treated with great distinction. But his son, Don Frederic, having deceived and abandoned a maid of honor and then espoused his cousin in order to avoid the reparation by marriage which his offense demanded, father and son were alike disgraced. Both were imprisoned in the castle of Uzeda. Don Antonio, however, having usurped the crown of Portugal, Philip needed an experienced general to lead his armies. He sent for Alva and gave him the command, but not forgiving him for his misdeed. In 1581 Alva defeated Antonio, driving him out of Portugal. Entering Lisbon, the Duke seized immense treasures and gave his soldiers license to sack the city and vicinity, which they did with a completeness only attainable by long service under a general skilled in the trade of war and rapine. Alva made no return to the royal treasury of his captured booty, and it is reported that upon being asked by an agent of Philip for an account of the gold and silver plundered from the city, he replied: "If the king asks me for an account, I will make him a statement of kingdoms preserved or conquered, of signal victories, of successful seiges, and of sixty years' service." Philip deemed it inexpedient to press his inquiries further.

In 1582, after having accomplished the mission intrusted to him in Portugal, he fell into a lingering fever, at the close of which he was so pitiably reduced that he was only kept alive by milk, which he drank from a woman's breast. His life went out with the expiring year.

No

Whatever may have been his merits as a soldier, or his capacity as a general-and they were undoubtedly great-his name, his fame, and his honor must forever rest under the black shadow of his heartless career in the Netherlands. slurring of facts or glossing of crimes by partial historians ; no eulogies or encomiums by Christians; no christening saint by pope, or dubbing knight by king can render his life and record other than that of an unfeeling tyrant actuated by pride, avarice, ambition, and a cruel disregard of the sacred right of civil and religious freedom.

JOHN KNOX.

THIS work would be imperfect without a sketch of the noted, persistent, and implacable Scotch reformer. He was a man who possessed sterling qualities, but whose religion made him a bigot and a hard-hearted, relentless despot. The good qualities he possessed, unfortunately, were overbalanced by his intolerance, bitterness, and brutality.

John Knox was born in 1505, of humble parents. He was educated for the priesthood at Haddington and St. Andrews, and appears to have been a close student. The Reformation had made considerable headway in Scotland before he came upon the stage; but it was not until after he enlisted in it and became its prime mover that it went forward to a successful triumph.

In 1549, or 1550, in spite of the vows of celibacy he had taken in the Romish Church, he was married to Miss Marjory Bowes, which was doubtless a very sensible movement on his part.

One of the blackest charges under which the memory of Knox rests is his participation in the assassination of Cardinal Beatoun in 1546. The clear description of the affair, from Archbishop Spalding's "History of the Protestant Reformation," vol. ii, p. 231, will be given :

"This barbarous assassination was concocted two years before, in England by the brutal Henry VIII., who was enraged with the cardinal for having foiled him in his attempt to get possession of the person of Mary Stuart, the infant queen of the Scots. The famous reformed Scottish priest and martyr, George Wishart-the religious teacher of Knox-came to England the bearer of a proposition from

certain Scottish lords, 'to apprehend and slay the cardinal.' Henry would not directly commit himself, but probably answered, as he did a year later to a similar proposal, that the parties had better do the deed and trust to his gratitude for the reward. The deed was done on the twenty-ninth of May, 1546, by assassins who, according to Foxe, 'were stirred up by the Lord.' The government of Edward VI. approved of it, and entered into a regular treaty with the assassins. Two months previously, Wishart, who had been the bearer of the infamous message to Henry, and who had stirred up riots and seditions wherever he preached, had unfortunately fallen into the hands of the cardinal and had been first hanged for sedition and then burned for heresy."

"What part did Knox and the reformers take in this treacherous and bloody deed, with which the Scottish Reformation was inaugurated? The answer is easily given. They openly approved of it, if they were not even accessory to it before the fact. Knox, to mark his approbation of 'the godly deed,' immediately threw one hundred and forty of his followers into the castle of St. Andrews to aid the assassins; and they all resolved together to resist the Scottish authorities to the last extremity, and to throw themselves on the protection of England.

Knox not only defended the 'godly deed,' but he spoke of it in a tone of levity and even of mockery, which betokened great hardness of heart, to use the softest expression. His biographer, indeed, endeavors to excuse him for this, on the ground that he was not able to restrain 'his vein of humor; though he admits that the pleasantry which Knox mingles with his narrative of his (Beatoun's) death and burial is unreasonable and unbecoming.' Knox evidently. thought that this assassination-as some of his friends said afterwards of his own famous sermon, to prove that the pope was Antichrist-was going at once to the very root of the matter.'

Knox partially espoused the cause of the Reformation as early as 1535, but did not openly profess Protestantism until

1542. A A year after the assassination of Cardinal Beatoun, he was taken prisoner by the French, who stormed the castle of St. Andrews, and was carried into France where he was detained two years. He returned to Scotland, but not coveting the crown of martyrdom, he fled to England, where he remained several years, employed as a missionary and chaplain of Edward VI. In 1554, apprehending danger, after the ascension of Mary he fled to Geneva where he several times betook himself in times of peril. Under the protection of Calvin he felt secure. There was a filiation of views and sentiments there that he scarcely found anywhere else. He frequently wrote to his disciples in Scotland during the three years he was away from them, and returned to them in 1559 when everything had ripened there for the establishment of a new Kirk. The change from the Catholic to the Protestant religion was probably more speedy and more thorough in Scotland than in any other country. In consummating this change, violence, treachery, and spoilation were the agencies freely employed. Let the archbishop speak again:

"That the Scottish nobles who joined the Reformation were impelled to do so by the hope of plunder, and that they were instigated and aided to achieve their ends by the English government there can be little doubt. Some of them, as we have already seen, had been intruded into the richest and most influential benefices of the Church; others hoped to build up their fortunes in a similar way. The former joined the reformers in order to secure to themselves and their pos terity their ill-gotten goods, the latter with the well-grounded hope to better their condition in the new order of things which was to arise on the ruins of the old." McCrie, the Protestant writer, says: "It has often been alleged that the desire of sharing in the rich spoils of the popish church, together with the intrigues of the court of England, engaged the Scottish nobles on the side of the Reformation. It is reasonable to think that, at a later period, this was so far true.”

As an indication of the spirit which prevailed in the country and governed the fiery Knox and his associates, Mc

Crie describes an instance where Knox preached a sermon at Perth, in May, 1559, in which he denounced the idolatry of the mass and of image worship. At the close of the sermon, and while several persons loitered in the church, an over-zealous priest, wishing either to try the disposition of the people or to show his contempt for the doctrines that had been preached, uncovered a rich altar-piece decorated with images and prepared to celebrate mass. A boy having uttered some expressions of disapprobation was struck by a priest. The boy retaliated by throwing a stone at the aggressor, which falling on the altar broke one of the images. This served as a signal to arouse the passions of the people present who immediately took part with the boy, and in the course of a few minutes the altar, images, and all the ornaments of the Church were torn down and trampled under foot. The noise soon collected a mob, who finding little to do in the church turned at once upon the monasteries and tore them to the ground. The authorities were unable to stay their ferocity (McCrie p. 182). These exhibitions became to be not at all uncommon; the burning of monasteries and Church property was by no means unusual. The archbishop says: "With the gospel in one hand and the fire-brand in the other, Knox and his brother preachers marched through Scotland, everywhere establishing the Reformation in the light of burning churches. and monasteries, with the noble monuments of art and learning which they contained." Knox, in the sermons which he was constantly giving the people, advocated the pulling down of the monasteries and destroying the images, pictures, and libraries so much revered and prized by devotees.

McCrie, the biographer of Knox, defends the vandalism in this language: "Scarcely anything in the progress of the Scottish Reformation has been more frequently or more loudly condemned than the demolition of those edifices upon which superstition had lavished all the ornaments of the chisel and pencil. To the Roman Catholics, who anathamatized all who were engaged in this work of inexpiable sacrilege, and represented it as involving the overthrow of all