he says: "Et dict on, de ce temps, que Machiavel est
encores ailleurs en crédit." The pertinently appropriate
quotation by which the Queen sanctified her murderous
resolve was supplied, not by her father's rejected and
discredited monitor, but by a bishop at the Council of
Trent, whose sermons had just been published: "Bisogna
esser severo et acuto, non bisogna esser clemente; è
crudel tà l'esser pietoso, è pietà l'esser crudele." And the argument was afterwards embodied in the Controversies of Bellarmin: "Haereticis obstinatis beneficium est, quod de hac vita tollantur, nam quo diutius vivunt, eo plures
errores excogitant; plures pervertunt, et majorem sibi
damnationem acquirunt."
The divines who held these doctrines received them through their own channels straight from the Middle Ages. The germ theory, that the wages of heresy is death, was so expanded as to include the rebel, the usurper, the heterodox or rebellious town, and it continued to develop long after the time of Machiavelli. At first it had, been doubtful whether a small number of culprits justified the demolition of a city: "Videtur quod si aliqui haeretici sunt in civitate potest exuri tota civitas." Under Gregory XIII. the right is asserted unequivocally: "Civitas ista potest igne destrui, quando in ea pI ures sunt haeretici." In case of sedition, fire is a less suitable agent: U Propter rebellionem civitas quandoque supponitur aratro et possunt singuli decapitari." As to heretics the view was: "Ut hostes latronesque occidi possunt etiamsi sunt clerici." A king, if he was judged a usurper, ,vas handed over to extinction: "Licite potest a quolibet de populo occidi, pro libertate populi, quando non est recursus ad superiorem, a quo possit iustitia fieri." Or, in the words of the scrupulous Soto: "Tunc quisque ius habet ipsum extinguendi." To the end of the seventeenth century theologians taught: "Occidatur, seu occidendus proscribatur, quando non alitur potest haberi tranquillitas Reipublicae."
This was not mere theory, or the enforced logic of men in thrall to mediæval antecedents. Under the most
