Spain.

The mode in which public negotiations were conducted at this period,
interposes still further embarrassments in our search after truth. They
were regarded as the personal concerns of the sovereign, in which the
nation at large had no right to interfere. They were settled, like the
rest of his private affairs, under his own eye, without the participation
of any other branch of the government. They were shrouded, therefore,
under an impenetrable secrecy, which permitted such results only to emerge
into light as suited the monarch. Even these results cannot be relied on
as furnishing the true key to the intentions of the parties. The science
of the cabinet, as then practised, authorized such a system of artifice
and shameless duplicity, as greatly impaired the credit of those official
documents which we are accustomed to regard as the surest foundations of
history.

The only records which we can receive with full confidence are the private
correspondence of contemporaries, which, from its very nature, is exempt
from most of the restraints and affectations incident more or less to
every work destined for the public eye. Such communications, indeed, come
like the voice of departed years; and when, as in Martyr's case, they
proceed from one whose acuteness is combined with singular opportunities
for observation, they are of inestimable value. Instead of exposing to us
only the results, they lay open the interior workings of the machinery,
and we enter into all the shifting doubts, passions, and purposes which
agitate the minds of the actors. Unfortunately, the chain of
correspondence here, as in similar cases, when not originally designed for
historical uses, necessarily suffers from occasional breaks and
interruptions. The scattered gleams which are thrown over the most
prominent points, however, shed so strong a light, as materially to aid us