In the sixteenth century assassination flourished to an extent never before or since known: the hundred years that followed Luther's appearance on the great stage forming murder's golden age, whether we consider the number or the quality of the persons slain or conspired against, or the sort of persons who condescended to act on the principle that killing is no murder. Reformers and reactionists had their assassins; but it must be acknowledged that the latter had the best (which was the worst) of the game, so that nearly all the infamous names that have come down to us won immortality in their service. It was a great, a stirring time, one that was fertile in all manner of crimes, and in which a gentleman that had much nerve and no scruples was sure of constant and well-paid employment, and might make his fortune--or that of his family, if he chanced to be cut off because he had cut down some eminent personage whose life was a great inconvenience to this or that sovereign or party. The conflict that was waged was one of opinion, and therefore was fertile of fanatics, a class of men who have furnished a large force of assassins, who have generally acted on principle, without being always heedless of their interests. In the fierce struggle between old ideas and new, every weapon was employed, and the talents and dispositions of all kinds of men were made available by the great managers who had the casting of the performers in the numerous tragedies that were played. There was not a country in which assassination was unknown; and in most countries it was common, kings and churchmen being its patrons, and not unfrequently perishing by the very arts which under their fostering care had been carried to the highest pitch of artistic perfection. Philip II. was the most powerful monarch of those days. His regal career began just as the Reformation was at its height, and when the Reaction was about to begin. He was a sort of Christian Old Man of the Mountain; and assassination was with him a regular business, a portion of his mode of governing the many races that owned his sway. Mignet, in his "Antonio Perez et Philippe II.," after mentioning that Philip gave instructions to put Escovedo to death, says,--"This order would appear strange on the part of the King, if we did not call to mind the practices as well as the theories of that violent age, so fertile in assassinations. Death was then the last argument of belief, the extreme, but frequent means employed by parties, kings, and subjects. They were not satisfied with killing; they believed they had the right. Certain casuists attributed this right, some to princes, others to the people. Here is what the friar Diego de Chaves, Philip's confessor, wrote upon the very subject of Escovedo's death: 'According to my view of the laws, the secular prince, who has power over the life of his inferiors or subjects, even as he can deprive them of it for a just cause and by judgment in form, may also do so without all this, since superfluous forms and all judicial proceedings are no laws for him who may dispense with them. It is, consequently, no crime on the part of a subject who by a sovereign order has put another subject to death. We must believe that the prince has given this order for a just cause, even as the law always presumes that there is one in all the actions of the sovereign.'" When such a king as Philip II. has such a ghostly father as Diego de Chaves, assassination may become common. Escovedo was murdered; but there were others besides the King concerned in his taking off, one of them being the Princess of Eboli, widow of Philip's first favorite, Ruy Gomez de Silva, and Antonio Perez; and it was because the King believed they had tricked him in the business, that Perez fell, and, when in exile, had his life sought by some of his old master's assassins. Two Irishmen were authorized to kill him, by Philip's Governor of the Netherlands, but failed, and were hanged in London. Baron de Pinella tried to kill Perez at Paris, was detected, and executed. As he had been himself an active assassin, Perez could not well complain of these attempts; but they illustrate the theory and practice of the powerful Spanish monarch. Perez was one of those persons who labored to bring about the assassination of William (the Silent) of Orange.