The efforts of Philip had been directed towards making his people as rigid as monks. Pragmatics had been showered upon Spain, prohibiting for the hundredth time luxury or splendour in dress, furniture, and appointments, restricting the use of carriages, abolishing courtesy titles. No person was allowed to be educated out of Spain, and all attempts at introducing science in any form were sternly suppressed by the Inquisition. The most slavish and extravagant conformity in religious observance was enforced, but the loosest and most licentious conversation was tolerated. The women of Spain had in previous times been modest, almost austere and oriental in their retirement. They now became perfectly scandalous in their freedom, and remained a bye-word for the rest of civilised Europe for a century afterwards. Camillo Borghese was sent by the pope to Madrid in 1593, and thus speaks of the state of affairs at that time: “The main street of Madrid ... is unutterably filthy, and almost impassable on foot. The better class of ladies are always in carriages or litters, whilst the humbler folk ride on donkey-back or pick their way through the mire. The ladies are naturally shameless, presumptuous, and abrupt, and even in the streets go up and address men unknown to them, looking upon it as a kind of heresy to be properly introduced. They admit all sorts of men to their conversation, and are not in the least scandalised at the most improper proposals being made to them.” Philip’s pragmatics were useless. Extravagance checked in one direction broke out in others, and in the midst of the most appalling poverty, luxury and waste ran riot. The immense loss of life in constant wars, and the vast emigration to America, had depopulated wide tracts of country, and the laws which favoured the aggregation of property in the hands of the Church had turned whole towns into ecclesiastical settlements. The friars had grown more insolent as their riches increased, and as the king’s slavishness to their cloth became more abject, and now during his last years their power was practically supreme in the king’s court.