quietly smuggled him into the hands of the Inquisition. With this the people rose. From the watch towers boomed the alarm bells, furious men swarmed into the streets, the king’s representative was dragged from his palace, stripped, stoned, scourged, and nearly killed; the palace of the Inquisition was besieged; faggots were piled up to burn it and the Inquisitors inside, as they had burnt others, said the mob. Then the Inquisitors gave way, and surrendered their prisoner to the populace, who took him back to the Manifestacion. He tried to escape and failed. He kept popular ebullition at fever-heat with artful proclamations and appeals, and unfortunately the hereditary office of grand justiciary fell at that time to a young man in Perez’s favour, who assumed office without Philip’s confirmation. To avoid further conflict, after the authorities had decided that Perez should be restored again to the Inquisition, the prisoner was secretly hurried out of Zaragoza into the mountains by his friends, and he escaped, after many wanderings, into France. He was supremely self-conscious--a monster of misfortune, a pilgrim of pain, as he called himself,--but he was clever and plausible, and was received with open arms by Catharine de Bourbon, Henry’s sister, in her castle of Pau. Henry himself made much of him, and so did Elizabeth and Essex. Pensions and gifts were showered upon him for years, for he knew all the weak places in Philip’s armour, and was ready to sell his knowledge to the highest bidder. Facile, witty, and utterly unscrupulous, he mingled the most sickening servility with the haughtiest arrogance. He betrayed and defamed in turn every person who trusted him, and, whenever he dared, bit the hand upon which he fawned. For years he tried unsuccessfully to crawl back into the favour of Philip III., the son of the man whom he had lived by libelling; and long before his death in Paris, in the midst of poverty (1611), he was contemptuously forgotten by his benefactors.