Philip was born to a hopeless battle. Spain, always a poor country of itself, was saddled by the marriage of Philip’s grandparents with a European foreign policy which cursed it with continuous wars for a century. The tradition he had inherited, and his own knowledge, showed him that his only chance of safety was to maintain a close political alliance with England. We have seen how, by fair means and by foul, he strove to this end through a long life, and how from the mere force of circumstances it was unattainable. Spain’s power was imperilled from the moment that Philip the Handsome brought the inheritance of Burgundy to Jane the Mad, and the doom was sealed when Henry Tudor cast his eyes upon Anne Boleyn; for the first event made a fixed alliance with England vital, and the second made it impossible. It may be objected that if a man of nimble mind and easy conscience had been in Philip’s place, and had fought Elizabeth, Catharine, and Orange with their own weapons of tergiversation and religious opportunism, the result might have been different, as it also might have been if he had opened his mind to new ideas and accepted the reformed faith. But apart from his mental qualities, and his monastic training, which made such an attitude impossible for him, his party had been chosen for him before his birth, and he inherited the championship of obscurantism, as he inherited the task which obscurantism was powerless to perform. Burdened thus, as he was, with an inherited work for which neither he, nor his inherited means, was adequate, it was only natural that he should adopt the strange views of the semi-divinity of himself and his mission that so deeply coloured most of the acts of his life. The descendant and the ancestor of a line of religious mystics, he looked upon himself as only an exalted instrument of a higher power. Philip of Austria could not be defeated, because Philip of Austria was not fighting. It was God’s battle, not his; and he might well be calm in the face of reverses that would have broken another man’s heart; for he knew, as he often said, that in the long-run the Almighty would fight for His own hand, and that defeat for Him was impossible. Where his reasoning was weak was in the assumption that the cause of the Almighty and the interests of Philip of Austria were necessarily identical. GENEALOGICAL TABLE SHOWING PHILIP’S CLAIM TO THE ENGLISH CROWN