PG Edition of Netherlands series — Complete eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 5,745 pages of information about PG Edition of Netherlands series — Complete.

PG Edition of Netherlands series — Complete eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 5,745 pages of information about PG Edition of Netherlands series — Complete.
its queen.  But the queen outwitted, outgeneralled, and outlived, him; English soldiers and sailors, assisted. by their Dutch comrades in arms, accomplished on the shores of Spain what the Invincible Armada had in vain essayed against England and Holland; while England, following thenceforth the opposite system to that of absolutism and the Inquisition, became, after centuries of struggles towards the right, the most powerful, prosperous, and enlightened kingdom in the world.

His exchequer, so full when he ascended the throne as to excite the awe of contemporary financiers, was reduced before his death to a net income of some four millions of dollars.  His armies; which had been the wonder of the age in the earlier period of his reign for discipline, courage, and every quality on which military efficiency depends, were in his later years a horde of starving, rebellious brigands, more formidable to their commanders than to the foe.  Mutiny was the only organised military institution that was left in his dominions, while the Spanish Inquisition, which it was the fell purpose of his life from youth upwards to establish over the world, became a loathsome and impossible nuisance everywhere but in its natal soil.

If there be such a thing as historical evidence, then is Philip ii., convicted before the tribunal of impartial posterity of every crime charged in his indictment.  He lived seventy-one years and three months, he reigned forty-three years.  He endured the martyrdom of his last illness with the heroism of a saint, and died in the certainty of immortal bliss as the reward of his life of evil.

     Etext editor’s bookmarks

     A despot really keeps no accounts, nor need to do so
     All Italy was in his hands
     Every one sees what you seem, few perceive what you are
     God of wrath who had decreed the extermination of all unbeliever
     Had industry been honoured instead of being despised
     History is but made up of a few scattered fragments
     Hugo Grotius
     Idle, listless, dice-playing, begging, filching vagabonds
     Ignorance is the real enslaver of mankind
     Innocent generation, to atone for the sins of their forefathers
     Intelligence, science, and industry were accounted degrading
     Labour was esteemed dishonourable
     Man had no rights at all He was property
     Matters little by what name a government is called
     Moral nature, undergoes less change than might be hoped
     Names history has often found it convenient to mark its epochs
     National character, not the work of a few individuals
     Proceeds of his permission to eat meat on Fridays
     Rarely able to command, having never learned to obey
     Rich enough to be worth robbing
     Seems but a change of masks, of costume, of phraseology
     Selling the privilege of eating eggs upon fast-days

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PG Edition of Netherlands series — Complete from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.