller, of course, a truly great monarch needed to have a tender heart; so Philip was given certain sentimental traits. He feels the loneliness of his station. In spite of his seeming coldness the pleading of Carlos for affection touches him, and he gives orders that henceforth his son is to stand nearer to the throne. For the purpose of exhibiting the king's magnanimity we have the anachronistic scene in which he is made to pardon Medina Sidonia for the loss of the great armada,--an event which happened twenty years later. Then he becomes suspicious of Domingo and Alva and longs for an honest man to tell him the truth. And when the man appears the king is most surprisingly open-minded. 'This fire', he says to Posa, Is admirable. You would fain do good, Just _how_ you do it, patriot and sage Can little care. So Philip is a patriot and a sage, glowing with the holy fire of humanity; and as such he even deigns to explain his policy and to enter into a contest of magnanimity with Posa. But the large-hearted monarch of whom we get a glimpse in this scene is soon reduced back to the jealous husband of St. Réal, and his jealousy is closely patterned upon that of Othello. The Philip of the last two acts is sometimes pitiable, sometimes repulsive, never great. One is not very much surprised when he hires an assassin to kill Posa, instead of handing him over to the law.