BOOK III.

THE WARS OF RELIGIONS IN NETHERLANDS (CONTINUED)

CHAPTER XXIV.

ALVA SENT TO THE NETHERLANDS.

1567.

While Margaret was thus successful in bringing the country to a state of at least temporary tranquility, measures were taken at the court of Madrid for shifting the government of the Netherlands into other hands, and for materially changing its policy.

We have seen how actively the rumors had been circulated, throughout the last year, of Philip's intended visit to the country. These rumors had received abundant warrant from his own letters, addressed to the regent and to his ministers at the different European courts. Nor did the king confine himself to professions. He applied to the French government to allow a free passage for his army through its territories. He caused a survey to be made of that part of Savoy through which his troops would probably march, and a map of the proposed route to be prepared. He ordered fresh levies from Germany to meet him on the Flemish frontier. And finally, he talked of calling the cortes together, to provide for the regency during his absence.

Yet whoever else might be imposed on, there was one potentate in Europe whose clear vision was not to be blinded by the professions of Philip, nor by all this bustle of preparation. This was the old pontiff, Pius the Fifth, who had always distrusted the king's sincerity. Pius had beheld with keen anguish the spread of heresy in the Low Countries. Like a true son of the Inquisition as he was, he would gladly have seen its fires kindled in every city of this apostate land. He had observed with vexation the apathy manifested by Philip. And he at length resolved to dispatch a special embassy to Spain, to stimulate the monarch, if possible, to more decided action.

The person employed was the bishop of Ascoli, and the good father delivered his rebuke in such blunt terms as caused a sensation at the court of Madrid. In a letter to his ambassador at Rome, Philip complained that the pope should have thus held him up to Christendom as one slack in the performance of his duty. The envoy had delivered himself in so strange a manner, Philip added, that, but for the respect and love he bore his holiness, he might have been led to take precisely the opposite course to the one he intended.

Yet notwithstanding this show of indignation, had it not been for the outbreak of the iconoclasts, it is not improbable that the king might still have continued to procrastinate, relying on his favorite maxim, that “Time and himself were a match for any other two”. But the event which caused such a sensation throughout Christendom roused every feeling of indignation in the royal bosom, and this from the insult offered to the crown as well as to the Church. Contrary to his wont, the king expressed himself with so much warmth on the subject, and so openly, that the most skeptical began at last to believe that the long talked of visit was at hand. The only doubt was as to the manner in which it should be made; whether the king should march at the head of an army, or attended only by so much of a retinue as was demanded by his royal state.

The question was warmly discussed in the council. Ruy Gomez, the courtly favorite of Philip, was for the latter alternative. A civil war he deprecated, as bringing ruin even to the victor. Clemency was the best attribute of a sovereign, and the people of Flanders were a generous race, more likely to be overcome by kindness than by arms. In these liberal and humane views the prince of Eboli was supported by the politic secretary, Antonio Perez, and by the duke of Feria, formerly ambassador to London, a man who to polished manners united a most insinuating eloquence.

But very different opinions, as might be expected, were advanced by the duke of Alva. The system of indulgence, he said, had been that followed by the regent, and its fruits were visible. The weeds of heresy were not to be extirpated by a gentle hand; and his majesty should deal with his rebellious vassals as Charles the Fifth had dealt with their rebel fathers at Ghent. These stern views received support from the Cardinal Espinosa, who held the office of president of the council, as well as of grand inquisitor, and who doubtless thought the insult offered to the Inquisition not the least of the offences to be charged on the Reformers.

Each of the great leaders recommended the measures most congenial with his own character, and which, had they been adopted, would probably have required his own services to carry them into execution. Had the pacific course been taken, Feria, or more probably Ruy Gomez, would have been entrusted with the direction of affairs. Indeed, Montigny and Bergen, still detained in reluctant captivity at Madrid, strongly urged the king to send the prince of Eboli, as a man, who, by his popular manners and known discretion, would be most likely to reconcile opposite factions. Were violent measures, on the other hand, to be adopted, to whom could they be so well entrusted as to the duke himself, the most experienced captain of his time?

The king, it is said, contrary to his custom, was present at the meeting of the council, and listened to the debate. He did not intimate his opinion. But it might be conjectured to which side he was most likely to lean, from his habitual preference for coercive measures.

Philip came to a decision sooner than usual. In a few days he summoned the duke, and told him that he had resolved to send him forthwith, at the head of an army, to the Netherlands. It was only, however, to prepare the way for his own coming, which would take place as soon as the country was in a state sufficiently settled to receive him.

All was now alive with the business of preparation in Castile. Levies were raised throughout the country. Such was the zeal displayed, that even the Inquisition and the clergy advanced a considerable sum towards defraying the expenses of an expedition which they seemed to regard in the light of a crusade. Magazines of provisions were ordered to be established at regular stations on the proposed line of march. Orders were sent, that the old Spanish garrisons in Lombardy, Naples, Sicily, and Sardinia, should be transported to the place of rendezvous in Piedmont, to await the coming of the duke, who would supply their places with the fresh recruits brought with him from Castile.

Philip meanwhile constantly proclaimed that Alva's departure was only the herald of his own. He wrote this to Margaret, assuring her of his purpose to go by water, and directing her to have a squadron of eight vessels in readiness to convoy him to Zealand, where he proposed to land. The vessels were accordingly equipped. Processions were made, and prayers put up in all the churches, for the prosperous passage of the king. Yet there were some in the Netherlands who remarked that prayers to avert the dangers of the sea were hardly needed by the monarch in his palace at Madrid! Many of those about the royal person soon indulged in the same skepticism in regard to the king's sincerity, as week after week passed away, and no arrangements were made for his departure. Among the contradictory rumors at court in respect to the king’s intention, the pope's nuncio wrote, it was impossible to get at the truth. It was easy to comprehend the general policy of Philip, but impossible to divine the particular plans by which, it was to be carried out. If such was the veil which hid the monarch's purposes even from the eyes of those who had nearest access to his person, how can we hope at this distance of time to penetrate it? Yet the historian of the nineteenth century is admitted to the perusal of many an authentic document revealing the royal purpose, which never came under the eye of the courtier of Madrid.

With all the light thus afforded, it is still difficult to say whether Philip ever was sincere in his professions of visiting the Netherlands. If he were so at any time, it certainly was not after he had decided on the mission of Alva. Philip widely differed from his father in a sluggishness of body which made any undertaking that required physical effort exceedingly irksome. He shrunk from no amount of sedentary labor, would toil from morning till midnight in his closet, like the humblest of his secretaries. But a journey was a great undertaking. After his visits, during his father's lifetime, to England and the Low Countries, he rarely travelled farther, as his graceless son satirically hinted, than from Madrid to Aranjuez, or Madrid to the Escorial. A thing so formidable as an expedition to Flanders, involving a tedious journey through an unfriendly land, or a voyage through seas not less unfriendly, was what, under ordinary circumstances, the king would have never dreamed of.

The present aspect of affairs, moreover, had nothing in it particularly inviting, especially to a prince of Philip’s temper. Never was there a prince more jealous of his authority; and the indignities to which he might have been exposed, in the disorderly condition of the country, might well have come to the aid of his constitutional sluggishness to deter him from the visit.

Under these circumstances, it is not strange that Philip, if he had ever entertained a vague project of a journey to the Netherlands, should have yielded to his natural habit of procrastination. The difficulties of a winter's voyage, the necessity of summoning the cortes and settling the affairs of the kingdom, his own protracted illness, furnished so many apologies for postponing the irksome visit, until the time had passed when such a visit could be effectual.

That he should so strenuously have asserted his purpose of going to the Netherlands may be explained by a desire in some sort to save his credit with those who seemed to think that the present exigency demanded he should go. He may have also thought it politic to keep up the idea of a visit to the Low Countries, in order to curb—as it no doubt had the effect in some degree of curbing—the licence of the people, who believed they were soon to be called to a reckoning for their misdeeds by their prince in person. After all, the conduct of Philip on this occasion, and the motives assigned for his delay in his letters to Margaret, must be allowed to afford a curious coincidence with those ascribed, in circumstances not dissimilar, by the Roman historian to Tiberius.

On the fifteenth of April, 1567, Alva had his last audience of Philip at Aranjuez. He immediately after departed for Carthagena, where a fleet of thirty-six vessels, under the Genoese Admiral Doria, lay riding at anchor to receive him. He was detained some time for the arrival of the troops, and while there he received dispatches from court containing his commission of captain-general, and particular instructions as to the course he was to pursue in the Netherlands. They were so particular, that, notwithstanding the broad extent of his powers, the duke wrote to his master complaining of his want of confidence, and declaring that he had never been hampered by instructions so minute, even under the emperor. One who has studied the character of Philip will find no difficulty in believing it.

On the twenty-seventh of April, the fleet weighed anchor; but in consequence of a detention of some days at several places on the Catalan coast, it did not reach the Genoese port of Savona till the seventeenth of the next month. The duke had been ill when he went on board; and his gouty constitution received no benefit from the voyage. Yet he did not decline the hospitalities offered by the Genoese nobles, who vied with the senate in showing the Spanish commander every testimony of respect. At Asti he was waited on by Albuquerque, the Milanese viceroy, and by ambassadors from different Italian provinces, eager to pay homage to the military representative of the Spanish monarch. But the gout under which Alva labored was now aggravated by an attack of tertian ague, and for a week or more he was confined to his bed.

Meanwhile the troops had assembled at the appointed rendezvous; and the duke, as soon as he had got the better of his disorder, made haste to review them. They amounted in all to about ten thousand men, of whom less than thirteen hundred were cavalry. But though small in amount, it was a picked body of troops, such as was hardly to be matched in Europe. The infantry, in particular, were mostly Spaniards,—veterans who had been accustomed to victory under the banner of Charles the Fifth, and many of them trained to war under the eye of Alva himself. He preferred such a body, compact and well-disciplined as it was, to one which, unwieldy from its size, would have been less fitted for a rapid march across the mountains.

Besides those of the common file, there were many gentlemen and cavaliers of note, who, weary of repose, came as volunteers to gather fresh laurels under so renowned a chief as the duke of Alva. Among these was Vitelli, marquis of Cetona, a Florentine soldier of high repute in his profession, but who, though now embarked in what might be called a war of religion, was held so indifferent to religion of any kind, that a whimsical epitaph on the sceptic denies him the possession of a soul. Another of these volunteers was Mondragone, a veteran of Charles the Fifth, whose character for chivalrous exploit was unstained by those deeds of cruelty and rapine which were so often the reproach of the cavalier of the sixteenth century. The duties of the commissariat, particularly difficult in a campaign like the present, were entrusted to an experienced Spanish officer named Ibarra. To the duke of Savoy Alva was indebted for an eminent engineer named Paciotti, whose services proved of great importance in the construction of fortresses in the Netherlands. Alva had also brought with him his two sons, Frederic and Ferdinand de Toledo,—the latter an illegitimate child, for whom the father showed as much affection as it was in his rugged nature to feel for any one. To Ferdinand was given the command of the cavalry, composed chiefly of Italians.

Having reviewed his forces, the duke formed them into three divisions. This he did in order to provide the more easily for their subsistence on his long and toilsome journey. The divisions were to be separated from one another by a day's march; so that each would take up at night the same quarters which had been occupied by the preceding division on the night before. Alva himself led the van.

He dispensed with artillery, not willing to embarrass his movements in his passage across the mountains. But he employed what was then a novelty in war. Each company of foot was flanked by a body of soldiers, carrying heavy muskets with rests attached to them. This sort of fire-arms, from their cumbrous nature, had hitherto been used only in the defense of fortresses. But with these portable rests, they were found efficient for field service, and as such came into general use after this period. Their introduction by Alva may be regarded, therefore, as an event of some importance in the history of military art.

The route that Alva proposed to take was that over Mount Cenis, the same, according to tradition, by which Hannibal crossed the great barrier some eighteen centuries before. If less formidable than in the days of the Carthaginian, it was far from being the practicable route so easily traversed, whether by trooper or tourist, at the present day. Steep rocky heights, shaggy with forests, where the snows of winter still lingered in the midst of June; fathomless ravines, choked up with the débris washed down by the mountain torrent; paths scarcely worn by the hunter and his game, affording a precarious footing on the edge of giddy precipices; long and intricate defiles, where a handful of men might hold an army at bay, and from the surrounding heights roll down ruin on their heads;—these were the obstacles which Alva and his followers had to encounter, as they threaded their toilsome way through a country where the natives bore no friendly disposition to the Spaniards.

Their route lay at no great distance from Geneva, that stronghold of the Reformers; and Pius the Fifth would have persuaded the duke to turn from his course, and exterminate this “nest of devils and apostates”, as the Christian father was pleased to term them. The people of Geneva, greatly alarmed at the prospect of an invasion, applied to their Huguenot brethren for aid. The prince of Condé and the Admiral Coligni—the leaders of that party—offered their services to the French monarch to raise fifty thousand men, fall upon his old enemies, the Spaniards, and cut them off in the passes of the mountains. But Charles the Ninth readily understood the drift of this proposal. Though he bore little love to the Spaniards, he bore still less to the Reformers. He therefore declined this offer of the Huguenot chiefs, adding that he was able to protect France without their assistance. The Genevans were accordingly obliged to stand to their own defense, though they gathered confidence from the promised support of their countrymen of Berne; and the whole array of these brave mountaineers was in arms, ready to repel any assault of the Spaniards on their own territory or on that of their allies, in their passage through the country. But this was unnecessary. Though Alva passed within six leagues of Geneva, and the request of the pontiff was warmly seconded by the duke of Savoy, the Spanish general did not deem it prudent to comply with it, declaring that his commission extended no further than to the Netherlands. Without turning to the right or to the left he held on, therefore, straight towards the mark, anxious only to extricate himself as speedily as possible from the perilous passes where he might be taken at so obvious disadvantage by an enemy.

Yet such were the difficulties he had to encounter, that a fortnight elapsed before he was able to set foot on the friendly plains of Burgundy, that part of the ancient duchy which acknowledged the authority of Spain. Here he received the welcome addition to his ranks of four hundred horse, the flower of the Burgundian chivalry. On his way across the country he was accompanied by a French army of observation, some six thousand strong, which moved in a parallel direction, at the distance of six or seven leagues only from the line of march pursued by the Spaniards,—though without offering them any molestation.

Soon after entering Lorraine, Alva was met by the duke of that province, who seemed desirous to show him every respect, and entertained him with princely hospitality. After a brief detention, the Spanish general resumed his journey, and on the 8th of August crossed the frontiers of the Netherlands.

His long and toilsome march had been accomplished without an untoward accident, and with scarcely a disorderly act on the part of the soldiers. No man's property had been plundered. No peasant's hut had been violated. The cattle had been allowed to graze unmolested in the fields, and the flocks to wander in safety over their mountain pastures. One instance only to the contrary is mentioned,—that of three troopers, who carried off one or two straggling sheep as the army was passing through Lorraine. But they were soon called to a heavy reckoning for their transgression. Alva, on being informed of the fact, sentenced them all to the gallows. At the intercession of the duke of Lorraine, the sentence was so far mitigated by the Spanish commander, that one only of the three, selected by lot, was finally executed.

The admirable discipline maintained among Alva's soldiers was the more conspicuous in an age when the name of soldier was synonymous with that of marauder. It mattered little whether it were a friendly country or that of a foe through which lay the line of march. The defenseless peasant was everywhere the prey of the warrior; and the general winked at the outrages of his followers, as the best means of settling their arrears.

What made the subordination of the troops, in the present instance, still more worthy of notice, was the great number of camp followers, especially courtesans, who hung on the skirts of the army. These latter mustered in such force, that they were divided into battalions and companies, marching each under its own banner, and subjected to a sort of military organization, like the men. The duke seems to have been as careless of the morals of his soldiers as he was careful of their discipline; perhaps willing by his laxity in the one to compensate for his severity in the other.

It was of the last importance to Alva that his soldiers should commit no trespass, nor entangle him in a quarrel with the dangerous people through the midst of whom he was to pass; and who, from their superior knowledge of the country, as well as their numbers, could so easily overpower him. Fortunately, he had received such intimations before his departure as put him on his guard. The result was, that he obtained such a mastery over his followers, and enforced so perfect a discipline, as excited the general admiration of his contemporaries, and made his march to the Low Countries one of the most memorable events of the period.

At Thionville the duke was waited on by Barlaimont and Noircarmes, who came to offer the salutations of the regent, and at the same time to request to see his powers. At the same place, and on the way to the capital, the duke was met by several of the Flemish nobility, who came to pay their respects to him; among the rest, Egmont, attended by forty of his retainers. On his entering Alva's presence, the duke exclaimed to one of his officers, “Here comes a great heretic!”. The words were overheard by Egmont, who hesitated a moment, naturally disconcerted by what would have served as an effectual warning to any other man. But Alva made haste to efface the impression caused by his heedless exclamation, receiving Egmont with so much cordiality as reassured the infatuated nobleman, who, regarding the words as a jest, before his departure presented the duke with two beautiful horses.—Such is the rather singular story which comes down to us on what must be admitted to be respectable authority.

Soon after he had entered the country, the duke detached the greater part of his forces to garrison some of the principal cities, and relieve the Walloon troops on duty there, less to be trusted than his Spanish veterans. With the Milanese brigade he took the road to Brussels, which he entered on the twenty-second of August. His cavalry he established at ten leagues' distance from the capital, and the infantry he lodged in the suburbs. Far from being greeted by acclamations, no one came out to welcome him as he entered the city, which seemed like a place deserted. He went straight to the palace, to offer his homage to the regent. An altercation took place on the threshold between his halberdiers and Margaret's body-guard of archers, who disputed the entrance of the Spanish soldiers. The duke himself was conducted to the bed-chamber of the duchess, where she was in the habit of giving audience. She was standing, with a few Flemish nobles by her side; and she remained in that position, without stirring a single step to receive her visitor. Both parties continued standing during the interview, which lasted half an hour; the duke during the greater part of the time with his hat in his hand, although Margaret requested him to be covered. The curious spectators of this conference amused themselves by contrasting the courteous and even deferential manners of the haughty Spaniard with the chilling reserve and stately demeanor of the duchess. At the close of the interview Alva withdrew to his own quarters at Culemborg House,—the place, it will be remembered, where the Gueux held their memorable banquet on their visit to Brussels.

The following morning, at the request of the council of state, the duke of Alva furnished that body with a copy of his commission. By this he was invested with the title of captain-general, and in that capacity was to exercise supreme control in all military affairs. By another commission, dated two months later, these powers were greatly enlarged. The country was declared in a state of rebellion; and, as milder means had failed to bring it to obedience, it was necessary to resort to arms. The duke was therefore commanded to levy war on the refractory people, and reduce them to submission. He was moreover to inquire into the causes of the recent troubles, and bring the suspected parties to trial, with full authority to punish or to pardon as he might judge best for the public weal. Finally, a third commission, of more startling import than the two preceding, and which, indeed, might seem to supersede them altogether, was dated on the first of March, 1567. In the former instruments the duke was so far required to act in subordination to the regent, that her authority was declared to be unimpaired. But by virtue of this last commission he was invested with supreme control in civil as well as military affairs; and persons of every degree, including the regent herself, were enjoined to render obedience to his commands, as to those of the king. Such a commission, which placed the government of the country in the hands of Alva, was equivalent to a dismissal of Margaret. The title of "regent," which still remained to her, was an empty mockery; nor could it be thought that she would be content to retain a barren scepter in the country over which she had so long ruled.

It is curious to observe the successive steps by which Philip had raised Alva from the rank of captain-general of the army to supreme authority in the country. It would seem as if the king were too tenacious of power readily to part with it; and that it was only by successive efforts, as the conviction of the necessity of such a step pressed more and more on his mind, that he determined to lodge the government in the hands of Alva.

Whether the duke acquainted the council with the full extent of his powers, or, as seems more probable, communicated to that body only his first two commissions, it is impossible to say. At all events, the members do not appear to have been prepared for the exhibition of powers so extensive, and which, even in the second of the commissions, transcended those exercised by the regent herself. A consciousness that they did so had led Philip, in more than one instance, to qualify the language of the instrument, in such a manner as not to rouse the jealousy of his sister, an artifice so obvious, that it probably produced a contrary effect. At any rate, Margaret did not affect to conceal her disgust, but talked openly of the affront put on her by the king, and avowed her determination to throw up the government.

She gave little attention to business, passing most of her days in hunting, of which masculine sport she was excessively fond. She even threatened to amuse herself with journeying about from place to place, leaving public affairs to take care of themselves, till she should receive the king's permission to retire. From this indulgence of her spleen she was dissuaded by her secretary, Armenteros, who, shifting his sails to suit the breeze, showed, soon after Alva's coming, his intention to propitiate the new governor. There were others of Margaret's adherents less accommodating. Some high in office intimated very plainly their discontent at the presence of the Spaniards, from which they boded only calamity to the country. Margaret's confessor, in a sermon preached before the regent, did not scruple to denounce the Spaniards as so many "knaves, traitors, and ravishers." And although the remonstrance of the loyal Armenteros induced the duchess to send back the honest man to his convent, it was plain, from the warm terms in which she commended the preacher, that she was far from being displeased with his discourse.

The duke of Alva cared little for the hatred of the Flemish lords. But he felt otherwise towards the regent. He would willingly have soothed her irritation; and he bent his haughty spirit to show, in spite of her coldness, a deference in his manner that must have done some violence to his nature. As a mark of respect, he proposed at once to pay her another visit, and in great state, as suited her rank. But Margaret, feigning or feeling herself too ill to receive him, declined his visit for some days, and at last, perhaps to mortify him the more, vouchsafed him only a private audience in her own apartment.

Yet at this interview she showed more condescension than before, and even went so far as to assure the duke that there was no one whose appointment would have been more acceptable to her. She followed this, by bluntly demanding why he had been sent at all. Alva replied, that, as she had often intimated her desire for a more efficient military force, he had come to aid her in the execution of her measures, and to restore peace to the country before the arrival of his majesty. —The answer could hardly have pleased the duchess, who doubtless considered she had done that without his aid, already.

The discourse fell upon the mode of quartering the troops. Alva proposed to introduce a Spanish garrison into Brussels. To this Margaret objected with great energy. But the duke on this point was inflexible. Brussels was the royal residence, and the quiet of the city could only be secured by a garrison. “If people murmur”, he concluded, “you can tell them I am a headstrong man, bent on having my own way. I am willing to take all the odium of the measure on myself”. Thus thwarted, and made to feel her inferiority when any question of real power was involved, Margaret felt the humiliation of her position even more keenly than before. The appointment of Alva had been from the first, as we have seen, a source of mortification to the duchess. In December, 1566, soon after Philip had decided on sending the duke, with the authority of captain-general, to the Low Countries, he announced it in a letter to Margaret. He had been as much perplexed, he said, in the choice of a commander, as she could have been; and it was only at her suggestion of the necessity of some one to take the military command, that he had made such a nomination. Alva was, however, only to prepare the way for him, to assemble a force on the frontier, establish the garrisons, and enforce discipline among the troops till he came. Philip was careful not to alarm his sister by any hint of the extraordinary powers to be conferred on the duke, who thus seemed to be sent only in obedience to her suggestion, and in subordination to her authority. Margaret knew too well that Alva was not a man to act in subordination to anyone. But whatever misgivings she may have had, she hardly betrayed them in her reply to Philip, in the following February, 1567, when she told the king she “was sure he would never be so unjust, and do a thing so prejudicial to the interests of the country, as to transfer to another the powers he had vested in her”.

The appointment of Alva may have stimulated the regent to the extraordinary efforts she then made to reduce the country to order. When she had achieved this, she opened her mind more freely to her brother, in a letter dated July 12, 1567. “The name of Alva was so odious in the Netherlands that it was enough to make the whole Spanish nation detested. She could never have imagined that the king would make such an appointment without consulting her”. She then, alluding to orders lately received from Madrid, shows extreme repugnance to carry out the stern policy of Philip; —a repugnance, it must be confessed, that seems to rest less on the character of the measures than on the difficulty of their execution.

When the duchess learned that Alva was in Italy, she wrote also to him, hoping at this late hour to arrest his progress by the assurance that the troubles were now at an end, and that his appearance at the head of an army would only serve to renew them. But the duke was preparing for his march across the Alps, and it would have been as easy to stop the avalanche in its descent, as to stay the onward course of this “man of destiny”.

The state of Margaret’s feelings was shown by the chilling reception she gave the duke on his arrival in Brussels. The extent of his powers, so much beyond what she had imagined, did not tend to soothe the irritation of the regent's temper; and the result of the subsequent interview filled up the measure of her indignation. However forms might be respected, it was clear the power had passed into other hands. She wrote at once to Philip, requesting, or rather requiring, his leave to withdraw without delay from the country. “If he had really felt the concern he professed for her welfare and reputation, he would have allowed her to quit the government before being brought into rivalry with a man like the duke of Alva, who took his own course in everything, without the least regard to her. It afflicted her to the bottom of her soul to have been thus treated by the king”.

It may have given some satisfaction to Margaret, that in her feelings towards the duke she had the entire sympathy of the nation. In earlier days, in the time of Charles the Fifth, Alva had passed some time both in Germany and in the Netherlands, and had left there no favorable impression of his character. In the former country, indeed, his haughty deportment on a question of etiquette had caused some embarrassment to his master. Alva insisted on the strange privilege of the Castilian grandee to wear his hat in the presence of his sovereign. The German nobles, scandalized by this pretension in a subject, asserted that their order had as good a right to it as the Spaniards. It was not without difficulty that the proud duke was content to waive the contested privilege till his return to Spain.

Another anecdote of Alva had left a still more unfavorable impression of his character. He had accompanied Charles on his memorable visit to Ghent, on occasion of its rebellion. The emperor asked the duke's counsel as to the manner in which he should deal with his refractory capital. Alva instantly answered, "Raze it to the ground!" Charles, without replying, took the duke with him to the battlements of the castle; and as their eyes wandered over the beautiful city spread out far and wide below, the emperor asked him, with a pun on the French name of Ghent (Gand), how many Spanish hides it would take to make such a glove (gant). Alva, who saw his master's displeasure, received the rebuke in silence. The story, whether true or not, was current among the people of Flanders, on whom it produced its effect.

Alva was now sixty years old. It was not likely that age had softened the asperity of his nature. He had, as might be expected, ever shown himself the uncompromising enemy of the party of reform in the Low Countries. He had opposed the concession made to the nation by the recall of Granvelle. The only concessions he recommended to Philip were in order to lull the suspicions of the great lords, till he could bring them to a bloody reckoning for their misdeeds. The general drift of his policy was perfectly understood in the Netherlands, and the duchess had not exaggerated when she dwelt on the detestation in which he was held by the people.

His course on his arrival was not such as to diminish the fears of the nation. His first act was to substitute in the great towns his own troops, men who knew no law but the will of their chief, for the Walloon garrisons, who might naturally have some sympathy with their countrymen. His next was to construct some fortresses, under the direction of one of the ablest engineers in Europe. The hour had come when, in the language of the prince of Orange, his countrymen were to be bridled by the Spaniard.

The conduct of Alva's soldiers underwent an ominous change. Instead of the discipline observed on the march, they now indulged in the most reckless license. “One hears everywhere”, writes a Fleming of the time, “of the oppressions of the Spaniards. Confiscation is going on to the right and left. If a man has anything to lose, they set him down at once as a heretic”. If the writer may be thought to have borrowed something from his fears, it cannot be doubted that the panic was general in the country. Men emigrated by thousands and tens of thousands, carrying with them to other lands the arts and manufactures which had so long been the boast and the source of prosperity of the Netherlands. Those who remained were filled with a dismal apprehension, a boding of coming evil, as they beheld the heavens darkening around them, and the signs of the tempest at hand.

A still deeper gloom lay upon Brussels, once the gayest city in the Netherlands, now the residence of Alva. All business was suspended. Places of public resort were unfrequented. The streets were silent and deserted. Several of the nobles and wealthier citizens had gone to their estates in the country, to watch there the aspect of events. Most of the courtiers who remained—the gilded insects that loved the sunshine—had left the regent's palace, and gone to pay their homage to her rival at Culemborg House. There everything went merrily as in the gayest time of Brussels. For the duke strove, by brilliant entertainments and festivities, to amuse the nobles and dissipate the gloom of the capital.

In all this Alva had a deeper motive than met the public eye. He was carrying out the policy which he had recommended to Philip. By courteous and conciliatory manners he hoped to draw around him the great nobles, especially such as had been at all mixed up with the late revolutionary movements. Of these, Egmont was still at Brussels; but Hoorne had withdrawn to his estates at Weert. Hoogstraten was in Germany with the prince of Orange. As to the latter, Alva, as he wrote to the king, could not flatter himself with the hope of his return.

The duke and his son Ferdinand both wrote to Count Hoorne in the most friendly terms, inviting him to come to Brussels. But this distrustful nobleman still kept aloof. Alva, in a conversation with the count's secretary, expressed the warmest solicitude for the health of his master. He had always been his friend, he said, and had seen with infinite regret that the count's services were no better appreciated by the king. But Philip was a good prince, and if slow to recompense, the count would find him not ungrateful. Could the duke but see the count, he had that to say which would content him. He would find he was not forgotten by his friends. This last assurance had a terrible significance. Hoorne yielded at length to an invitation couched in terms so flattering. With Hoogstraten, Alva was not so fortunate. His good genius, or the counsel of Orange, saved him from the snare, and kept him in Germany.

Having nothing further to gain by delay, Alva determined to proceed at once to the execution of his scheme. On the ninth of September the council of state was summoned to meet at Culemborg House. Egmont and Hoorne were present; and two or three of the officers, among them Paciotti, the engineer, were invited to discuss a plan of fortification for some of the Flemish cities. In the meantime, strong guards had been posted at all the avenues of the house, and cavalry drawn together from the country and established in the suburbs.

The duke prolonged the meeting until information was privately communicated to him of the arrest of Backerzele, Egmont's secretary, and Van Stralen, the burgomaster of Antwerp. The former was a person of great political sagacity, and deep in the confidence of Egmont; the latter, the friend of Orange, with whom he was still in constant correspondence. The arrest of Backerzele, who resided in Brussels, was made without difficulty, and possession was taken of his papers. Van Stralen was surrounded by a body of horse, as he was driving out of Antwerp in his carriage; and both of the unfortunate gentlemen were brought prisoners to Culemborg House.

As soon as these tidings were conveyed to Alva, he broke up the meeting of the council. Then, entering into conversation with Egmont, he strolled with him through the adjoining rooms, in one of which was a small body of soldiers. As the two nobles entered the apartment, Sancho Davila, the captain of the duke's guard, went up to Egmont, and in the king's name demanded his sword, telling him at the same time he was his prisoner. The count, astounded by the proceeding, and seeing himself surrounded by soldiers, made no attempt at resistance, but calmly, and with much dignity in his manner, gave up his sword, saying at the same time, “It has done the king service more than once”. And well might he say so; for with that sword he had won the fields of Gravelines and St. Quentin.

Hoorne fell into a similar ambuscade, in another part of the palace, whither he was drawn while conversing with the duke's son Ferdinand de Toledo, who, according to his father's account, had the whole merit of arranging this little drama. Neither did the admiral make any resistance; but, on learning Egmont's fate, yielded himself up, saying "he had no right to expect to fare better than his friend."

It now became a question as to the disposal of the prisoners. Culemborg House was clearly no fitting place for their confinement. Alva caused several castles in the neighborhood of Brussels to be examined, but they were judged insecure. He finally decided on Ghent. The strong fortress of this city was held by one of Egmont's own partisans; but an order was obtained from the count requiring him to deliver up the keys into the hands of Ulloa, one of Alva's most trusted captains, who, at the head of a corps of Spanish veterans, marched to Ghent, and relieved the Walloon garrison of their charge. Ulloa gave proof of his vigilance, immediately on his arrival, by seizing a heavy wagon loaded with valuables belonging to Egmont, as it was leaving the castle gate.

Having completed these arrangements, the duke lost no time in sending the two lords, under a strong military escort, to Ghent. Two companies of mounted arquebusiers rode in the front. A regiment of Spanish infantry, which formed the centre, guarded the prisoners; one of whom, Egmont, was borne in a litter carried by mules, while Hoorne was in his own carriage. The rear was brought up by three companies of light horse.

Under this strong guard the unfortunate nobles were conducted through the province where Egmont had lately ruled “with an authority”, writes Alva’s secretary, “greater even than that of the king”. But no attempt was made at a rescue; and as the procession entered the gates of Ghent, where Egmont's popularity was equal to his power, the people gazed in stupefied silence on the stern array that was conducting their lord to the place of his confinement.

The arrest of Egmont and Hoorne was known, in a few hours after it took place, to every inhabitant of Brussels; and the tidings soon spread to the furthest parts of the country. “The imprisonment of the lords”, writes Alva to the king, “has caused no disturbance. The tranquility is such that your majesty would hardly credit it”. True; but the tranquility was that of a man stunned by a heavy blow. If murmurs were not loud, however, they were deep. Men mourned over the credulity of the two counts, who had so blindly fallen into the snare, and congratulated one another on the forecast of the prince of Orange, who might one day have the power to avenge them. The event gave a new spur to emigration. In the space of a few weeks no loss than twenty thousand persons are said to have fled the country. And the exiles were not altogether drawn from the humbler ranks; for no one, however high, could feel secure when he saw the blow aimed at men like Egmont and Hoorne, the former of whom, if he had given some cause of distrust, had long since made his peace with the government.

Count Mansfeldt made haste to send his son out of the country, lest the sympathy he had once shown for the confederates, notwithstanding his recent change of opinion, might draw on him the vengeance of Alva. The old count, whose own loyalty could not be impeached, boldly complained of the arrest of the lords as an infringement on the rights of the Toison d'Or, which body alone had cognizance of the causes that concerned their order, intimating, at the same time, his intention to summon a meeting of the members. But he was silenced by Alva, who plainly told him, that, if the chevaliers of the order did meet, and said so much as the credo, he would bring them to a heavy reckoning for it. As to the rights of the Toison, his majesty has pronounced on them, said the duke, and nothing remains for you but to submit.

The arrest and imprisonment of the two highest nobles in the land, members of the council of state, and that without any communication with her, was an affront to the regent which she could not brook. It was in vain that Alva excused it by saying it had been done by the order of the king, who wished to spare his sister the unpopularity which must attach to such a proceeding. Margaret made no reply. She did not complain. She was too deeply wounded to complain. But she wrote to Philip, asking him to consider “whether it could be advantageous to him, or decorous for her, whom he did not disdain to call his sister, that she should remain longer in a place of which the authority was so much abridged, or rather annihilated”. She sent her secretary, Machiavelli, with her dispatches, requesting an immediate reply from Philip, and adding that, if it were delayed, she should take silence for assent, and forthwith leave the country.

The duke of Alva was entirely resigned to the proposed departure of Margaret. However slight the restraint her presence might impose on his conduct, it exacted more deference than was convenient, and compelled him to consult appearances. Now that he had shown his hand, he was willing to play it out boldly to the end. His first step, after the arrest of the lords, was to organize that memorable tribunal for inquiring into the troubles of the country, which has no parallel in history save the revolutionary tribunal of the French republic. The duke did not shrink from assuming the sole responsibility of his measures. He said, “it was better for the king to postpone his visit to the Netherlands, so that his ministers might bear alone the odium of these rigorous acts. When these had been performed, he might come like a gracious prince, dispensing promises and pardon”.

This admirable coolness must be referred in part to Alva's consciousness that his policy would receive the unqualified sanction of his master. Indeed, his correspondence shows that all he had done in the Low Countries was in accordance with a plan preconcerted with Philip. The arrest of the Flemish lords, accordingly, gave entire satisfaction at the court of Madrid, where it was looked on as the first great step in the measures of redress. It gave equal contentment to the court of Rome, where it was believed that the root of heresy was to be reached only by the axe of the executioner. Yet there was one person at that court of more penetration than those around him, the old statesman, Granvelle, who, when informed of the arrest of Egmont and Hoorne, inquired if the duke had “also drawn into his net the Silent one”,—as the prince of Orange was popularly called. On being answered in the negative, “Then”, said the cardinal, “if he has not caught him, he has caught nothing”.

CHAPTER XXV.

CRUEL POLICY OF ALVA.

1567

.

“Thank God”, writes the duke of Alva to his sovereign, on the twenty-fourth of October, “all is tranquil in the Low Countries”. It was the same sentiment he had uttered a few weeks before. All was indeed tranquil. Silence reigned throughout the land. Yet it might have spoken more eloquently to the heart than the murmurs of discontent, or the loudest tumult of insurrection. “They say many are leaving the country”, he writes in another dispatch. “It is hardly worth while to arrest them. The repose of the nation is not to be brought about by cutting off the heads of those who are led astray by others”.

Yet in less than a week after this, we find a royal ordinance, declaring that, “whereas his majesty is averse to use rigor towards those who have taken part in the late rebellion; and would rather deal with them in all gentleness and mercy, it is forbidden to any one to leave the land, or to send off his effects, without obtaining a license from the authorities, under pain of being regarded as having taken part in the late troubles, and of being dealt with accordingly. All masters and owners of vessels, who shall aid such persons in their flight, shall incur the same penalties”. The penalties denounced in this spirit of “gentleness and mercy”, were death and confiscation of property.

That the law was not a dead letter was soon shown by the arrest of ten of the principal merchants of Tournay, as they were preparing to fly to foreign parts, and by the immediate confiscation of their estates. Yet Alva would have persuaded the world that he, as well as his master, was influenced only by sentiments of humanity. To the Spanish ambassador at Rome he wrote, soon after the seizure of the Flemish lords: "I might have arrested more; but the king is averse to shedding the blood of his people. I have the same disposition myself. I am pained to the bottom of my soul by the necessity of the measure."

But now that the great nobles had come into the snare, it was hardly necessary to keep up the affectation of lenity; and it was not long before he threw away the mask altogether. The arm of justice—of vengeance—was openly raised to strike down all who had offended by taking part in the late disturbances.

The existing tribunals were not considered as competent to this work. The regular forms of procedure were too dilatory, and the judges themselves would hardly be found subservient enough to the will of Alva. He created, therefore, a new tribunal, with extraordinary powers, for the sole purpose of investigating the causes of the late disorders, and for bringing the authors to punishment. It was called originally the “Council of his Excellency”. The name was soon changed for that of the “Council of Tumults”. But the tribunal is better known in history by the terrible name it received from the people, of the “Council of Blood”.

It was composed of twelve judges, “the most learned, upright men, and of the purest lives” if we may take the duke's word for it—that were to be found in the country. Among them were Noircarmes and Barlaimont, both members of the council of state. The latter was a proud noble, of one of the most ancient families in the land, inflexible in his character, and stanch in his devotion to the crown. Besides these there were the presidents of the councils of Artois and Flanders, the chancellor of Gueldres, and several jurists of repute in the country. But the persons of most consideration in the body were two lawyers who had come in the duke's train from Castile. One of these, the doctor Del Rio, though born in Bruges, was of Spanish extraction. His most prominent trait seems to have been unlimited subserviency to the will of his employer. The other, Juan de Vargas, was to play the most conspicuous part in the bloody drama that followed. He was a Spaniard, and had held a place in the council of the Indies. His character was infamous; and he was said to have defrauded an orphan ward of her patrimony. When he left Spain, two criminal prosecutions are reported to have been hanging over him. This only made him the more dependent on Alva’s protection. He was a man of great energy of character, unwearied in application to business, unscrupulous in the service of his employer, ready at any price to sacrifice to his own interest, not only every generous impulse, but the common feelings of humanity. Such, at least, are the dark colors in which he is portrayed by the writers of a nation which held him in detestation. Yet his very vices made him so convenient to the duke, that the latter soon bestowed on him more of his confidence than on any other of his followers; and in his correspondence with Philip we perpetually find him commending Vargas to the monarch’s favor, and contrasting his “activity, altogether juvenile”, with the apathy of others of the council. As Vargas was unacquainted with Flemish, the proceedings of the court were conducted, for his benefit, in Latin. Yet he was such a bungler, even in this language, that his blunders furnished infinite merriment to the people of Flanders, who took some revenge for their wrongs in the ridicule of their oppressor.

As the new court had cognizance of all cases, civil as well as criminal, which grew out of the late disorders, the amount of business soon pressed on them so heavily, that it was found expedient to distribute it into several departments among the different members. Two of the body had especial charge of the processes of the prince of Orange, his brother Louis, Hoogstraten, Culemborg, and the rest of William's noble companions in exile. To Vargas and Del Rio was entrusted the trial of the Counts Egmont and Hoorne. And two others, Blasere and Hessels, had the most burdensome and important charge of all such causes as came from the provinces.

The latter of these two worthies was destined to occupy a place second only to that of Vargas on the bloody roll of persecution. He was a native of Ghent, of sufficient eminence in his profession to fill the office of attorney-general of his province under Charles the Fifth. In that capacity he enforced the edicts with so much rigor as to make himself odious to his countrymen. In the new career now opened to him, he found a still wider field for his mischievous talents, and he entered on the duties of his office with such hearty zeal as soon roused general indignation in the people, who at a later day took terrible vengeance on their oppressor.

As soon as the Council of Troubles was organized, commissioners were dispatched into the provinces to hunt out the suspected parties. All who had officiated as preachers, or had harbored or aided them, who had joined the consistories, who had assisted in defacing or destroying the Catholic churches or in building the Protestant, who had subscribed the Compromise, or who, in short, had taken an active part in the late disorders, were to be arrested as guilty of treason. In the hunt after victims informations were invited from every source. Wives were encouraged to depose against husbands, children against parents. The prisons were soon full to overflowing, and the provincial and the local magistrates were busy in filing informations of the different cases, which were forwarded to the court at Brussels. When deemed of sufficient importance, the further examination of a case was reserved for the council itself. But for the most part the local authorities, or a commission sent expressly for the purpose, were authorized to try the cause, proceeding even to a definitive sentence, which, with the grounds of it, they were to lay before the Council of Troubles. The process was then revised by the committee for the provinces, who submitted the result of their examination to Vargas and Del Rio. The latter were alone empowered to vote in the matter; and their sentence, prepared in writing, was laid before the duke, who reserved to himself the right of a final decision. This he did, as he wrote to Philip, that he might not come too much under the direction of the council. “Your majesty well knows," he concludes, "that gentlemen of the law are unwilling to decide anything except upon evidence, while measures of state policy are not to be regulated by the laws”.

It might be supposed that the different judges to whom the prisoner's case was thus separately submitted for examination, would have afforded an additional guaranty for his security. But quite the contrary; it only multiplied the chances of his conviction. When the provincial committee presented their report to Vargas and Del Rio,—to whom a Spanish jurist, auditor of the chancery of Valladolid, named Roda, was afterwards added,—if it proposed sentence of death, these judges declared it “was right, and that there was no necessity of reviewing the process”. If, on the contrary, a lower penalty was recommended, the worthy ministers of the law were in the habit of returning the process, ordering the committee, with bitter imprecations, to revise it more carefully!

As confiscation was one of the most frequent as well as momentous penalties adjudged by the Council of Blood, it necessarily involved a large number of civil actions; for the estate thus forfeited was often burdened with heavy claims on it by other parties. These were all to be established before the council. One may readily comprehend how small was the chance of justice before such a tribunal, where the creditor was one of the parties, and the crown the other. Even if the suit was decided in favor of the creditor, it was usually so long protracted, and attended with such ruinous expense, that it would have been better for him never to have urged it.

The jurisdiction of the court, within the limits assigned to it, wholly superseded that of the great court of Mechlin, as well as of every other tribunal, provincial or municipal, in the country. Its decisions were final. By the law of the land, established by repeated royal charters in the provinces, no man in the Netherlands could be tried by any but a native judge. But of the present court, one member was a native of Burgundy, and two were Spaniards.

It might be supposed that a tribunal with such enormous powers, which involved so gross an outrage on the constitutional rights and long-established usages of the nation, would at least have been sanctioned by some warrant from the crown. It could pretend to nothing of the kind,—not even a written commission from the duke of Alva, the man who created it. By his voice alone he gave it an existence. The ceremony of induction into office was performed by the new member placing his hands between those of the duke, and swearing to remain true to the faith; to decide in all cases according to his sincere conviction; finally, to keep secret all the doings of the council, and to denounce anyone who disclosed them. A tribunal clothed with such unbounded power, and conducted on a plan so repugnant to all principles of justice, fell nothing short, in its atrocity, of that inquisition so much dreaded in the Netherlands.

Alva, in order to be the better able to attend the council, appointed his own palace for the place of meeting. At first the sittings were held morning and afternoon, lasting sometimes seven hours in a day. There was a general attendance of the members, the duke presiding in person. After a few months, as he was drawn to a distance by more pressing affairs, he resigned his place to Vargas. Barlaimont and Noircarmes, disgusted with the atrocious character of the proceedings, soon absented themselves from the meetings. The more respectable of the members imitated their example. One of the body, a Burgundian, a follower of Granvelle, having criticized the proceedings somewhat too freely, had leave to withdraw to his own province; till at length only three or four councilors remained,—Vargas, Del Rio, Hessels, and his colleague,—on whom the dispatch of the momentous business wholly devolved. To some of the processes we find not more than three names subscribed. The duke was as indifferent to forms, as he was to the rights of the nation.

It soon became apparent, that, as in most proscriptions, wealth was the mark at which persecution was mainly directed. At least, if it did not actually form a ground of accusation, it greatly enhanced the chances of a conviction. The commissioners sent to the provinces received written instructions to ascertain the exact amount of property belonging to the suspected parties. The expense incident to the maintenance of so many officials, as well as of a large military force, pressed heavily on the government; and Alva soon found it necessary to ask for support from Madrid. It was in vain he attempted to obtain a loan from the merchants. “They refuse”, he writes; “to advance a real on the security of the confiscations, till they see how the game we have begun is likely to prosper!”

In another letter to Philip, dated on the twenty-fourth of October, Alva, expressing his regret at the necessity of demanding supplies, says that the Low Countries ought to maintain themselves, and be no tax upon Spain. He is constantly thwarted by the duchess, and by the council of finance, in his appropriation of the confiscated property. Could he only manage things in his own way, he would answer for it that the Flemish cities, uncertain and anxious as to their fate, would readily acquiesce in the fair means of raising a revenue proposed by the king. The ambitious general, eager to secure the sole authority to himself, artfully touched on the topic which would be most likely to operate with his master. In a note on this passage, in his own handwriting, Philip remarked that this was but just; but as he feared that supplies would never be raised with the consent of the states, Alva must devise some expedient by which their consent in the matter might be dispensed with, and communicate it privately to him. This pregnant thought he soon after develops more fully in a letter to the duke. —It is edifying to observe the cool manner in which the king and his general discuss the best means for filching a revenue from the pockets of the good people of the Netherlands.

Margaret,—whose name now rarely appears,—scandalized by the plan avowed of wholesale persecution, and satisfied that blood enough had been shed already, would fain have urged her brother to grant a general pardon. But to this the duke strongly objected. “He would have every man”, he wrote to Philip, “feel that any day his house might fall about his ears. Thus private individuals would be induced to pay larger sums by way of composition for their offences”.

As the result of the confiscations, owing to the drains upon them above alluded to, proved less than he expected, the duke, somewhat later, proposed a tax of one per cent. on all property, personal and real. But to this some of the council had the courage to object, as a thing not likely to be relished by the states. “That depends”, said Alva, “on the way in which they are approached”. He had as little love for the states-general as his master, and looked on applications to them for money as something derogatory to the crown. “I would take care to ask for it”, he said, “as I did when I wanted money to build the citadel of Antwerp,—in such a way that they should not care to refuse it”.

The most perfect harmony seems to have subsisted between the king and Alva in their operations for destroying the liberties of the nation,—so perfect, indeed, that it could have been the result only of some previous plan, concerted probably while the duke was in Castile. The details of the execution were doubtless left, as they arose, to Alva’s discretion. But they so entirely received the royal sanction,—as is abundantly shown by the correspondence,—that Philip may be said to have made every act of his general his own. And not unfrequently we find the monarch improving on the hints of his correspondent by some additional suggestion. Whatever evils grew out of the male-administration of the duke of Alva, the responsibility for the measures rests ultimately on the head of Philip.

One of the early acts of the new council was to issue a summons to the prince of Orange, and to each of the noble exiles in his company, to present themselves at Brussels, and answer the charges against them. In the summons addressed to William, he was accused of having early encouraged a spirit of disaffection in the nation; of bringing the Inquisition into contempt; of promoting the confederacy of the nobles, and opening his own palace of Breda for their discussions; of authorizing the exercise of the reformed religion in Antwerp; in fine, of being at the bottom of the troubles, civil and religious, which had so long distracted the land. He was required, therefore, under pain of confiscation of his property and perpetual exile, to present himself before the council at Brussels within the space of six weeks, and answer the charges against him. This summons was proclaimed by the public crier, both in Brussels and in William's own city of Breda; and a placard containing it was affixed to the door of the principal church in each of those places.

Alva followed up this act by another, which excited general indignation through the country. He caused the count of Buren, William's eldest son, then a lad pursuing his studies at Louvain, to be removed from the university, and sent to Spain. His tutor and several of his domestics were allowed to accompany him. But the duke advised the king to get rid of these attendants as speedily as possible, and fill their places with Spaniards. This unwarrantable act appears to have originated with Granvelle, who recommends it in one of his letters from Rome. The object, no doubt, was to secure some guaranty for the father's obedience, as well as to insure the loyalty of the heir of the house of Nassau, and to retain him in the Catholic faith. In the last object the plan succeeded. The youth was kindly treated by Philip; and his long residence in Spain nourished in him so strong an attachment to both Church and crown, that he was ever after divorced from the great cause in which his father and his countrymen were embarked.

The prince of Orange published to the world his sense of the injury done to him by this high-handed proceeding of the duke of Alva; and the university of Louvain boldly sent a committee to the council to remonstrate on the violation of their privileges. Vargas listened to them with a smile of contempt, and, as he dismissed the deputation, exclaimed, “Non curamus vestros privilegios”, —an exclamation long remembered for its bad Latin as well as for its insolence.

It may well be believed that neither William nor his friends obeyed the summons of the Council of Blood. The prince, in a reply which was printed and circulated abroad, denied the authority of Alva to try him. As a knight of the Golden Fleece, he had a right to be tried by his peers; as a citizen of Brabant, by his countrymen. He was not bound to present himself before an incompetent tribunal,—one, moreover, which had his avowed personal enemy at its head.

The prince, during his residence in Germany, experienced all those alleviations of his misfortunes which the sympathy and support of powerful friends could afford. Among these the most deserving of notice was William the Wise, a worthy son of the famous old landgrave of Hesse who so stoutly maintained the Protestant cause against Charles the Fifth. He and the elector of Saxony, both kinsmen of William’s wife, offered to provide an establishment for the prince, while he remained in Germany, which, if it was not on the magnificent scale to which he had been used in the Netherlands, was still not unsuited to the dignity of his rank.

The little court of William received every day fresh accessions from those who fled from persecution in the Netherlands. They brought with them appeals to him from his countrymen to interpose in their behalf. The hour had not yet come. But still he was not idle. He was earnestly endeavoring to interest the German princes in the cause, was strengthening his own resources, and steadily, though silently, making preparation for the great struggle with the oppressors of his country.

While these events were passing in the Netherlands, the neighboring monarchy of France was torn by those religious dissensions, which, at this period, agitated, in a greater or less degree, most of the states of Christendom. One half of the French nation was in arms against the other half. At the time of our history, the Huguenots had gained a temporary advantage; their combined forces were beleaguering the capital, in which the king and Catherine de Medicis, his mother, were then held prisoners. In this extremity, Catherine appealed to Margaret to send a body of troops to her assistance. The regent hesitated as to what course to take, and referred the matter to Alva. He did not hesitate. He knew Philip’s disposition in regard to France, and had himself, probably, come to an understanding on the subject with the queen-mother in the famous interview at Bayonne. He proposed to send a body of three thousand horse to her relief. At the same time he wrote to Catherine, offering to leave the Low Countries, and march himself to her support with his whole strength, five thousand horse and fifteen thousand foot, all his Spanish veterans included, provided she would bring matters to an issue, and finish at once with the enemies of their religion. The duke felt how powerfully such a result would react on the Catholic cause in the Netherlands.

He besought Catherine to come to no terms with the rebels; above all, to make them no concessions. “Such concessions must, of necessity, be either spiritual or temporal. If spiritual, they would be opposed to the rights of God; if temporal, to the rights of the king. Better to reign over a ruined land, which yet remains true to its God and its king, than over one left unharmed for the benefit of the Devil and his followers the heretics”. In this declaration, breathing the full spirit of religious and political absolutism, may be found the true key to the policy of Alva and of his master.

Philip heartily approved of the views taken by his general. As the great champion of Catholicism, he looked with the deepest interest on the religious struggle going forward in the neighboring kingdom, which exercised so direct an influence on the revolutionary movements in the Netherlands. He strongly encouraged the queen-mother to yield nothing to the heretics. “With his own person”, he declared, “and with all that he possessed, he was ready to serve the French crown in its contests with the rebels”. Philip’s zeal in the cause was so well understood in France, that some of the Catholic leaders did not scruple to look to him, rather than to their own government, as the true head of their party.

Catherine de Medicis did not discover the same uncompromising spirit, and had before this disgusted her royal son-in-law by the politic views which mingled with her religion. On the present occasion she did not profit by the brilliant offer made to her by Alva to come in person at the head of his army. She may have thought so formidable a presence might endanger the independence of the government. Roman Catholic as she was at heart, she preferred, with true Italian policy, balancing the rival factions against each other, to exterminating either of them altogether. The duke saw that Catherine was not disposed to strike at the root of the evil, and that the advantages to be secured by success would be only temporary. He contented himself, therefore, with dispatching a smaller force, chiefly of Flemish troops, under Aremberg. Before the count reached Paris, the battle of St. Denis had been fought. Montmorenci fell; but the royal party was victorious. Catherine made a treaty with the discomfited Huguenots, as favorable to them as if they, not she, had won the fight. Alva, disgusted with the issue, ordered the speedy return of Aremberg, whose presence, moreover, was needed, on a more active theatre of operations.

During all this while Margaret's position afforded a pitiable contrast to the splendid elevation which she had occupied for so many years as head of the government. Not only had the actual power passed from her hands, but she felt that all her influence had gone with it. She hardly enjoyed even the right of remonstrance. In this position, she had the advantage of being more favorably situated for criticizing the conduct of the administration, than when she was herself at the head of it. She became more sensible of the wrongs of the people,—now that they were inflicted by other hands than her own. She did not refuse to intercede in their behalf. She deprecated the introduction of a garrison into the good city of Brussels. If this were necessary, she still besought the duke not to allow the loyal inhabitants to be burdened with the maintenance of the soldiers. But he turned a deaf ear to her petition. She urged that, after the chastisement already inflicted on the nation, the only way to restore quiet was by a general amnesty. The duke replied, that no amnesty could be so general but there must be some exceptions, and it would take time to determine who should be excepted. She recommended that the states be called together to vote the supplies. He evaded this also by saying it would be necessary first to decide on the amount of the subsidy to be raised. The regent felt that in all matters of real moment she had as little weight as any private individual in the country.

From this state of humiliation she was at last relieved by the return of her secretary, Machiavelli, who brought with him despatches from Ruy Gomez, Philip's favorite minister. He informed the duchess that the king, though, reluctantly, had at last acceded to her request, and allowed her to resign the government of the provinces. In token of his satisfaction with her conduct, his majesty had raised the pension which she had hitherto enjoyed, of eight thousand florins, to fourteen thousand, to be paid her yearly during the remainder of her life. This letter was dated on the sixth of October. Margaret soon after received one, dated four days later, from Philip himself, of much the same tenor with that of his minister. The king, in a few words, intimated the regret he felt at his sister's retirement from office, and the sense he entertained of the services she had rendered him by her long and faithful administration.

The increase of the pension showed no very extravagant estimate of these services; and the parsimonious tribute which, after his long silence, he now, in a few brief sentences, paid to her deserts, too plainly intimated, that all she had done had failed to excite even a feeling of gratitude in the bosom of her brother. At the same time with the letter to Margaret came a commission to the duke of Alva, investing him with the title of regent and governor-general, together with all the powers that had been possessed by his predecessor.

Margaret made only one request of Philip previous to her departure. This he denied her. Her father, Charles the Fifth, at the time of his abdication, had called the states-general together, and taken leave of them in a farewell address, which was still cherished as a legacy by his subjects. Margaret would have imitated his example. The grandeur of the spectacle pleased her imagination; and she was influenced, no doubt, by the honest desire of manifesting, in the hour of separation, some feelings of a kindly nature for the people over whom she had ruled for so many years.

But Philip, as we have seen, had no relish for these meetings of the states. He had no idea of consenting to them on an emergency no more pressing than the present. Margaret was obliged, therefore, to relinquish the pageant, and to content herself with taking leave of the people by letters addressed to the principal cities of the provinces. In these she briefly touched on the difficulties which had lain in her path, and on the satisfaction which she felt at having, at length, brought the country to a state of tranquility and order. She besought them to remain always constant in the faith in which they had been nurtured, as well as in their loyalty to a prince so benign and merciful as the king, her brother. In so doing the blessing of Heaven would rest upon them; and for her own part, she would ever be found ready to use her good offices in their behalf.

She proved her sincerity by a letter written to Philip, before her departure, in which she invoked his mercy in behalf of his Flemish subjects. “Mercy”, she said, “was a divine attribute. The greater the power possessed by a monarch, the nearer he approached the Deity, and the more should he strive to imitate the divine clemency and compassion. His royal predecessors had contented themselves with punishing the leaders of sedition, while they spared the masses who repented. Any other course would confound the good with the bad, and bring such calamities on the country as his majesty could not fail to appreciate”. —Well had it been for the fair fame of Margaret, if her counsels had always been guided by such wise and magnanimous sentiments.

The tidings of the regent's abdication were received with dismay throughout the provinces. All the errors of her government, her acts of duplicity, the excessive rigor with which she had of late visited offences,—all were forgotten in the regret felt for her departure. Men thought only of the prosperity which the country had enjoyed under her rule, the confidence which in earlier years she had bestowed on the friends of the people, the generous manner in which she had interposed, on more than one occasion, to mitigate the hard policy of the court of Madrid. And as they turned from these more brilliant passages of her history, their hearts were filled with dismay while they looked gloomily into the future.

Addresses poured in upon her from all quarters. The different cities vied with one another in expressions of regret for her departure, while they invoked the blessings of Heaven on her remaining days. More than one of the provinces gave substantial evidence of their good-will by liberal donatives. Brabant voted her the sum of twenty-five thousand florins, and Flanders, thirty thousand. The neighboring princes, and among them Elizabeth of England, joined with the people of the Netherlands in professions of respect for the regent, as well as of regret that she was to relinquish the government.

Cheered by these assurances of the consideration in which she was held both at home and abroad, Margaret quitted Brussels at the close of December, 1567. She was attended to the borders of Brabant by Alva, and thence conducted to Germany, by Count Mansfeldt and an escort of Flemish nobles. There bidding adieu to all that remained of her former state, she pursued her journey quietly to Italy. For some time she continued with her husband in his ducal residence at Parma. But, wherever lay the fault, it was Margaret’s misfortune to taste but little of the sweets of domestic intercourse. Soon afterwards she removed to Naples, and there permanently established her abode on estates which had been granted her by the crown. Many years later, when her son, Alexander Farnese, was called to the government of the Netherlands, she quitted her retirement to take part with him in the direction of public affairs. It was but for a moment; and her present departure from the Netherlands may be regarded as the close of her political existence.

The government of Margaret continued from the autumn of 1559 to the end of 1567, a period of eight years. It was a stormy and most eventful period; for it was then that the minds of men were agitated to their utmost depths by the new doctrines which gave birth to the revolution. Margaret's regency, indeed, may be said to have furnished the opening scenes of that great drama. The inhabitants of the Low Countries were accustomed to the sway of a woman. Margaret was the third of her line that had been entrusted with the regency. In qualifications for the office she was probably not inferior to her predecessors. Her long residence in Italy had made her acquainted with the principles of government in a country where political science was more carefully studied than in any other quarter of Europe. She was habitually industrious; and her robust frame was capable of any amount of labor. If she was too masculine in her nature to allow of the softer qualities of her sex, she was, on the other hand, exempt from the fondness for pleasure and from most of the frivolities which belonged to the women of the voluptuous clime in which she had lived. She was stanch in her devotion to the Catholic faith; and her loyalty was such, that, from the moment of assuming the government, she acknowledged no stronger motive than that of conformity to the will of her sovereign. She was fond of power; and she well knew that, with Philip, absolute conformity to his will was the only condition on which it was to be held.

With her natural good sense, and the general moderation of her views, she would, doubtless, have ruled over the land as prosperously as her predecessors, had the times been like theirs. But, unhappily for her, the times had greatly changed. Still Margaret, living on the theatre of action, and feeling the pressure of circumstances, would have gone far to conform to the change. But unfortunately she represented a prince, dwelling at a distance, who knew no change himself, allowed no concessions to others,—whose conservative policy rested wholly on the past.

It was unfortunate for Margaret, that she never fully possessed the confidence of Philip. Whether from distrust of her more accommodating temper, or of her capacity for government, he gave a larger share of it, at the outset, to Granvelle than to her. If the regent could have been blind to this, her eyes would soon have been opened to the fact by the rivals who hated the minister. It was not long before she hated him too. But the removal of Granvelle did not establish her in her brother’s confidence. It rather increased his distrust, by the necessity it imposed on her of throwing herself into the arms of the opposite party, the friends of the people. From this moment Philip's confidence was more heartily bestowed on the duke of Alva, even on the banished Granvelle, than on the regent. Her letters remained too often unanswered. The answers, when they did come, furnished only dark and mysterious hints of the course to be pursued. She was left to work out the problem of government by herself, sure for every blunder to be called to a strict account. Rumors of the speedy coming of the king suggested the idea that her own dominion was transitory, soon to be superseded by that of a higher power.

Under these disadvantages she might well have lost all reliance on herself. She was not even supplied with the means of carrying out her own schemes. She was left without money, without arms, without the power to pardon,—more important, with a brave and generous race, than the power to punish. Thus, destitute of resources, without the confidence of her employer, with the people stoutly demanding concessions on the one side, with the sovereign sternly refusing them on the other, it is little to say that Margaret was in a false position: her position was deplorable. She ought not to have remained in it a day after she found that she could not hold it with honor. But Margaret was too covetous of power readily to resign it. Her misunderstanding with her husband made her, moreover, somewhat dependent on her brother.

At last came the Compromise and the league. Margaret's eyes seemed now to be first opened to the direction of the course she was taking. This was followed by the explosion of the iconoclasts. The shock fully awoke her from her delusion. She was as zealous for the Catholic Church as Philip himself; and she saw with horror that it was trembling to its foundations. A complete change seemed to take place in her convictions,—in her very nature. She repudiated all those with whom she had hitherto acted. She embraced, as heartily as he could desire, the stern policy of Philip. She proscribed, she persecuted, she punished,—and that with an excess of rigor that does little honor to her memory. It was too late. The distrust of Philip was not to be removed by this tardy compliance with his wishes. A successor was already appointed; and at the very moment when she flattered herself that the tranquility of the country and her own authority were established on a permanent basis, the duke of Alva was on his march across the mountains.

Yet it was fortunate for Margaret's reputation that she was succeeded in the government by a man like Alva. The darkest spots on her administration became light when brought into comparison with his reign of terror. From this point of view it has been criticized by the writers of her own time and those of later ages. And in this way, probably, as the student who ponders the events of her history may infer, a more favorable judgment has been passed upon her actions than would be warranted by a calm and deliberate scrutiny.

CHAPTER XXVI.

REIGN OF TERROR.

1568.

In the beginning of 1568, Philip, if we may trust the historians, resorted to a very extraordinary measure for justifying to the world his rigorous proceedings against the Netherlands. He submitted the case to the Inquisition at Madrid; and that ghostly tribunal, after duly considering the evidence derived from the information of the king and of the inquisitors in the Netherlands, came to the following decision. All who had been guilty of heresy, apostasy, or sedition, and all, moreover, who, though professing themselves good Catholics, had offered no resistance to these, were, with the exception of a few specified individuals, thereby convicted of treason in the highest degree.

This sweeping judgment was followed by a royal edict, dated on the same day, the sixteenth of February, in which, after reciting the language of the Inquisition, the whole nation, with the exception above stated, was sentenced, without distinction of sex or age, to the penalties of treason, death and confiscation of property; and this, the decree went on to say, “without any hope of grace whatever, that it might serve for an example and a warning to all future time!”

It is difficult to give credit to a story so monstrous, repeated though it has been by successive writers without the least distrust of its correctness. Not that anything can be too monstrous to be believed of the Inquisition. But it is not easy to believe that a sagacious prince like Philip the Second, however willing he might be to shelter himself under the mantle of the Holy Office, could have lent himself to an act as impolitic as it was absurd; one that, confounding the innocent with the guilty, would drive both to desperation,—would incite the former, from a sense of injury, to take up rebellion, by which there was nothing more to lose, and the latter to persist in it, since there was nothing more to hope.

The messenger who brought to Margaret the royal permission to resign the regency delivered to Alva his commission as captain-general of the Netherlands. This would place the duke, as Philip wrote to him, beyond the control of the council of finance, in the important matter of the confiscations. It raised him, indeed, not only above that council, but above every other council in the country. It gave him an authority not less than that of the sovereign himself. And Alva prepared to stretch this to an extent greater than any sovereign of the Netherlands had ever ventured on. The time had now come to put his terrible machinery into operation. The regent was gone, who, if she could not curb, might at least criticize his actions. The prisons were full; the processes were completed. Nothing remained but to pass sentence and to execute.

On the fourth of January, 1568, we find eighty-four persons sentenced to death at Valenciennes, on the charge of having taken part in the late movements,—religious or political. On the twentieth of February, ninety-five persons were arraigned before the Council of Blood, and thirty-seven capitally convicted. On the twentieth of March thirty-five more were condemned. The governor’s emissaries were out in every direction. “I heard that preaching was going on at Antwerp”, he writes to Philip; “and I sent my own provost there, for I cannot trust the authorities. He arrested a good number of heretics. They will never attend another such meeting. The magistrates complain that the interference of the provost was a violation of their privileges. The magistrates may as well take it patiently”.  The pleasant manner in which the duke talks over the fate of his victims with his master may remind one of the similar dialogues between Petit André and Louis the Eleventh, in “Quentin Durward”.

The proceedings in Ghent may show the course pursued in the other cities. Commissioners were sent to that capital, to ferret out the suspected. No than a hundred and forty-seven were summoned before the council at Brussels. Their names were cried about the streets, and posted up in placards on the public buildings. Among them were many noble and wealthy individuals. The officers were particularly instructed to ascertain the wealth of the parties. Most of the accused contrived to make their escape. They preferred flight to the chance of an acquittal by the bloody tribunal,—though flight involved certain banishment and confiscation of property. Eighteen only answered the summons by repairing to Brussels. They were all arrested on the same day, at their lodgings, and, without exception, were sentenced to death! Five or six of the principal were beheaded. The rest perished on the gallows.

Impatient of what seemed to him a too tardy method of following up his game, the duke determined on a bolder movement, and laid his plans for driving a goodly number of victims into the toils at once. He fixed on Ash Wednesday for the time,—the beginning of Lent, when men, after the Carnival was past, would be gathered soberly in their own dwellings. The officers of justice entered their premises at dead of night; and no less than five hundred citizens were dragged from their beds and hurried off to prison. They all received sentence of death! "I have reiterated the sentence again and again," he writes to Philip, "for they torment me with inquiries whether in this or that case it might not be commuted for banishment. They weary me of my life with their importunities." He was not too weary, however, to go on with the bloody work; for in the same letter we find him reckoning that three hundred heads more must fall before it will be time to talk of a general pardon.

It was common, says an old chronicler, to see thirty or forty persons arrested at once. The wealthier burghers might be seen, with their arms pinioned behind them, dragged at the horse's tail to the place of execution. The poorer sort were not even summoned to take their trial in Brussels. Their cases were dispatched at once, and they were hung up, without further delay, in the city or in the suburbs.

Brandt, in his History of the Reformation, has collected many particulars respecting the persecution, especially in his own province of Holland, during that "reign of terror." Men of lower consideration, when dragged to prison, were often cruelly tortured on the rack, to extort confessions, implicating themselves or their friends. The modes of death adjudged by the bloody tribunal were various. Some were beheaded with the sword,—a distinction reserved, as it would seem, for persons of condition. Some were sentenced to the gibbet, and others to the stake. This last punishment, the most dreadful of all, was confined to the greater offenders against religion. But it seems to have been left much to the caprice of the judges, sometimes even of the brutal soldiery who superintended the executions. At least we find the Spanish soldiers, on one occasion, in their righteous indignation, throwing into the flames an unhappy Protestant preacher whom the court had sentenced to the gallows.

The soldiers of Alva were many of them veterans who had borne arms against the Protestants under Charles the Fifth,—comrades of the men who at that very time were hunting down the natives of the New World, and slaughtering them by thousands in the name of religion. With them the sum and substance of religion were comprised in a blind faith in the Romish Church, and in uncompromising hostility to the heretic. The life of the heretic was the most acceptable sacrifice that could be offered to Jehovah. With hearts thus seared by fanaticism, and made callous by long familiarity with human suffering, they were the very ministers to do the bidding of such a master as the duke of Alva.

The cruelty of the persecutors was met by an indomitable courage on the part of their victims. Most of the offences were, in some way or other, connected with religion. The accused were preachers, or had aided and comforted the preachers, or had attended their services, or joined the consistories, or afforded evidence, in some form, that they had espoused the damnable doctrines of heresy. It is precisely in such a case, where men are called to suffer for conscience' sake, that they are prepared to endure all,—to die in defense of their opinions. The storm of persecution fell on persons of every condition; men and women, the young, the old, the infirm and helpless. But the weaker the party, the more did the spirit rise to endure his sufferings. Many affecting instances are recorded of persons who, with no support but their trust in heaven, displayed the most heroic fortitude in the presence of their judges, and, by the boldness with which they asserted their opinions, seemed even to court the crown of martyrdom. On the scaffold and at the stake this intrepid spirit did not desert them; and the testimony they bore to the truth of the cause for which they suffered had such an effect on the bystanders, that it was found necessary to silence them. A cruel device for more effectually accomplishing this was employed by the officials. The tip of the tongue was seared with a red-hot iron, and the swollen member then compressed between two plates of metal screwed fast together. Thus gagged, the groans of the wretched sufferer found vent in strange sounds, that excited the brutal merriment of his tormentors.

But it is needless to dwell longer on the miseries endured by the people of the Netherlands in this season of trial. Yet, if the cruelties perpetrated in the name of religion are most degrading to humanity, they must be allowed to have called forth the most sublime spectacle which humanity can present,—that of the martyr offering up his life on the altar of principle.

It is difficult—in fact, from the data in my possession, not possible—to calculate the number of those who fell by the hand of the executioner in this dismal persecution. The number, doubtless, was not great as compared with the population of the country,—not so great as we may find left, almost every year of our lives, on a single battle-field. When the forms of legal proceedings are maintained, the movements of justice—if the name can be so profaned—are comparatively tardy. It is only, as in the French Revolution, when thousands are swept down by the cannon, or whole cargoes of wretched victims are plunged at once into the waters, that death moves on with the gigantic stride of pestilence and war.

But the amount of suffering from such a persecution is not to be estimated merely by the number of those who have actually suffered death, when the fear of death hung like a naked sword over every man’s head. Alva had expressed to Philip the wish that every man, as he lay down at night, or as he rose in the morning, “might feel that his house, at any hour, might fall and crush him!”. This humane wish was accomplished. Those who escaped death had to fear a fate scarcely less dreadful, in banishment and confiscation of property. The persecution very soon took this direction; and persecution when prompted by avarice is even more odious than when it springs from fanaticism, which, however degrading in itself, is but the perversion of the religious principle.

Sentence of perpetual exile and confiscation was pronounced at once against all who fled the country. Even the dead were not spared; as is shown by the process instituted against the marquis of Bergen, for the confiscation of his estates on the charge of treason. That nobleman had gone with Montigny, as the reader may remember, on his mission to Madrid, where he had recently died,—more fortunate than his companion, who survived for a darker destiny. The duke’s emissaries were everywhere active in making inventories of the property of the suspected parties. “I am going to arrest some of the richest and worst offenders”, writes Alva to his master, “and bring them to a pecuniary composition”. He shall next proceed, he says, against the delinquent cities. In this way a round sum will flow into his majesty's coffers. The victims of this class were so numerous, that we find a single sentence of the council sometimes comprehending eighty or a hundred individuals. One before me, in fewer words than are taken up by the names of the parties, dooms no less than a hundred and thirty-five inhabitants of Amsterdam to confiscation and exile.

One may imagine the distress brought on this once flourishing country by this wholesale proscription; for besides the parties directly interested, there was a host of others incidentally affected,—hospitals and charitable establishments, widows and helpless orphans, now reduced to want by the failure of the sources which supplied them with their ordinary subsistence. Slow and sparing must have been the justice doled out to such impotent creditors, when they preferred their claims to a tribunal like the Council of Blood! The effect was soon visible in the decay of trade and the rapid depopulation of the towns. Notwithstanding the dreadful penalties denounced against fugitives, great numbers, especially from the border states, contrived to make their escape. The neighboring districts of Germany opened their arms to the wanderers; and many a wretched exile from the northern provinces, flying across the frozen waters of the Zuyder Zee, found refuge within the hospitable walls of Embden. Even in an inland city like Ghent, half the houses, if we may credit the historian, were abandoned. Not a family was there, he says, but some of its members had tasted the bitterness of exile or of death. "The fury of persecution," writes the prince of Orange, "spreads such horror throughout the nation, that thousands, and among them some of the principal Papists, have fled a country where tyranny seems to be directed against all, without distinction of faith."

Yet in a financial point of view the results did not keep pace with Alva's wishes. Notwithstanding the large amount of the confiscations, the proceeds, as he complains to Philip, were absorbed in so many ways, especially by the peculation of his agents, that he doubted whether the expense would not come to more than the profits! He was equally dissatisfied with the conduct of other functionaries. The commissioners sent into the provinces, instead of using their efforts to detect the guilty, seemed disposed, he said, rather to conceal them. Even the members of the Council of Troubles manifested so much apathy in their vocation, as to give him more annoyance than the delinquents themselves! The only person who showed any zeal in the service was Vargas. He was worth all the others of the council put together. The duke might have excepted from this sweeping condemnation Hessels, the lawyer of Ghent, if the rumors concerning him were true. This worthy councilor, it is said, would sometimes fall asleep in his chair, worn out by the fatigue of trying causes and signing death-warrants. In this state, when suddenly called on to pronounce the doom of the prisoner, he would cry out, half awake, and rubbing his eyes, “Ad patibulum! Ad patibulum!”—“To the gallows! To the gallows!”

But Vargas was after the duke’s own heart. Alva was never weary of commending his follower to the king. He besought Philip to interpose in his behalf, and cause three suits which had been brought against that functionary to be suspended during his absence from Spain. The king accordingly addressed the judge on the subject. But the magistrate (his name should have been preserved) had the independence to reply, that “justice must take its course, and could not be suspended from favor to any one”. “Nor would I have it so”, answered Philip, (it is the king who tells it;) “I would do only what is possible to save the interests of Vargas from suffering by his absence”. In conclusion he tells the duke, that Vargas should give no heed to what is said of the suits, since he must be assured, after the letter he has received under the royal hand, that his sovereign fully approves his conduct. But if Vargas, by his unscrupulous devotion to the cause, won the confidence of his employers, he incurred, on the other hand, the unmitigated hatred of the people,—a hatred deeper, it would almost seem, than even that which attached to Alva; owing perhaps to the circumstance that, as the instrument for the execution of the duke's measures, Vargas was brought more immediately in contact with the people than the duke himself.

As we have already seen, many, especially of those who dwelt in the border provinces, escaped the storm of persecution by voluntary exile. The suspected parties would seem to have received, not unfrequently, kindly intimations from the local magistrates of the fate that menaced them. Others, who lived in the interior, were driven to more desperate courses. They banded together in considerable numbers, under the name of the "wild Gueux,"—"Gueux sauvages,"—and took refuge in the forests, particularly of West Flanders. Thence they sallied forth, fell upon unsuspecting travelers, especially the monks and ecclesiastics, whom they robbed, and sometimes murdered. Occasionally they were so bold as to invade the monasteries and churches, stripping them of their rich ornaments, their plate and other valuables, when, loaded with booty, they hurried back to their fastnesses. The evil proceeded to such a length, that the governor-general was obliged to order out a strong force to exterminate the banditti, while at the same time he published an edict, declaring that every district should be held responsible for the damage done to property within its limits by these marauders.

It might be supposed that, under the general feeling of resentment provoked by Alva's cruel policy, his life would have been in constant danger from the hand of the assassin. Once, indeed, he had nearly fallen a victim to a conspiracy headed by two brothers, men of good family in Flanders, who formed a plan to kill him while attending mass at an abbey in the neighborhood of Brussels. But Alva was not destined to fall by the hand of violence.

We may well believe that wise and temperate men, like Viglius, condemned the duke's proceedings as no less impolitic than cruel. That this veteran councilor did so is apparent from his confidential letters, though he was too prudent to expose himself to Alva's enmity by openly avowing it. There were others, however,—the princes of Germany, in particular,—who had no such reasons for dissembling, and who carried their remonstrances to a higher tribunal than that of the governor-general.

On the second of March, 1568, the Emperor Maximilian, in the name of the electors, addressed a letter to Philip, in behalf of his oppressed subjects in the Netherlands. He reminded the king that he had already more than once, and in most affectionate terms, interceded with him for a milder and more merciful policy towards his Flemish subjects. He entreated his royal kinsman to reflect whether it were not better to insure the tranquility of the state by winning the hearts of his people, than by excessive rigor to drive them to extremity. And he concluded by intimating that, as a member of the Germanic body, the Netherlands had a right to be dealt with in that spirit of clemency which was conformable to the constitutions of the empire.

Although neither the arguments nor the importunity of Maximilian had power to shake the constancy of Philip, he did not refuse to enter into some explanation, if not vindication, of his conduct. "What I have done," he replied, "has been for the repose of the provinces, and for the defense of the Catholic faith. If I had respected justice less, I should have dispatched the whole business in a single day. No one acquainted with the state of affairs will find reason to censure my severity. Nor would I do otherwise than I have done, though I should risk the sovereignty of the Netherlands,—no, though the world should fall in ruins around me!"—Such a reply effectually closed the correspondence.

The wretched people of the Netherlands, meanwhile, now looked to the prince of Orange as the only refuge left them, under Providence. Those who fled the country, especially persons of higher condition, gathered round his little court at Dillemburg, where they were eagerly devising plans for the best means of restoring freedom to their country. They brought with them repeated invitations from their countrymen to William that he would take up arms in their defense. The Protestants of Antwerp, in particular, promised that, if he would raise funds by coining his plate, they would agree to pay him double the value of it.

William had no wish nearer his heart than that of assuming the enterprise. But he knew the difficulties that lay in the way, and, like a wise man, he was not disposed to enter on it till he saw the means of carrying it through successfully. To the citizens of Antwerp he answered, that not only would he devote his plate, but his person and all that he possessed, most willingly, for the freedom of religion and of his country. But the expenses of raising a force were great,—at the very least, six hundred thousand florins; nor could he now undertake to procure that amount, unless some of the principal merchants, whom he named, would consent to remain with him as security.

In the meantime he was carrying on an extensive correspondence with the German princes, with the leaders of the Huguenot party in France, and even with the English government,—endeavoring to propitiate them to the cause, as one in which every Protestant had an interest. From the elector of Saxony and the landgrave of Hesse he received assurances of aid. Considerable sums seem to have been secretly remitted from the principal towns in the Low Countries; while Culemborg, Hoogstraten, Louis of Nassau, and the other great lords who shared his exile, contributed as largely as their dilapidated fortunes would allow. The prince himself parted with his most precious effects, pawning his jewels, and sending his plate to the mint,—“the fit ornaments of a palace”, exclaims an old writer, “but yielding little for the necessities of war”.

By these sacrifices a considerable force was assembled before the end of April, consisting of the most irregular and incongruous materials. There were German mercenaries, who had no interest in the cause beyond their pay; Huguenots from France, who brought into the field a hatred of the Roman Catholics which made them little welcome, even as allies, to a large portion of the Netherlands; and, lastly, exiles from the Netherlands,—the only men worthy of the struggle,—who held life cheap in comparison with the great cause to which they devoted it. But these, however strong in their patriotism, were for the most part simple burghers untrained to arms, and ill fitted to cope with the hardy veterans of Castile.

Before completing his levies, the prince of Orange, at the suggestion of his friend, the landgrave of Hesse, prepared and published a document, known as his “Justification”, in which he vindicated himself and his cause from the charges of Alva. He threw the original blame of the troubles on Granvelle, denied having planned or even promoted the confederacy of the nobles, and treated with scorn the charge of having, from motives of criminal ambition, fomented rebellion in a country where he had larger interests at stake than almost any other inhabitant. He touched on his own services, as well as those of his ancestors, and the ingratitude with which they had been requited by the throne. And in conclusion, he prayed that his majesty might at length open his eyes to the innocence of his persecuted subjects, and that it might be made apparent to the world that the wrongs inflicted on them had come from evil counsellors rather than himself.

The plan of the campaign was, to distract the duke’s attention, and, if possible, create a general rising in the country, by assailing it on three several points at once. A Huguenot corps, under an adventurer named Cocqueville, was to operate against Artois. Hoogstraten, with the lord of Villers, and others of the banished nobles, were to penetrate the country in a central direction through Brabant. While William's brothers, the Counts Louis and Adolphus, at the head of a force, partly Flemish, partly German, were to carry the war over the northern borders, into Groningen; the prince himself, who established his head-quarters in the neighborhood of Cleves, was busy in assembling a force prepared to support any one of the divisions, as occasion might require.

It was the latter part of April, before Hoogstraten and Louis took the field. The Huguenots ware still later; and William met with difficulties which greatly retarded the formation of his own corps. The great difficulty—one which threatened to defeat the enterprise at its commencement—was the want of money, equally felt in raising troops and in enforcing discipline among them when they were raised. “If you have any love for me”, he writes to his friend, the “wise” landgrave of Hesse, “I beseech you to aid me privately with a sum sufficient to meet the pay of the troops for the first month. Without this I shall be in danger of failing in my engagements,—to me worse than death; to say nothing of the ruin which such a failure must bring on our credit and on the cause”. We are constantly reminded, in the career of the prince of Orange, of the embarrassments under which our own Washington labored in the time of the Revolution, and of the patience and unconquerable spirit which enabled him to surmount them.

Little need be said of two of the expeditions, which were failures. Hoogstraten had scarcely crossed the frontier, towards the end of April, when he was met by Alva's trusty lieutenant, Sancho Davila, and beaten, with considerable loss. Villers and some others of the rebel lords, made prisoners, escaped the sword of the enemy in the field, to fall by that of the executioner in Brussels. Hoogstraten, with the remnant of his forces, made good his retreat, and effected a junction with the prince of Orange.

Cocqueville met with a worse fate. A detachment of French troops was sent against him by Charles the Ninth, who thus requited the service of the same kind he had lately received from the duke of Alva. On the approach of their countrymen, the Huguenots basely laid down their arms. Cocqueville and his principal officers were surrounded, made prisoners, and perished ignominiously on the scaffold.

The enterprise of Louis of Nassau was attended with different results. Yet after he had penetrated into Groningen, he was sorely embarrassed by the mutinous spirit of the German mercenaries. The province was defended by Count Aremberg, its governor, a brave old officer, who had studied the art of war under Charles the Fifth; one of those models of chivalry on whom the men of a younger generation are ambitious to form themselves. He had been employed on many distinguished services; and there were few men at the court of Brussels who enjoyed higher consideration under both Philip and his father. The strength of his forces lay in his Spanish infantry. He was deficient in cavalry, but was soon to be reinforced by a body of horse under Count Megen, who was a day's march in his rear.

Aremberg soon came in sight of Louis, who was less troubled by the presence of his enemy than by the disorderly conduct of his German soldiers, clamorous for their pay. Doubtful of his men, Louis declined to give battle to a foe so far superior to him in everything but numbers. He accordingly established himself in an uncommonly strong position, which the nature of the ground fortunately afforded. In his rear, protected by a thick wood, stood the convent of Heyligerlee, which gave its name to the battle. In front the land sloped towards an extensive morass. His infantry, on the left, was partly screened by a hill from the enemy's fire; and on the right he stationed his cavalry, under the command of his brother Adolphus, who was to fall on the enemy's flank, should they be hardy enough to give battle

But Aremberg was too well acquainted with the difficulties of the ground to risk an engagement, at least till he was strengthened by the reinforcement under Megen. Unfortunately, the Spanish infantry, accustomed to victory, and feeling a contempt for the disorderly levies opposed to them, loudly called to be led against the heretics. In vain their more prudent general persisted in his plan. They chafed at the delay, refusing to a Flemish commander the obedience which they might probably have paid to one of their own nation. They openly accused him of treachery, and of having an understanding with his countrymen in the enemy's camp. Stung by their reproaches, Aremberg had the imprudence to do what more than one brave man has been led to do, both before and since; he surrendered his own judgment to the importunities of his soldiers. Crying out that "they should soon see if he were a traitor!" he put himself at the head of his little army, and marched against the enemy. His artillery, meanwhile, which he had posted on his right, opened a brisk fire on Louis's left wing, where, owing to the nature of the ground, it did little execution.

Under cover of this fire the main body of the Spanish infantry moved forward; but, as their commander had foreseen, the men soon became entangled in the morass; their ranks were thrown into disorder; and when at length, after long and painful efforts, they emerged on the firm ground, they were more spent with toil than they would have been after a hard day's march. Thus jaded, and sadly in disarray, they were at once assailed in front by an enemy who, conscious of his own advantage, was all fresh and hot for action. Notwithstanding their distressed condition, Aremberg's soldiers maintained their ground for some time, like men unaccustomed to defeat. At length, Louis ordered the cavalry on his right to charge Aremberg's flank. This unexpected movement, occurring at a critical moment, decided the day. Assailed in front and in flank, hemmed in by the fatal morass in the rear, the Spaniards were thrown into utter confusion. In vain their gallant leader, proof against danger, though not against the taunts of his followers, endeavored to rally them. His horse was killed under him; and as he was mounting another, he received a shot from a foot-soldier, and fell mortally wounded from his saddle. The rout now became general. Some took to the morass, and fell into the hands of the victors. Some succeeded in cutting their way through the ranks of their assailants, while many more lost their lives in the attempt. The ground was covered with the wounded and the dead. The victory was complete.

Sixteen hundred of the enemy were left on that fatal field. In the imagination of the exile thirsting for vengeance, it might serve in some degree to balance the bloody roll of victims whom the pitiless duke had sent to their account. Nine pieces of artillery, with a large quantity of ammunition and military stores, a rich service of plate belonging to Aremberg, and a considerable sum of money lately received by him to pay the arrears of the soldiers, fell into the hands of the patriots. Yet as serious a loss as any inflicted on the Spaniards was that of their brave commander. His corpse, disfigured by wounds, was recognized, amid a heap of the slain, by the insignia of the Golden Fleece, which he wore round his neck, and which Louis sent to the prince, his brother, as a proud trophy of his victory. The joy of the conquerors was dimmed by one mournful event, the death of Count Adolphus of Nassau, who fell bravely fighting at the head of his troops, one of the first victims in the war of the revolution. He was a younger brother of William, only twenty-seven years of age. But he had already given promise of those heroic qualities which proved him worthy of the generous race from which he sprung.

The battle was fought on the twenty-third of May, 1568. On the day following, Count Megen arrived with a reinforcement; too late to secure the victory, but not, as it proved, too late to snatch the fruits of it from the victors. By a rapid movement, he succeeded in throwing himself into the town of Groningen, and thus saved that important place from falling into the hands of the patriots.

The tidings of the battle of Heyligerlee caused a great sensation through the country. While it raised the hopes of the malecontents, it filled the duke of Alva with indignation,—the greater as he perceived that the loss of the battle was to be referred mainly to the misconduct of his own soldiers. He saw with alarm the disastrous effect likely to be produced by so brilliant a success on the part of the rebels, in the very beginning of the struggle. The hardy men of Friesland would rise to assert their independence. The prince of Orange, with his German levies, would unite with his victorious brother, and, aided by the inhabitants, would be in condition to make formidable head against any force that Alva could muster. It was an important crisis, and called for prompt and decisive action. The duke, with his usual energy, determined to employ no agent here, but to take the affair into his own hands, concentrate his forces, and march in person against the enemy.

Yet there were some things he deemed necessary to be done, if it were only for their effect on the public mind, before entering on the campaign. On the twenty-eighth of May, sentence was passed on the prince of Orange, his brother Louis, and their noble companions. They were pronounced guilty of contumacy in not obeying the summons of the council, and of levying war against the king. For this they were condemned to perpetual banishment, and their estates confiscated to the use of the crown. The sentence was signed by the duke of Alva. William's estates had been already sequestrated, and a body of Spanish troops was quartered in his town of Breda.

Another act, of a singular nature, intimated pretty clearly the dispositions of the government. The duke caused the Hôtel de Culemborg, where he had fixed his own residence before the regent's departure, and where the Gueux had held their meetings on coming to Brussels, to be levelled with the ground. On the spot a marble column was raised, bearing on each side of the base the following inscription: “Here once stood the mansion of Florence Pallant”,—the name of the count of Culemborg,—“now razed to the ground for the execrable conspiracy plotted therein against religion, the Roman Catholic Church, the king’s majesty, and the country”. Alva by this act intended doubtless to proclaim to the world, not so much his detestation of the confederacy—that would have been superfluous—as his determination to show no mercy to those who had taken part in it. Indeed, in his letters, on more than one occasion, he speaks of the signers of the Compromise as men who had placed themselves beyond the pale of mercy.

But all these acts were only the prelude to the dismal tragedy which was soon to be performed. Nearly nine months had elapsed since the arrest of the Counts Egmont and Hoorne. During all this time they had remained prisoners of state, under a strong guard, in the castle of Ghent. Their prosecution had been conducted in a deliberate, and indeed dilatory manner, which had nourished in their friends the hope of a favorable issue. Alva now determined to bring the trial to a close,—to pass sentence of death on the two lords, and to carry it into execution before departing on his expedition.

It was in vain that some of his counsellors remonstrated on the impolicy, at a crisis like the present, of outraging the feelings of the nation, by whom Egmont in particular was so much beloved. In vain they suggested that the two nobles would serve as hostages for the good behavior of the people during his absence, since any tumult must only tend to precipitate the fate of the prisoners. Whether it was that Alva distrusted the effect on his master of the importunities, from numerous quarters, in their behalf; or, what is far more likely, that he feared lest some popular rising, during his absence, might open the gates to his prisoners, he was determined to proceed at once to their execution. His appetite for vengeance may have been sharpened by mortification at the reverse his arms had lately experienced; and he may have felt that a blow like the present would be the most effectual to humble the arrogance of the nation.

There were some other prisoners of less note, but of no little consideration, who remained to be disposed of. Their execution would prepare the public mind for the last scene of the drama. There were nineteen persons who, at this time, lay in confinement in the castle of Vilvoorde, a fortress of great strength, two leagues distant from Brussels. They were chiefly men of rank, and for the most part members of the Union. For these latter, of course, there was no hope. Their trials were now concluded, and they were only waiting their sentences. On the ominous twenty-eighth of May, a day on which the Council of Blood seems to have been uncommonly alert, they were all, without exception, condemned to be beheaded, and their estates were confiscated to the public use.

On the first of June, they were brought to Brussels, having been escorted there by nine companies of Spanish infantry, were conducted to the great square in front of the Hôtel de Ville, and, while the drums beat to prevent their last words from reaching the ears of the by-standers, their heads were struck off by the sword of the executioner. Eight of the number, who died in the Roman Catholic faith, were graciously allowed the rites of Christian burial. The heads of the remaining eleven were set upon poles, and their bodies left to rot upon the gibbet, like those of the vilest malefactors.

On the second of June, ten or twelve more, some of them persons of distinction, perished on the scaffold, in the same square in Brussels. Among these was Villers, the companion of Hoogstraten in the ill-starred expedition to Brabant, in which he was made prisoner. Since his captivity he had made some disclosures respecting the measures of Orange and his party, which might have entitled him to the consideration of Alva. But he had signed the Compromise.

On the following day, five other victims were led to execution within the walls of Vilvoorde, where they had been long confined. One of these has some interest for us, Casembrot, lord of Backerzele, Egmont's confidential secretary. That unfortunate gentleman had been put to the rack more than once, to draw from him disclosures to the prejudice of Egmont. But his constancy proved stronger than the cruelty of his persecutors. He was now to close his sufferings by an ignominious death; so far fortunate, however, that it saved him from witnessing the fate of his beloved master. Such were the gloomy scenes which ushered in the great catastrophe of the fifth of June.

CHAPTER XXVII.

TRIALS OF EGMONT AND HOORNE.

1568.

Nine months had now elapsed since the Counts Egmont and Hoorne had been immured within the strong citadel of Ghent. During their confinement they had met with even less indulgence than was commonly shown to prisoners of state. They were not allowed to take the air of the castle, and were debarred from all intercourse with the members of their families. The sequestration of their property at the time of their arrest had moreover reduced them to such extreme indigence, that but for the care of their friends they would have wanted the common necessaries of life.

During this period their enemies had not been idle. We have seen, at the time of the arrest of the two nobles, that their secretaries and their private papers had been also seized. “Backerzele”, writes the duke of Alva to Philip, “makes disclosures every day respecting his master Count Egmont. When he is put to the torture, wonders may be expected from him in this way!”. But all that the rack extorted from the unhappy man was some obscure intimation respecting a place in which Egmont had secreted a portion of his effects. After turning up the ground in every direction round the castle of Ghent, the Spaniards succeeded in disinterring eleven boxes filled with plate, and some caskets of jewels, and other precious articles,—all that now remained of Egmont’s once splendid fortune.

Meanwhile commissioners were sent into the provinces placed under the rule of the two noblemen to collect information respecting their government. The burgomasters of the towns were closely questioned, and, where they showed reluctance, were compelled by menaces to answer. But what Alva chiefly relied on was the examination of the prisoners themselves.

On the twelfth of November, 1567, a commission composed of Vargas, Del Rio, and the secretary Pratz, proceeded to Ghent, and began a personal examination of Egmont. The interrogatories covered the whole ground of the recent troubles. They were particularly directed to ascertain Egmont's relations with the reformed party, but above all, his connection with the confederates,—the offence of deepest dye in the view of the commissioners. The examination continued through five days; and a record, signed and sworn to by the several parties, furnished the basis of the future proceedings against the prisoner. A similar course was then taken in regard to Hoorne.

In the meantime the friends of the two nobles were making active exertions in their behalf. Egmont, as we have already seen, was married to a German princess, Sabina, sister of the elector of Bavaria,—a lady who, from her rank, the charm of her manners, and her irreproachable character, was the most distinguished ornament of the court of Brussels. She was the mother of eleven children, the eldest of them still of tender age. Surrounded by this numerous and helpless family, thus suddenly reduced from affluence to miserable penury, the countess became the object of general commiseration. Even the stern heart of Alva seems to have been touched, as he notices her "lamentable situation," in one of his letters to Philip.

The unhappy lady was fortunate in securing the services of Nicolas de Landas, one of the most eminent jurists of the country, and a personal friend of her husband. In her name, he addressed letters to several of the German princes, and to the Emperor Maximilian, requesting their good offices in behalf of her lord. He also wrote both to Alva and the king, less to solicit the release of Egmont—a thing little to be expected—than to obtain the removal of the cause from the Council of Blood to a court consisting of the knights of the Golden Fleece. To this both Egmont and Hoorne had a good claim, as belonging to that order, the statutes of which, solemnly ratified by Philip himself, guarantied to its members the right of being tried only by their peers. The frank and independent tone with which the Flemish jurist, himself also one of the order, and well skilled in the law, urged this claim on the Spanish monarch, reflects honor on his memory.

Hoorne’s wife, also a German lady of high connection, and his step-mother, the countess-dowager, were unwearied in their exertions in his behalf. They wrote to the knights of the Golden Fleece, in whatever country residing, and obtained their written testimony to the inalienable right of the accused to be tried by his brethren. This was obviously a point of the last importance, since a trial by the Council of Blood was itself equivalent to a condemnation.

Several of the electors, as well as other princes of the empire, addressed Philip directly on the subject, beseeching him to deal with the two nobles according to the statutes of the order. Maximilian wrote two letters to the same purpose; and, touching on the brilliant services of Egmont, he endeavored to excite the king's compassion for the desolate condition of the countess and her children.

But it was not foreigners only who interceded in behalf of the lords. Mansfeldt, than whom Philip had not a more devoted subject in the Netherlands, implored his sovereign to act conformably to justice and reason in the matter. Count Barlaimont, who on all occasions had proved himself no less stanch in his loyalty, found himself now in an embarrassing situation,—being both a knight of the order and a member of the Council of Troubles. He wrote accordingly to Philip, beseeching his majesty to relieve him from the necessity of either acting like a disloyal subject or of incurring the reproaches of his brethren.

Still more worthy of notice is the interference of Cardinal Granvelle, who, forgetting his own disgrace, for which he had been indebted to Egmont perhaps as much as to any other person, now generously interceded in behalf of his ancient foe. He invoked the clemency of Philip, as more worthy of a great prince than rigor. He called to mind the former good deeds of the count, and declared, if he had since been led astray, the blame was chargeable on others rather than on himself. But although the cardinal wrote more than once to the king in this strain, it was too late to efface the impression made by former communications, in which he had accused his rival of being a party to the treasonable designs of the prince of Orange. This impression had been deepened by the reports from time to time received from the regent, who at one period, as we have seen, withdrew her confidence altogether from Egmont. Thus the conviction of that nobleman's guilt was so firmly settled in the king's mind, that, when Alva received the government of the Netherlands, there can be little doubt that Egmont was already marked out as the first great victim to expiate the sins of the nation. The arguments and entreaties, therefore, used on the present occasion to dissuade Philip from his purpose, had no other effect than to quicken his movements. Anxious to rid himself of importunities so annoying, he ordered Alva to press forward the trial, adding, at the same time, that all should be made so clear that the world, whose eyes were now turned on these proceedings, might be satisfied of their justice.

Before the end of December the attorney-general Du Bois had prepared the articles of accusation against Egmont. They amounted to no less than ninety, some of them of great length. They chiefly rested on evidence derived from the personal examination, sustained by information gathered from other quarters. The first article, which, indeed, may be said to have been the key to all the rest, charged Egmont with having conspired with William and the other banished lords to shake off the Spanish rule, and divide the government among themselves. With this view he had made war on the faithful Granvelle, had sought to concentrate the powers of the various councils into one, had resisted the Inquisition, had urged the meeting of the states-general, in short, had thwarted, as far as possible, in every particular, the intentions of the king. He was accused, moreover, of giving encouragement to the sectaries. He had not only refused his aid when asked to repress their violence, but had repeatedly licensed their meetings, and allowed them to celebrate their religious rites. Egmont was too stanch a Catholic to warrant his own faith being called into question. It was only in connection with the political movements of the country that he was supposed to have countenanced the party of religious reform. Lastly he was charged, not only with abetting the confederacy of the nobles, but with having, in conjunction with the prince of Orange and his associates, devised the original plan of it. It was proof of the good-will he bore the league, that he had retained in his service more than one member of his household after they had subscribed the Compromise. On these various grounds, Egmont was declared to be guilty of treason.

The charges, which cover a great space, would seem at the first glance to be crudely put together, confounding things trivial, and even irrelevant to the question, with others of real moment. Yet they must be admitted to have been so cunningly prepared as to leave an impression most unfavorable to the innocence of the prisoner. The attorney-general, sometimes audaciously perverting the answers of Egmont, at other times giving an exaggerated importance to his occasional admissions, succeeded in spreading his meshes so artfully, that it required no slight degree of coolness and circumspection, even in an innocent party, to escape from them.

The instrument was delivered to Egmont on the twenty-ninth of December. Five days only were allowed him to prepare his defense,—and that too without the aid of a friend to support, or of counsel to advise him. He at first resolutely declined to make a defense at all, declaring that he was amenable to no tribunal but that of the members of the order. Being informed, however, that if he persisted he would be condemned for contumacy, he consented, though with a formal protest against the proceeding as illegal, to enter on his defense.

He indignantly disclaimed the idea of any design to subvert the existing government. He admitted the charges in regard to his treatment of Granvelle, and defended his conduct on the ground of expediency,—of its being demanded by the public interest. On the same ground he explained his course in reference to some of the other matters charged on him, and especially in relation to the sectaries,—too strong in numbers, he maintained, to be openly resisted. He positively denied the connection imputed to him with the confederates; declaring that, far from countenancing the league, he had always lamented its existence, and discouraged all within his reach from joining it. In reply to the charge of not having dismissed Backerzele after it was known that he had joined the confederates, he excused himself by alleging the good services which his secretary had rendered the government, more especially in repressing the disorders of the iconoclasts. On the whole, his answers seem to have been given in good faith, and convey the impression—probably not far from the truth—of one who, while he did not approve of the policy of the crown, and thought, indeed, some of its measures impracticable, had no design to overturn the government.

The attorney-general next prepared his accusation of Count Hoorne, consisting of sixty-three separate charges. They were of much the same import with those brought against Egmont. The bold, impatient temper of the admiral made him particularly open to the assault of his enemies. He was still more peremptory than his friend in his refusal to relinquish his rights as a knight of the Golden Fleece, and appear before the tribunal of Alva. When prevailed on to waive his scruples, his defense was couched in language so direct and manly as at once engages our confidence. “Unskilled as I am in this sort of business”, he remarks, “and without the aid of counsel to guide me, if I have fallen into errors, they must be imputed, not to intention, but to the want of experience.... I can only beseech those who shall read my defense to believe that it has been made sincerely and in all truth, as becomes a gentleman of honorable descent”.

By the remonstrances of the prisoners and their friends, the duke was at length prevailed on to allow them counsel. Each of the two lords obtained the services of five of the most eminent jurists of the country; who, to their credit, seem not to have shrunk from a duty which, if not attended with actual danger, certainly did not lie in the road to preferment.

The counsel of the two lords lost no time in preparing the defense of their clients, taking up each charge brought against them by the attorney-general, and minutely replying to it. Their defense was substantially the same with that which had been set up by the prisoners themselves, though more elaborate, and sustained by a greater array both of facts and arguments. Meanwhile the counsel did not remit their efforts to have the causes brought before the tribunal of the Toison d'Or. Unless this could be effected, they felt that all endeavors to establish the innocence of their clients would be unavailing.

Alva had early foreseen the embarrassment to which he would be exposed on this ground. He had accordingly requested Philip to stop all further solicitations by making known his own decision in the matter. The king in reply assured the duke that men of authority and learning, to whom the subject had been committed, after a full examination, entirely confirmed the decision made before Alva's departure, that the case of treason did not come within the cognizance of the Toison d'Or. Letters patent accompanied this note, empowering the duke to try the cause. With these credentials Alva now strove to silence, if not to satisfy, the counsel of the prisoners; and, by a formal decree, all further applications for transferring the cause from his own jurisdiction to that of the Golden Fleece were peremptorily forbidden.

Yet all were not to be thus silenced. Egmont's countess still continued unwearied in her efforts to excite a sympathy in her lord's behalf in all those who would be likely to have any influence with the government. Early in 1568 she again wrote to Philip, complaining that she had not been allowed so much as to see her husband. She implored the king to take her and her children as sureties for Egmont, and permit him to be removed to one of his own houses. If that could not be, she begged that he might at least be allowed the air of the castle, lest, though innocent, his confinement might cost him his life. She alludes to her miserable condition, with her young and helpless family, and trusts in the king's goodness and justice that she shall not be forced to seek a subsistence in Germany, from which country she had been brought to Flanders by his father the emperor. The letter, says a chronicler of the time, was not to be read by any one without sincere commiseration for the writer.

The German princes, at the same time, continued their intercessions with the king for both the nobles; and the duke of Bavaria, and the duke and duchess of Lorraine, earnestly invoked his clemency in their behalf. Philip, wearied by this importunity but not wavering in his purpose, again called on Alva to press the trial to a conclusion.

Towards the end of April, 1568, came that irruption across the borders by Hoogstraten and the other lords, described in the previous chapter. Alva, feeling probably that his own presence might be required to check the invaders, found an additional motive for bringing the trials to a decision.

On the sixth of May, the attorney-general presented a remonstrance against the dilatory proceedings of Egmont's counsel, declaring that, although so many months had elapsed, they had neglected to bring forward their witnesses in support of their defense. He prayed that a day might be named for the termination of the process.

In the latter part of May, news came of the battle won by Louis of Nassau in the north. That now became certain which had before been only probable,—that Alva must repair in person to the seat of war, and assume the command of the army. There could be no further delay. On the first of June, a decree was published declaring that the time allowed for the defense of the prisoners had expired, and that no evidence could henceforth be admitted. The counsel for the accused loudly protested against a decision which cut them off from all means of establishing the innocence of their clients. They had abundant testimony at hand, they said, and had only waited until the government should have produced theirs. This was plausible, as it was in the regular course for the prosecuting party to take precedence. But one can hardly doubt that the wary lawyers knew that too little was to be expected from a tribunal like the Council of Blood to wish to have the case brought to a decision. By delaying matters, some circumstance might occur,—perhaps some stronger expression of the public sentiment,—to work a favorable change in the mind of the king. Poor as it was, this was the only chance for safety; and every day that the decision was postponed was a day gained to their clients.

But no time was given for expostulation. On the day on which Alva's decree was published, the affair was submitted to the decision of the Council of Blood; and on the following morning, the second of June, that body—or rather Vargas and Del Rio, the only members who had a voice in the matter—pronounced both the prisoners guilty of treason, and doomed them to death. The sentence was approved by Alva.

On the evening of the fourth, Alva went in person to the meeting of the council. The sentences of the two lords, each under a sealed envelope, were produced, and read aloud by the secretary. They were both of precisely the same import. After the usual preamble, they pronounced the Counts Egmont and Hoorne to have been proved parties to the abominable league and conspiracy of the prince of Orange and his associates; to have given aid and protection to the confederates; and to have committed sundry malepractices in their respective governments in regard to the sectaries, to the prejudice of the holy Catholic faith. On these grounds they were adjudged guilty of treason and rebellion, and were sentenced accordingly to be beheaded with the sword, their heads to be set upon poles, and there to continue during the pleasure of the duke; their possessions, fiefs, and rights, of every description, to be confiscated to the use of the crown. These sentences were signed only with the name of Alva, and countersigned with that of the secretary Pratz.

Such was the result of these famous trials, which, from the peculiar circumstances that attended them, especially their extraordinary duration and the illustrious characters and rank of the accused, became an object of general interest throughout Europe. In reviewing them, the first question that occurs is in regard to the validity of the grounds on which the causes were removed from the jurisdiction of the Toison d'Or. The decision of the “men of authority and learning”, referred to by the king, is of little moment considering the influences under which such a decision in the court of Madrid was necessarily given. The only authority of any weight in favor of this interpretation seems to have been that of the president Viglius; a man well versed in the law, with the statutes of the order before him, and, in short, with every facility at his command for forming an accurate judgment in the matter.

His opinion seems to have mainly rested on the fact that, in the year 1473, a knight of the order, charged with a capital crime, submitted to be tried by the ordinary courts of law. But, on the other hand, some years later, in 1490, four knights accused of treason, the precise crime alleged against Egmont and Hoorne, were arraigned and tried before the members of the Toison. A more conclusive argument against Viglius was afforded by the fact, that in 1531 a law was passed, under the Emperor Charles the Fifth, that no knight of the Golden Fleece could be arrested or tried, for any offence whatever, by any other body than the members of his own order. This statute was solemnly confirmed by Philip himself in 1550; and no law, surely, could be devised covering more effectually the whole ground in question. Yet Viglius had the effrontery to set this aside as of no force, being so clearly in contempt of all precedents and statutes. A subterfuge like this, which might justify the disregard of any law whatever, found no favor with the members of the order. Arschot and Barlaimont, in particular, the most devoted adherents of the crown, and among the few knights of the Toison then in Brussels, openly expressed their dissent. The authority of a jurist like Viglius was of great moment, however, to the duke, who did not fail to parade it. But sorely was it to the disgrace of that timid and time-serving councilor, that he could thus lend himself, and in such a cause, to become the tool of arbitrary power. It may well lead us to give easier faith than we should otherwise have done to those charges of peculation and meanness which the regent, in the heat of party dissensions, so liberally heaped on him.

But whatever may be thought of the rights possessed by the Toison d'Or in this matter, there can be no doubt as to the illegality of the court before which the cause was brought;—a court which had no warrant for its existence but the will of Alva; where the judges, contrary to the law of the land, were foreigners; where the presiding officer was not even necessarily present at the trial of the causes on which he alone was to pass sentence.

If so little regard was paid to the law in the composition of this tribunal, scarcely more was shown to it in the forms of proceeding. On the present occasion it does not appear that any evidence was brought forward by the prisoners. And as we are in possession of only a small part of that which sustained the prosecution, it is not easy to form an opinion how far the parties were or were not guilty of the crime imputed to them; still less whether that crime, according to the laws of the land, amounted to treason. The gravest charge made, with any apparent foundation, was that of a secret understanding with the confederates. The avowed object of the confederates was, in certain contingencies, to resist the execution of a particular ordinance; but without any design to overturn the government. This, by our law, could hardly be construed into treason. But in the Netherlands, in the time of the Spanish rule, the law may have been more comprehensive in its import; nor is it likely that the word "treason" was limited in so explicit a manner as by the English statute-book under the Plantagenets.

We have information of a curious document of the time, that may throw light on the matter. Peter d'Arset, president of Artois, was one of the original members of the Council of Troubles, but had retired from office before the trial of the two lords. It may have been from the high judicial station he held in one of Egmont's provinces, that he was consulted in regard to that nobleman's process. After an examination of the papers, he returned an answer, written in Latin, at great length, and with a purity of style that shows him to have been a scholar. In this, he goes over the whole ground of the accusation, article by article, showing the insufficiency of proof on every charge, and by argument and legal reference fully establishing the innocence of the accused. The president's opinion, so independently given, we may readily believe, found too little favor with the duke of Alva to be cited as authority.

But even though it were true that the two lords, in that season of public excitement, had been seduced from their allegiance for a time, some charity might have been shown to men who had subsequently broken with their former friends, and displayed the utmost zeal in carrying out the measures of the government; a zeal in the case of Egmont, at least, which drew from the regent unqualified commendation. Something more might have been conceded to the man who had won for his sovereign the most glorious trophies of his reign. But Philip's nature, unhappily, as I have had occasion to notice, was of that sort which is more sensible to injuries than to benefits.

Under the circumstances attending this trial, it may seem to have been a waste of time to inquire into the legality of the court which tried the cause, or the regularity of the forms of procedure. The real trial took place, not in Flanders, but in Castile. Who can doubt that, long before the duke of Alva began his march, the doom of the two nobles had been pronounced in the cabinet of Madrid?

CHAPTER XXVIII.

EXECUTION OF EGMONT AND HOORNE.

1568.

On the second of June, 1568, a body of three thousand men was ordered to Ghent to escort the Counts Egmont and Hoorne to Brussels. No resistance was offered, although the presence of the Spaniards caused a great sensation among the inhabitants of the place, who too well foreboded the fate of their beloved lord.

The nobles, each accompanied by two officers, were put into separate chariots. They were guarded by twenty companies of pikemen and arquebusiers; and a detachment of lancers, among whom was a body of the duke's own horse, rode in the van, while another of equal strength protected the rear. Under this strong escort they moved slowly towards Brussels. One night they halted at Dendermonde, and towards evening, on the fourth of the month, entered the capital. As the martial array defiled through its streets, there was no one, however stout-hearted he might be, says an eye-witness, who could behold the funeral pomp of the procession, and listen to the strains of melancholy music, without a feeling of sickness at his heart.

The prisoners were at once conducted to the Brodhuys, or “Bread-House”, usually known as the Maison du Roi,—that venerable pile in the market-place of Brussels, still visited by every traveler for its curious architecture, and yet more as the last resting-place of the Flemish lords. Here they were lodged in separate rooms, small, dark, and uncomfortable, and scantily provided with furniture. Nearly the whole of the force which had escorted them to Brussels was established in the great square, to defeat any attempt at a rescue. But none was made; and the night passed away without disturbance, except what was occasioned by the sound of busy workmen employed in constructing a scaffold for the scene of execution on the following day.

On the afternoon of the fourth, the duke of Alva had sent for Martin Rithovius, bishop of Ypres; and, communicating to him the sentence of the nobles, he requested the prelate to visit the prisoners, acquaint them with their fate, and prepare them for their execution on the following day. The bishop, an excellent man, and the personal friend of Egmont, was astounded by the tidings. He threw himself at Alva's feet, imploring mercy for the prisoners, and, if he could not spare their lives, beseeching him at least to grant them more time for preparation. But Alva sternly rebuked the prelate, saying that he had been summoned, not to thwart the execution of the law, but to console the prisoners, and enable them to die like Christians. The bishop, finding his entreaties useless, rose and addressed himself to his melancholy mission.

It was near midnight when he entered Egmont's apartment, where he found the poor nobleman, whose strength had been already reduced by confinement, and who was wearied by the fatigue of the journey, buried in slumber. It is said that the two lords, when summoned to Brussels, had indulged the vain hope that it was to inform them of the conclusion of their trial and their acquittal! However this may be, Egmont seems to have been but ill prepared for the dreadful tidings he received. He turned deadly pale as he listened to the bishop, and exclaimed, with deep emotion: “It is a terrible sentence. Little did I imagine that any offence I had committed against God or the king could merit such a punishment. It is not death that I fear. Death is the common lot of all. But I shrink from dishonor. Yet I may hope that my sufferings will so far expiate my offences, that my innocent family will not be involved in my ruin by the confiscation of my property. Thus much, at least, I think I may claim in consideration of my past services”. Then, after a pause, he added, “Since my death is the will of God and his majesty, I will try to meet it with patience”. He asked the bishop if there were no hope. On being answered, “None whatever”, he resolved to devote himself at once to preparing for the solemn change.

He rose from his couch, and hastily dressed himself. He then made his confession to the prelate, and desired that mass might be said, and the sacrament administered to him. This was done with great solemnity; and Egmont received the communion in the most devout manner, manifesting the greatest contrition for his sins. He next inquired of the bishop to what prayer he could best have recourse to sustain him in this trying hour. The prelate recommended to him that prayer which our Saviour had commended to his disciples. The advice pleased the count, who earnestly engaged in his devotions. But a host of tender recollections crowded on his mind; and the images of his wife and children drew his thoughts in another direction, till the kind expostulations of the prelate again restored him to himself.

Egmont asked whether it would be well to say anything on the scaffold for the edification of the people. But the bishop discouraged him, saying that he would be imperfectly heard, and that the people, in their present excitement, would be apt to misinterpret what he said to their own prejudice.

Having attended to his spiritual concerns, Egmont called for writing materials, and wrote a letter to his wife, whom he had not seen during his long confinement; and to her he now bade a tender farewell. He then addressed another letter, written in French, in a few brief and touching sentences, to the king,—which fortunately has been preserved to us. “This morning”, he says, “I have been made acquainted with the sentence which it has pleased your majesty to pass upon me. And although it has never been my intent to do aught against the person or the service of your majesty, or against our true, ancient, and Catholic faith, yet I receive in patience what it has pleased God to send me. If during these troubles I have counselled or permitted aught which might seem otherwise, I have done so from a sincere regard for the service of God and your majesty, and from what I believed the necessity of the times. Wherefore I pray your majesty to pardon it, and for the sake of my past services to take pity on my poor wife, my children, and my servants. In this trust, I commend myself to the mercy of God”. The letter is dated Brussels, “on the point of death”, June 5, 1568.

Having time still left, the count made a fair copy of the two letters, and gave them to the bishop, entreating him to deliver them according to their destination. He accompanied that to Philip with a ring, to be given at the same time to the monarch. It was of great value; and as it had been the gift of Philip himself during the count's late visit to Madrid, it might soften the heart of the king by reminding him of happier days, when he had looked with an eye of favor on his unhappy vassal.

Having completed all his arrangements, Egmont became impatient for the hour of his departure; and he expressed the hope that there would be no unnecessary delay. At ten in the morning the soldiers appeared who were to conduct him to the scaffold. They brought with them cords, as usual, to bind the prisoner's hands. But Egmont remonstrated, and showed that he had, himself, cut off the collar of his doublet and shirt, in order to facilitate the stroke of the executioner. This he did to convince them that he meditated no resistance; and on his promising that he would attempt none, they consented to his remaining with his hands unbound.

Egmont was dressed in a crimson damask robe, over which was a Spanish, mantle fringed with gold. His breeches were of black silk; and his hat, of the same material, was garnished with white and sable plumes. In his hand, which, as we have seen, remained free, he held a white handkerchief. On his way to the place of execution, he was accompanied by Julian de Romero, maître de camp, by the captain, Salinas, who had charge of the fortress of Ghent, and by the bishop of Ypres. As the procession moved slowly forward, the count repeated some portion of the fifty-first psalm,—“Have mercy on me, O God!”—in which the good prelate joined with him. In the centre of the square, on the spot where so much of the best blood of the Netherlands has been shed, stood the scaffold, covered with black cloth. On it were two velvet cushions with a small table, shrouded likewise in black, and supporting a silver crucifix. At the corners of the platform were two poles, pointed at the end with steel, intimating the purpose for which they were intended.

In front of the scaffold was the provost of the court, mounted on horseback and bearing the red wand of office in his hand. The executioner remained, as usual, below the platform, screened from view, that he might not, by his presence before it was necessary, outrage the feelings of the prisoners. The troops, who had been under arms all night, were drawn up around in order of battle; and strong bodies of arquebusiers were posted in the great avenues which led to the square. The space left open by the soldiery was speedily occupied by a crowd of eager spectators. Others thronged the roofs and windows of the buildings that surrounded the market-place, some of which, still standing at the present day, show, by their quaint and venerable architecture, that they must have looked down on the tragic scene we are now depicting.

It was indeed a gloomy day for Brussels,—so long the residence of the two nobles, where their forms were as familiar, and where they were held in as much love and honor as in any of their own provinces. All business was suspended. The shops were closed. The bells tolled in all the churches. An air of gloom, as of some impending calamity, settled on the city. “It seemed”, says one residing there at the time, “as if the day of judgment were at hand!”

As the procession slowly passed through the ranks of the soldiers, Egmont saluted the officers—some of them his ancient companions—with such a sweet and dignified composure in his manner as was long remembered by those who saw it. And few even of the Spaniards could refrain from tears, as they took their last look at the gallant noble who was to perish by so miserable an end.

With a steady step he mounted the scaffold, and, as he crossed it, gave utterance to the vain wish, that, instead of meeting such a fate, he had been allowed to die in the service of his king and country. He quickly, however, turned to other thoughts, and, kneeling on one of the cushions, with the bishop beside him on the other, he was soon engaged earnestly in prayer. With his eyes raised towards Heaven with a look of unutterable sadness, he prayed so fervently and loud as to be distinctly heard by the spectators. The prelate, much affected, put into his hands the silver crucifix, which Egmont repeatedly kissed; after which, having received absolution for the last time, he rose and made a sign to the bishop to retire. He then stripped off his mantle and robe; and again kneeling, he drew a silk cap, which he had brought for the purpose, over his eyes, and repeating the words, "Into thy hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit," he calmly awaited the stroke of the executioner.

The low sounds of lamentation, which from time to time had been heard among the populace, were now hushed into silence, as the minister of justice appearing on the platform, approached his victim, and with a single blow of the sword severed the head from the body. A cry of horror rose from the multitude, and some frantic with grief, broke through the ranks of the soldiers, and wildly dipped their handkerchiefs in the blood that streamed from the scaffold, treasuring them up, says the chronicler, as precious memorials of love and incitements to vengeance.—The head was then set on one of the poles at the end of the platform, while a mantle thrown over the mutilated trunk hid it from the public gaze.

It was near noon, when orders were sent to lead forth the remaining prisoner to execution. It had been assigned to the curate of La Chapelle to acquaint Count Hoorne with his fate. That nobleman received the awful tidings with less patience than was shown by his friend. He gave way to a burst of indignation at the cruelty and injustice of the sentence. It was a poor requital, he said, for eight and twenty years of faithful services to his sovereign. Yet, he added, he was not sorry to be released from a life of such incessant fatigue. For some time he refused to confess, saying he had done enough in the way of confession. When urged not to throw away the few precious moments that were left to him, he at length consented.

The count was dressed in a plain suit of black, and wore a Milanese cap upon his head. He was, at this time, about fifty years of age. He was tall, with handsome features, and altogether of a commanding presence. His form was erect, and as he passed with a steady step through the files of soldiers, on his way to the place of execution, he frankly saluted those of his acquaintance whom he saw among the spectators. His look had in it less of sorrow than of indignation, like that of one conscious of enduring wrong. He was spared one pang, in his last hour, which had filled Egmont's cup with bitterness; though, like him, he had a wife, he was to leave no orphan family to mourn him.

As he trod the scaffold, the apparatus of death seemed to have no power to move him. He still repeated the declaration, that, “often as he had offended his Maker, he had never, to his knowledge, committed any offence against the king”. When his eyes fell on the bloody shroud that enveloped the remains of Egmont, he inquired if it were the body of his friend. Being answered in the affirmative, he made some remark in Castilian, not understood. He then prayed for a few moments, but in so low a tone, that the words were not caught by the by-standers, and, rising, he asked pardon of those around if he had ever offended any of them, and earnestly besought their prayers. Then, without further delay, he knelt down, and, repeating the words “In manus tuas, Domine”, he submitted himself to his fate.

His bloody head was set up opposite to that of his fellow-sufferer. For three hours these ghastly trophies remained exposed to the gaze of the multitude. They were then taken down, and, with the bodies, placed in leaden coffins, which were straightway removed,—that containing the remains of Egmont to the convent of Santa Clara, and that of Hoorne to the ancient church of St. Gudule. To these places, especially to Santa Clara, the people now flocked, as to the shrine of a martyr. They threw themselves on the coffin, kissing it and bedewing it with their tears, as if it had contained the relics of some murdered saint; while many of them, taking little heed of the presence of informers, breathed vows of vengeance; some even swearing not to trim either hair or beard till these vows were executed. The government seems to have thought it prudent to take no notice of this burst of popular feeling. But a funeral hatchment, blazoned with the arms of Egmont, which, as usual after the master's death, had been fixed by his domestics on the gates of his mansion, was ordered to be instantly removed; no doubt, as tending to keep alive the popular excitement. The bodies were not allowed to remain long in their temporary places of deposit, but were transported to the family residences of the two lords in the country, and laid in the vaults of their ancestors.

Thus by the hand of the common executioner perished these two unfortunate noblemen, who, by their rank, possessions, and personal characters, were the most illustrious victims that could have been selected in the Netherlands. Both had early enjoyed the favor of Charles the Fifth, and both had been entrusted by Philip with some of the highest offices in the state. Philip de Montmorency, Count Hoorne, the elder of the two, came of the ancient house of Montmorency in France. Besides filling the high post of Admiral of the Low Countries, he was made governor of the provinces of Gueldres and Zutphen, was a councilor of state, and was created by the emperor a knight of the Golden Fleece. His fortune was greatly inferior to that of Count Egmont; yet its confiscation afforded a supply by no means unwelcome to the needy exchequer of the duke of Alva.

However nearly on a footing they might be in many respects, Hoorne was altogether eclipsed by his friend in military renown. Lamoral, Count Egmont, inherited through his mother, the most beautiful woman of her time, the title of prince of Gavre,—a place on the Scheldt, not far from Ghent. He preferred, however, the more modest title of count of Egmont, which came to him by the father's side, from ancestors who had reigned over the duchy of Gueldres. The uncommon promise which he early gave served, with his high position, to recommend him to the notice of the Emperor Charles the Fifth, who, in 1544, honored by his presence Egmont's nuptials with Sabina, countess-palatine of Bavaria. In 1546, when scarcely twenty-four years of age, he was admitted to the order of the Golden Fleece,—and, by a singular coincidence, on the same day on which that dignity was bestowed on the man destined to become his mortal foe, the duke of Alva. Philip, on his accession, raised him to the dignity of a councilor of state, and made him governor of the important provinces of Artois and Flanders.

But every other title to distinction faded away before that derived from those two victories, which left the deepest stain on the French arms that they had received since the defeat at Pavia. “I have seen”, said the French ambassador, who witnessed the execution of Egmont, “I have seen the head of that man fall who twice caused France to tremble”.

Yet the fame won by his success was probably unfortunate for Egmont. For this, the fruit of impetuous valor and of a brilliant coup-de-main, was very different from the success of a long campaign, implying genius and great military science in the commander. Yet the éclat it gave was enough to turn the head of a man less presumptuous than Egmont. It placed him at once on the most conspicuous eminence in the country; compelling him, in some sort, to take a position above his capacity to maintain. When the troubles broke out, Egmont was found side by side with Orange, in the van of the malcontents. He was urged to this rather by generous sensibility to the wrongs of his countrymen, than by any settled principle of action. Thus acting from impulse, he did not, like William, calculate the consequences of his conduct. When those consequences came, he was not prepared to meet them; he was like some unskillful necromancer, who has neither the wit to lay the storm which he has raised, nor the hardihood to brave it. He was acted on by contrary influences. In opposition to the popular movement came his strong feeling of loyalty, and his stronger devotion to the Roman Catholic faith. His personal vanity cooperated with these; for Egmont was too much of a courtier willingly to dispense with the smiles of royalty. Thus the opposite forces by which he was impelled served to neutralize each other. Instead of moving on a decided one of conduct, like his friend, William of Orange, he appeared weak and vacillating. He hesitated where he should have acted. And as the storm thickened, he even retraced his steps, and threw himself on the mercy of the monarch whom he had offended. William better understood the character of his master,—and that of the minister who was to execute his decrees.

Still, with all his deficiencies, there was much both in the personal qualities of Egmont and in his exploits to challenge admiration. “I knew him”, says Brantôme, “both in France and in Spain, and never did I meet with a nobleman of higher breeding, or more gracious in his manners”. With an address so winning, a heart so generous, and with so brilliant a reputation, it is not wonderful that Egmont should have been the pride of his court and the idol of his countrymen. In their idolatry they could not comprehend that Alva's persecution should not have been prompted by a keener feeling than a sense of public duty or obedience to his sovereign. They industriously sought in the earlier history of the rival chiefs the motives for personal pique. On Alva's first visit to the Netherlands, Egmont, then a young man, was said to have won of him a considerable sum at play. The ill-will thus raised in Alva’s mind was heightened by Egmont’s superiority over him at a shooting-match, which the people, regarding as a sort of national triumph, hailed with an exultation that greatly increased the mortification of the duke. But what filled up the measure of his jealousy was his rival’s military renown; for the Fabian policy which directed Alva's campaigns, however it established his claims to the reputation of a great commander, was by no means favorable to those brilliant feats of arms which have such attraction for the multitude. So intense, indeed, was the feeling of hatred, it was said, in Alva's bosom, that, on the day of his rival's execution, he posted himself behind a lattice of the very building in which Egmont had been confined, that he might feast his eyes with the sight of his mortal agony.

The friends of Alva give a very different view of his conduct. According to them, an illness under which he labored, at the close of Egmont's trial, was occasioned by his distress of mind at the task imposed on him by the king. He had written more than once to the court of Castile, to request some mitigation of Egmont’s sentence, but was answered, that “this would have been easy to grant, if the offence had been against the king; but against the faith, it was impossible”. It was even said that the duke was so much moved, that he was seen to shed tears as big as peas on the day of the execution!

I must confess, I have never seen any account that would warrant a belief in the report that Alva witnessed in person the execution of his prisoners. Nor, on the other hand, have I met with any letter of his deprecating the severity of their sentence, or advising a mitigation of their punishment. This, indeed, would be directly opposed to his policy, openly avowed. The reader may, perhaps, recall the homely simile by which he recommended to the queen-mother, at Bayonne, to strike at the great nobles in preference to the commoners. “One salmon”, he said, “was worth ten thousand frogs”. Soon after Egmont’s arrest, some of the burghers of Brussels waited on him to ask why it had been made. The duke bluntly told them, “When he had got together his troops, he would let them know”. Everything shows that, in his method of proceeding in regard to the two lords, he had acted on a preconcerted plan, in the arrangement of which he had taken his full part. In a letter to Philip, written soon after the execution, he speaks with complacency of having carried out the royal views in respect to the great offenders. In another, he notices the sensation caused by the death of Egmont; and “the greater the sensation”, he adds, “the greater will be the benefit to be derived from it”.—There is little in all this of compunction for the act, or of compassion for its victims.

The truth seems to be, that Alva was a man of an arrogant nature, an inflexible will, and of the most narrow and limited views. His doctrine of implicit obedience went as far as that of Philip himself. In enforcing it, he disdained the milder methods of argument or conciliation. It was on force, brute force alone, that he relied. He was bred a soldier, early accustomed to the stern discipline of the camp. The only law he recognized was martial law; his only argument, the sword. No agent could have been fitter to execute the designs of a despotic prince. His hard, impassible nature was not to be influenced by those affections which sometimes turn the most obdurate from their purpose. As little did he know of fear; nor could danger deter him from carrying out his work. The hatred he excited in the Netherlands was such, that, as he was warned, it was not safe for him to go out after dark. Placards were posted up in Brussels menacing his life if he persisted in the prosecution of Egmont. He held such menaces as light as he did the entreaties of the countess, or the arguments of her counsel. Far from being moved by personal considerations, no power could turn him from that narrow path which he professed to regard as the path of duty. He went surely, though it might be slowly, towards the mark, crushing by his iron will every obstacle that lay in his track. We shudder at the contemplation of such a character, relieved by scarcely a single touch of humanity. Yet we must admit there is something which challenges our admiration in the stern, uncompromising manner, without fear or favor, with which a man of this indomitable temper carries his plans into execution.

It would not be fair to omit, in this connection, some passages from Alva’s correspondence, which suggest the idea that he was not wholly insensible to feelings of compassion,—when they did not interfere with the performance of his task. In a letter to the king, dated the ninth of June, four days only after the death of the two nobles, the duke says: “Your majesty will understand the regret I feel at seeing these poor lords brought to such an end, and myself obliged to bring them to it. But I have not shrunk from doing what is for your majesty’s service. Indeed, they and their accomplices have been the cause of very great present evil, and one which will endanger the souls of many for years to come. The Countess Egmont’s condition fills me with the greatest pity, burdened as she is with a family of eleven children, none old enough to take care of themselves;—and she too a lady of so distinguished rank, sister of the count-palatine, and of so virtuous, truly Catholic, and exemplary life. There is no man in the country who does not grieve for her! I cannot but commend her”, he concludes, “as I do now, very humbly, to the good grace of your majesty, beseeching you to call to mind that if the count, her husband, came to trouble at the close of his days, he formerly rendered great service to the state”. The reflection, it must be owned, came somewhat late.

In another letter to Philip, though of the same date, Alva recommends the king to summon the countess and her children to Spain; where her daughters might take the veil, and her sons be properly educated. “I do not believe”, he adds, “that there is so unfortunate a family in the whole world. I am not sure that the countess has the means of procuring a supper this very evening!”

Philip, in answer to these letters, showed that he was not disposed to shrink from his own share of responsibility for the proceedings of his general. The duke, he said, had only done what justice and his duty demanded. He could have wished that the state of things had warranted a different result; nor could he help feeling deeply that measures like those to which he had been forced should have been necessary in his reign. “But”, continued the king, “no man has a right to shrink from his duty.—I am well pleased”, he concludes, “to learn that the two lords made so good and Catholic an end”. As to what you recommend in regard to the countess of Egmont and her eleven children, I shall give all proper heed to it.

The condition of the countess might well have moved the hardest heart to pity. Denied all access to her husband, she had been unable to afford him that consolation which he so much needed during his long and dreary confinement. Yet she had not been idle; and, as we have seen, she was unwearied in her efforts to excite a sympathy in his behalf. Neither did she rely only on the aid which this world can give; and few nights passed during her lord's imprisonment in which she and her daughters might not be seen making their pious pilgrimages, barefooted, to the different churches of Brussels, to invoke the blessing of Heaven on their labors. She had been supported through this trying time by a reliance on the success of her endeavors, in which she was confirmed by the encouragement she received from the highest quarters. It is not necessary to give credit to the report of a brutal jest attributed to the duke of Alva, who, on the day preceding the execution, was said to have told the countess “to be of good cheer; for her husband would leave the prison on the morrow!” There is more reason to believe that the Emperor Maximilian, shortly before the close of the trial, sent a gentleman with a kind letter to the countess, testifying the interest he took in her affairs, and assuring her she had nothing to fear on account of her husband. On the very morning of Egmont's execution, she was herself, we are told, paying a visit of condolence to the countess of Aremberg, whose husband had lately fallen in the battle of Heyligerlee; and at her friend's house the poor lady is said to have received the first tidings of the fate of her lord.

The blow fell the heavier, that she was so ill prepared for it. On the same day she found herself, not only a widow, but a beggar,—with a family of orphan children in vain looking up to her for the common necessaries of life. In her extremity, she resolved to apply to the king himself. She found an apology for it in the necessity of transmitting to Philip her husband's letter to him, which, it seems, had been entrusted to her care. She apologizes for not sooner sending this last and most humble petition of her deceased lord, by the extreme wretchedness of her situation, abandoned, as she is, by all, far from kindred and country. She trusts in his majesty's benignity and compassion to aid her sons by receiving them into his service when they shall be of sufficient age. This will oblige her, during the remainder of her sad days, and her children after her, to pray God for the long and happy life of his majesty.—It must have given another pang to the heart of the widowed countess, to have been thus forced to solicit aid from the very hand that had smitten her. But it was the mother pleading for her children.

Yet Philip, notwithstanding his assurances to the duke of Alva, showed no alacrity in relieving the wants of the countess. On the first of September the duke again wrote, to urge the necessity of her case, declaring that, if it had not been for a “small sum that he had himself sent, she and the children would have perished of hunger!”

The misfortunes of this noble lady excited commiseration not only at home, but in other countries of Europe, and especially in Germany, the land of her birth. Her brother, the elector of Bavaria, wrote to Philip, to urge the restitution of her husband’s estates to his family. Other German princes preferred the same request, which was moreover formally made by the emperor, through his ambassador at Madrid. Philip coolly replied, that “the time for this had not yet come”. A moderate pension, meanwhile, was annually paid by Alva to the countess of Egmont, who survived her husband ten years,—not long enough to see her children established in possession of their patrimony. Shortly before her death, her eldest son, then grown to man’s estate, chafing under the sense of injustice to himself and his family, took part in the war against the Spaniards. Philip, who may perhaps have felt some compunction for the ungenerous requital he had made for the father’s services, not only forgave this act of disloyalty in the son, but three years later allowed the young man to resume his allegiance, and placed him in full possession of the honors and estates of his ancestors.

Alva, as we have seen, in his letters to Philip, had dwelt on the important effects of Egmont's execution. He did not exaggerate these effects. But he sorely mistook the nature of them. Abroad, the elector of Bavaria at once threw his whole weight into the scale of Orange and the party of reform. Others of the German princes followed his example; and Maximilian’s ambassador at Madrid informed Philip that the execution of the two nobles, by the indignation it had caused throughout Germany, had wonderfully served the designs of the prince of Orange.

At home the effects were not less striking. The death of these two illustrious men, following so close upon the preceding executions, spread a deep gloom over the country. Men became possessed with the idea that the reign of blood was to be perpetual. All confidence was destroyed, even that confidence which naturally exists between parent and child, between brother and brother. The foreign merchant caught somewhat of this general distrust, and refused to send his commodities to a country where they were exposed to confiscation. Yet among the inhabitants indignation was greater than even fear or sorrow; and the Flemings who had taken part in the prosecution of Egmont trembled before the wrath of an avenging people. Such were the effects produced by the execution of men whom the nation reverenced as martyrs in the cause of freedom. Alva notices these consequences in his letters to the king. But though he could discern the signs of the times, he little dreamed of the extent of the troubles they portended. “The people of this country”, he writes, “are of so easy a temper, that, when your majesty shall think fit to grant them a general pardon, your clemency, I trust, will make them as prompt to render you their obedience as they are now reluctant to do it”.—The haughty soldier, in his contempt for the peaceful habits of a burgher population, comprehended as little as his master the true character of the men of the Netherlands.

CHAPTER XXIX.

SECRET EXECUTION OF MONTIGNY.

1567-1570.

Before bidding a long adieu to the Netherlands, it will be well to lay before the reader an account of a transaction which has proved a fruitful theme of speculation to the historian, but which, until the present time, has been shrouded in impenetrable mystery.

It may be remembered that, in the year 1566, two noble Flemings, the marquis of Bergen and the baron of Montigny, were sent on a mission to the court of Madrid, to lay before the king the critical state of affairs, imperatively demanding some change in the policy of the government. The two lords went on the mission; but they never returned. Many conjectures were made respecting their fate; and historians have concluded that Bergen possibly, and certainly Montigny, came to their end by violence. But, in the want of evidence, it was only conjecture, while the greatest discrepancy has prevailed in regard to details. It is not till very recently that the veil has been withdrawn through the access that has been given to the Archives of Simancas, that dread repository, in which the secrets of the Castilian kings have been buried for ages. Independently of the interest attaching to the circumstances of the present narrative, it is of great importance for the light it throws on the dark, unscrupulous policy of Philip the Second. It has, moreover, the merit of resting on the most authentic grounds of the correspondence of the king and his ministers.

Both envoys were men of the highest consideration. The marquis of Bergen, by his rank and fortune, was in the first class of the Flemish aristocracy. Montigny was of the ancient house of the Montmorencys, being a younger brother of the unfortunate Count Hoorne. At the time of Charles the Fifth's abdication he had the honor of being selected by the emperor as one of those Flemish nobles who were to escort him to his monastic residence in Spain. He occupied several important posts,—among others, that of governor of Tournay,—and, like Bergen, was a knight of the Golden Fleece. In the political disturbances of the time, although not placed in the front of disaffection, the two lords had taken part with the discontented faction, had joined in the war upon Granvelle, and had very generally disapproved of the policy of the crown. They had, especially, raised their voices against the system of religious persecution, with a manly independence which had secured for them—it seems undeservedly—the reputation of being the advocates of religious reform. This was particularly the case with Bergen, who, to one that asked how heretics should be dealt with, replied, "If they were willing to be converted, I would not trouble them. If they refused, still I would not take their lives, as they might hereafter be converted." This saying, duly reported to the ears of Philip, was doubtless treasured up against the man who had the courage to utter it.

The purpose of their embassy was to urge on the king the necessity of a more liberal and lenient policy, to which Margaret, who had not yet broken with the nobles, was herself inclined. It was not strange that the two lords should have felt the utmost reluctance to undertake a mission which was to bring them so directly within the power of the monarch whom they knew they had offended, and who, as they also knew, was not apt to forgive an offence. True, Egmont had gone on a similar mission to Madrid, and returned uninjured to Brussels. But it was at an earlier period, when the aspect of things was not so dangerous. His time had not yet come.

It was not till after much delay that the other nobles, with the regent, prevailed on Bergen and Montigny to accept the trust, by urging on them its absolute importance for assuring the tranquility of the country. Even then, an injury which confined the marquis some weeks to his house furnished him with a plausible excuse for not performing his engagement, of which he would gladly have availed himself. But his scruples again vanished before the arguments and entreaties of his friends; and he consented to follow, as he could not accompany, Montigny.

The latter reached Madrid towards the middle of June, 1566, was graciously received by the king, and was admitted to repeated audiences, at which he did not fail to urge the remedial measures countenanced by Margaret. Philip appeared to listen with complacency; but declined giving an answer till the arrival of the other ambassador, who, having already set out on his journey, was attacked, on his way through France, by a fever. There Bergen halted, and again thought of abandoning the expedition. His good genius seemed ever willing to interpose to save him. But his evil genius, in the shape of Philip, who wrote to him, in the most condescending terms, to hasten his journey, beckoned him to Madrid.

Besides the two envoys there was another person of consequence from the Low Countries at that time in the capital,—Simon Renard, once Charles's minister at the English court, the inexorable foe of Granvelle. He had been persuaded by Philip to come to Spain, although to do so, he knew, was to put himself on trial for his manifold offences against the government. He was arrested; proceedings were commenced against him; and he was released only by an illness which terminated in his death. There seems to have been a mysterious fascination possessed by Philip, that he could thus draw within his reach the very men whom every motive of self-preservation should have kept at an immeasurable distance.

The arrival of the marquis did not expedite the business of the mission. Unfortunately, about that period news came to Madrid of the outbreak of the iconoclasts, exciting not merely in Spain, but throughout Christendom, feelings of horror and indignation. There was no longer a question as to a more temperate policy. The only thought now was of vengeance. It was in vain that the Flemish envoys interposed to mitigate the king's anger, and turn him from those violent measures which must bring ruin on the country. Their remonstrances were unheeded. They found access to his person by no means so easy a thing as before. They felt that somewhat of the odium of the late transactions attached to them. Even the courtiers, with the ready instinct that detects a sovereign's frown, grew cold in their deportment. The situation of the envoys became every day more uncomfortable. Their mission was obviously at an end, and all they now asked was leave to return to the Netherlands.

But the king had no mind to grant it. He had been long since advised by Granvelle, and others in whom he trusted, that both the nobles had taken a decided part in fostering the troubles of the country. To that country they were never to return. Philip told them he had need of their presence for some time longer, to advise with him on the critical state of affairs in Flanders. So thin a veil could not impose on them, and they were idled with the most serious apprehensions. They wrote to Margaret, begging her to request the king to dismiss them; otherwise they should have good cause to complain both of her and of the nobles, who had sent them on a mission from which they would gladly have been excused. But Margaret had already written to her brother to keep them in Spain until the troubles in Flanders should be ended. On the reception of the letter of her envoys, however, she replied that she had already written to the king to request leave for them to return. I have found no record of such a letter.

In the spring of 1567, the duke of Alva was sent to take command of the Netherlands. Such an appointment, at such a crisis, plainly intimated the course to be pursued, and the host of evils it would soon bring on the devoted country. The conviction of this was too much for Bergen, heightened as his distress was by his separation, at such a moment, from all that was most dear to him on earth. He fell ill of a fever, and grew rapidly worse, till at length, it was reported to Philip that there was no chance for his recovery unless he were allowed to return to his native land.

This placed the king in a perplexing dilemma. He was not disposed to let the marquis escape from his hands even by the way of a natural death. He was still less inclined to assent to his return to Flanders. In this emergency he directed Ruy Gomez, the prince of Eboli, to visit the sick nobleman, who was his personal friend. In case Gomez found the marquis so ill that his recovery was next to impossible, he was to give him the king's permission to return home. If, however, there seemed a prospect of his recovery, he was only to hold out the hope of such a permission. In case of the sick man’s death, Gomez was to take care to have his obsequies performed in such a manner as to show the sorrow of the king and his ministers at his loss, and their respect for the lords of the Low Countries! He was, moreover, in that event, to take means to have the marquis's property in the Netherlands sequestered, as, should rebellion be proved against him, it would be forfeited to the crown.—This curious, and, as it must be allowed, highly confidential epistle, was written with the king’s own hand. The address ran, “Ruy Gomez—to his hands. Not to be opened nor read in the presence of the bearer”.

Which part of the royal instruction the minister thought best to follow for the cure of the patient,—whether he gave him an unconditional permission to return, or only held out the hope that he would do so,—we are not informed. It matters little, however. The marquis, it is probable, had already learned not to put his trust in princes. At all events, the promises of the king did as little for the patient as the prescriptions of the doctor. On the twenty-first of May he died,—justifying the melancholy presentiment with which he had entered on his mission.

Montigny was the only victim that now remained to Philip; and he caused him to be guarded with redoubled vigilance. He directed Ruy Gomez to keep an eye on all his movements, and to write to the governors of Navarre, Catalonia, and other frontier places, to take precautions to intercept the Flemish lord, in case of his attempting to fly the country. Montigny was in fact a prisoner, with Madrid for the limits of his prison. Yet, after this, the regent could write to him from Brussels, that she was pleased to learn from her brother that he was soon to give him his congé.—If the king said this, he had a bitter meaning in his words, beyond what the duchess apprehended.

It was not long, however, that Montigny was allowed to retain even this degree of liberty. In September, 1567, arrived the tidings of the arrest of the Counts Egmont and Hoorne. Orders were instantly issued for the arrest of Montigny. He was seized by a detachment of the royal guard, and borne off to the alcazar of Segovia. He was not to be allowed to leave the fortress day or night; but as much indulgence was shown to him as was compatible with this strict confinement; and he was permitted to take with him the various retainers who composed his household, and to maintain his establishment in prison. But what indulgence could soften the bitterness of a captivity far from kindred and country, with the consciousness, moreover, that the only avenue from his prison conducted to the scaffold!

In his extremity, Montigny looked around for the means of effecting his own escape; and he nearly succeeded. One, if not more, of the Spaniards on guard, together with his own servants, were in the plot. It was arranged that the prisoner should file through the bars of a window in his apartment, and lower himself to the ground by means of a rope ladder. Relays of horses were provided to take him rapidly on to the seaport of Santander, in the north, whence he was to be transported in a shallop to St. Jean de Luz. The materials for executing his part of the work were conveyed to Montigny in the loaves of bread daily sent to him by his baker. Everything seemed to promise success. The bars of the window were removed. They waited only for a day when the alcayde of the castle would not be likely to visit it. At this juncture the plot was discovered through the carelessness of the maître d'hôtel.

This person neglected to send one of the loaves to his master, which contained a paper giving sundry directions respecting the mode of escape, and mentioning the names of several of the parties. The loaf fell into the hands of a soldier. On breaking it, the paper was discovered, and taken by him to the captain of the guard. The plot was laid open; the parties were arrested, and sentenced to death or the galleys. The king allowed the sentence to take effect in regard to the Spaniards. He granted a reprieve to the Flemings, saying that what they had done was in some sort excusable, as being for the service of their master. Besides, they might be of use hereafter, in furnishing testimony in the prosecution of Montigny. On this compound principle their lives were spared. After languishing some time in prison, they were allowed to return to the Low Countries, bearing with them letters from Montigny, requesting his friends to provide for them in consideration of their sacrifices for him. But they were provided for in a much more summary manner by Alva, who, on their landing, caused them to be immediately arrested, and banished them all from the country, under pain of death if they returned to it!

The greatest sympathy was felt for Montigny in the Netherlands, where the nobles were filled with indignation at the unworthy treatment their envoy had received from Philip. His step-mother, the dowager-countess of Hoorne, was as untiring in her efforts for him as she had been for his unfortunate brother. These were warmly seconded by his wife, a daughter of the prince of Epinoy, to whom Montigny had been married but a short time before his mission to Spain. This lady wrote a letter in the most humble tone of supplication to Philip. She touched on the blight brought on her domestic happiness, spoke with a strong conviction of the innocence of Montigny, and with tears and lamentations implored the king, by the consideration of his past services, by the passion of the blessed Saviour, to show mercy to her husband.

Several months elapsed, after the execution of the Counts Egmont and Hoorne, before the duke commenced proceedings against Montigny; and it was not till February, 1569, that the licentiate Salazar, one of the royal council, was sent to Segovia in order to interrogate the prisoner. The charges were of the same nature with those brought against Egmont and Hoorne. Montigny at first, like them, refused to make any reply,—standing on his rights as a member of the Golden Fleece. He was, however, after a formal protest, prevailed on to waive this privilege. The examination continued several days. The various documents connected with it are still preserved in the Archives of Simancas. M. Gachard has given no abstract of their contents. But that sagacious inquirer, after a careful perusal of the papers, pronounces Montigny’s answers to be “a victorious refutation of the charges of the attorney-general”.

It was not a refutation that Philip or his viceroy wanted. Montigny was instantly required to appoint some one to act as counsel in his behalf. But no one was willing to undertake the business, till a person of little note at length consented, or was rather compelled to undertake it by the menaces of Alva. Any man might well have felt a disinclination for an office which must expose him to the ill-will of the government, with little chance of benefit to his client.

Even after this, Montigny was allowed to languish another year in prison before sentence was passed on him by his judges. The proceedings of the Council of Blood on this occasion were marked by a more flagitious contempt of justice, if possible, than its proceedings usually were. The duke, in a letter of the eighteenth of March, 1570, informed the king of the particulars of the trial. He had submitted the case, not to the whole court, but to a certain number of the councilors, selected by him for the purpose. He does not tell on what principle the selection was made. Philip could readily divine it. In the judgment of the majority, Montigny was found guilty of high treason. The duke accordingly passed sentence of death on him. The sentence was dated March 4, 1570. It was precisely of the same import with the sentences of Egmont and Hoorne. It commanded that Montigny be taken from prison, and publicly beheaded with a sword. His head was to be stuck on a pole, there to remain during the pleasure of his majesty. His goods and estates were to be confiscated to the crown.

The sentence was not communicated even to the Council of Blood. The only persons aware of its existence were the duke's secretary and his two trusty councilors, Vargas and Del Rio. Alva had kept it thus secret until he should learn the will of his master. At the same time he intimated to Philip that he might think it better to have the execution take place in Castile, as under existing circumstances more eligible than the Netherlands.

Philip was in Andalusia, making a tour in the southern provinces, when the dispatches of his viceroy reached him. He was not altogether pleased with their tenor. Not that he had any misgivings in regard to the sentence; for he was entirely satisfied, as he wrote to Alva, of Montigny’s guilt. But he did not approve of a public execution. Enough blood, it might be thought in the Netherlands, had been already spilt; and men there might complain that, shut up in a foreign prison during his trial, Montigny had not met with justice. There were certainly some grounds for such a complaint.

Philip resolved to defer taking any decisive step in the matter till his return to the north. Meanwhile he commended Alva's discretion in keeping the sentence secret, and charged him on no account to divulge it, even to members of the council.

Some months elapsed after the king's return to Madrid before he came to a decision,—exhibiting the procrastination, so conspicuous a trait in him, even among a people with whom procrastination was no miracle. It may have been that he was too much occupied with an interesting affair which pressed on him at that moment. About two years before, Philip had had the misfortune to lose his young and beautiful queen, Isabella of the Peace. Her place was now to be supplied by a German princess, Anne of Austria, his fourth wife, still younger than the one he had lost. She was already on her way to Castile; and the king may have been too much engrossed by his preparations for the nuptial festivities, to have much thought to bestow on the concerns of his wretched prisoner.

The problem to be solved was how to carry the sentence into effect, and yet leave the impression on the public that Montigny died a natural death. Most of the few ministers whom the king took into his confidence on the occasion were of opinion that it would be best to bring the prisoner's death about by means of a slow poison administered in his drink, or some article of his daily food. This would give him time, moreover, to provide for the concerns of his soul. But Philip objected to this, as not fulfilling what he was pleased to call the ends of justice. He at last decided on the garrote,—the form of execution used for the meaner sort of criminals in Spain, but which, producing death by suffocation, would be less likely to leave its traces on the body.

To accomplish this, it would be necessary to remove Montigny from the town of Segovia, the gay residence of the court, and soon to be the scene of the wedding ceremonies, to some more remote and less frequented spot. Simancas was accordingly selected, whose stern, secluded fortress seemed to be a fitting place for the perpetration of such a deed. The fortress was of great strength, and was encompassed by massive walls, and a wide moat, across which two bridges gave access to the interior. It was anciently used as a prison for state criminals. Cardinal Ximenes first conceived the idea of turning it to the nobler purpose of preserving the public archives. Charles the Fifth carried this enlightened project into execution; but it was not fully consummated till the time of Philip, who prescribed the regulations, and made all the necessary arrangements for placing the institution on a permanent basis,—thus securing to future historians the best means for guiding their steps through the dark and tortuous passages of his reign. But even after this change in its destination, the fortress of Simancas continued to be used occasionally as a place of confinement for prisoners of state. The famous bishop of Zamora, who took so active a part in the war of the comunidades, was there strangled by command of Charles the Fifth. The quarter of the building in which he suffered is still known by the name of “el cubo del obispo”,—“The Bishop’s Tower”.

To this strong place Montigny was removed from Segovia, on the nineteenth of August, 1570, under a numerous guard of alguazils and arquebusiers. For greater security he was put in irons,—a superfluous piece of cruelty, from which Philip, in a letter to Alva, thought it necessary to vindicate himself, as having been done without his orders. We might well imagine that the last ray of hope must have faded away in Montigny’s bosom, as he entered the gloomy portals of his new abode. Yet hope, as we are assured, did not altogether desert him. He had learned that Anne of Austria had expressed much sympathy for his sufferings. It was but natural that the daughter of the emperor Maximilian should take an interest in the persecuted people of the Netherlands. It was even said that she promised the wife and step-mother of Montigny to make his liberation the first boon she would ask of her husband on coming to Castile. And Montigny cherished the fond hope that the influence of the young bride would turn the king from his purpose, and that her coming to Castile would be the signal for his liberation. That Anne should have yielded to such an illusion is not so strange, for she had never seen Philip; but that Montigny should have been beguiled by it is more difficult to understand.

In his new quarters he was treated with a show of respect, if not indulgence. He was even allowed some privileges. Though the guards were doubled over him, he was permitted to have his own servants, and, when it suited him, to take the fresh air and sunshine in the corridor.

Early in October the young Austrian princess landed on the northern shores of the kingdom, at Santander. The tidings of this may have induced the king to quicken his movements in regard to his prisoner, willing perhaps to relieve himself of all chance of importunity from his bride, as well as from the awkwardness of refusing the first favor she should request. As a preliminary step, it would be necessary to abridge the liberty which Montigny at present enjoyed, to confine him to his apartment, and cutting off his communications even with those in the castle, to spread the rumor of his illness, which should prepare the minds of the public for a fatal issue.

To furnish an apology for his close confinement, a story was got up of an attempt to escape, similar to what had actually occurred at Segovia. Peralta, alcayde of the fortress, a trustworthy vassal, to whom was committed the direction of the affair, addressed a letter to the king, inclosing a note in Latin, which he pretended had been found under Montigny’s window, containing sundry directions for his flight. The fact of such a design, the writer said, was corroborated by the appearance of certain persons in the disguise of friars about the castle. The governor, in consequence, had been obliged to remove his prisoner to other quarters, of greater security. He was accordingly lodged in the Bishop's Tower,—ominous quarters!—where he was no longer allowed the attendance of his own domestics, but placed in strict confinement. Montigny had taken this proceeding so ill, and with such vehement complaints of its injustice, that it had brought on a fever, under which he was now laboring. Peralta concluded by expressing his regret at being forced by Montigny's conduct into a course so painful to himself, as he would gladly have allowed him all the indulgence compatible with his own honor.—This letter, which had all been concocted in the cabinet at Madrid, was shown openly at court. It gained easier credit from the fact of Montigny's former attempt to escape; and the rumor went abroad that he was now lying dangerously ill.

Early in October, the licentiate Alonzo de Arellano had been summoned from Seville, and installed in the office of alcalde of the chancery of Valladolid, distant only two leagues from Simancas. Arellano was a person in whose discretion and devotion to himself Philip knew he could confide; and to him he now intrusted the execution of Montigny. Directions for the course he was to take, as well as the precautions he was to use to prevent suspicion, were set down in the royal instructions with great minuteness. They must be allowed to form a remarkable document, such as has rarely proceeded from a royal pen. The alcalde was to pass to Simancas, and take with him a notary, an executioner, and a priest. The last should be a man of undoubted piety and learning, capable of dispelling any doubts or errors that might unhappily have arisen in Montigny’s mind in respect to the faith. Such a man appeared to be Fray Hernando del Castillo, of the order of St. Dominic, in Valladolid; and no better person could have been chosen, nor one more open to those feelings of humanity which are not always found under the robe of the friar.

Attended by these three persons, the alcalde left Valladolid soon after nightfall on the evening of the fourteenth of October. Peralta had been advised of his coming; and the little company were admitted into the castle so cautiously as to attract no observation. The governor and the judge at once proceeded to Montigny’s apartment, where they found the unhappy man lying on his pallet, ill not so much of the fever that was talked of, as of that sickness of the heart which springs from hope deferred. When informed of his sentence by Arellano, in words as kind as so cruel a communication would permit, he was wholly overcome by it, and for some time continued in a state of pitiable agitation. Yet one might have thought that the warnings he had already received were such as might have prepared his mind in some degree for the blow. For he seems to have been in the condition of the tenant of one of those inquisitorial cells in Venice, the walls of which, we are told, were so constructed as to approach each other gradually every day, until the wretched inmate was crushed between them. After Montigny had sufficiently recovered from his agitation to give heed to it, the sentence was read to him by the notary. He was still to be allowed a day before the execution, in order to gain time, as Philip had said, to settle his affairs with Heaven. And although, as the alcalde added, the sentence passed on him was held by the king as a just sentence, yet, in consideration of his quality, his majesty, purely out of his benignity and clemency, was willing so far to mitigate it, in regard to the form, as to allow him to be executed, not in public, but in secret, thus saving his honor, and suggesting the idea of his having come to his end by a natural death. For this act of grace Montigny seems to have been duly grateful. How true were the motives assigned for it, the reader can determine.

Having thus discharged their painful office, Arellano and the governor withdrew, and, summoning the friar, left the prisoner to the spiritual consolations he so much needed. What followed, we have from Castillo himself. As Montigny's agitation subsided, he listened patiently to the exhortations of the good father; and when at length restored to something like his natural composure, he joined with him earnestly in prayer. He then confessed and received the sacrament, seeming desirous of employing the brief space that yet remained to him in preparation for the solemn change. At intervals, when not actually occupied with his devotions, he read the compositions of Father Luis de Granada, whose spiritualized conceptions had often solaced the hours of his captivity.

Montigny was greatly disturbed by the rumor of his having been shaken in his religious principles, and having embraced the errors of the Reformers. To correct this impression, he briefly drew up, with his own hand, a confession of faith, in which he avows as implicit a belief in all the articles sanctioned by the Roman Catholic Church, and its head, the Vicar of Christ, as Pius the Fifth himself could have desired. Having thus relieved his mind, Montigny turned to settle some temporal affairs which he was desirous to settle. They did not occupy much time. For, as Philip had truly remarked, there was no occasion for him to make a will, since he had nothing to bequeath,—all his property having been confiscated to the crown. If, however, any debt pressed heavily on his conscience, he was to be allowed to indicate it, as well as any provision which he particularly desired to make for a special purpose. This was on the condition, however, that he should allude to himself as about to die a natural death.

Montigny profited by this to express the wish that masses, to the number of seven hundred, might be said for his soul, that sundry sums might be appropriated to private uses, and that some gratuities might be given to certain of his faithful followers. It may interest the reader to know that the masses were punctually performed. In regard to the pious legacies, the king wrote to Alva, he must first see if Montigny's estate would justify the appropriation; as for the gratuities to servants, they were wholly out of the question.

One token of remembrance, which he placed in the hands of Castillo, doubtless reached its destination. This was a gold chain of delicate workmanship, with a seal or signet ring attached to it, bearing his arms. This little token he requested might be given to his wife. It had been his constant companion ever since they were married; and he wished her to wear it in memory of him,—expressing at the same time his regret that a longer life had not been granted him, to serve and honor her. As a dying injunction he besought her not to be entangled by the new doctrines, or to swerve from the faith of her ancestors.—If ever Montigny had a leaning to the doctrines of the Reformation, it could hardly have deepened into conviction; for early habit and education reasserted their power so entirely, at this solemn moment, that the Dominican by his side declared that he gave evidence of being as good and Catholic a Christian as he could wish to be himself. The few hours in which Montigny had thus tasted of the bitterness of death seemed to have done more to wean him from the vanities of life than the whole years of dreary imprisonment he had passed within the walls of Segovia and Simancas. Yet we shall hardly credit the friar's assertion, that he carried his resignation so far, that, though insisting on his own innocence, he admitted the sentence of his judges to be just!

At about two o'clock on the morning of the sixteenth of October, when the interval allowed for this solemn preparation had expired, Father Castillo waited on the governor and the alcalde, to inform them that the hour had come, and that their prisoner was ready to receive them. They went, without further delay, to the chamber of death, attended by the notary and the executioner. Then, in their presence, while the notary made a record of the proceedings, the grim minister of the law did his work on his unresisting victim.

No sooner was the breath out of the body of Montigny, than the alcalde, the priest, and their two companions were on their way back to Valladolid, reaching it before dawn, so as to escape the notice of the inhabitants. All were solemnly bound to secrecy in regard to the dark act in which they had been engaged. The notary and the hangman were still further secured by the menace of death, in case they betrayed any knowledge of the matter; and they knew full well that Philip was not a man to shrink from the execution of his menaces.

The corpse was arrayed in a Franciscan habit, which, coming up to the throat, left the face only exposed to observation. It was thus seen by Montigny's servants, who recognized the features of their master, hardly more distorted than sometimes happens from disease, when the agonies of death have left their traces. The story went abroad that their lord had died of the fever with which he had been so violently attacked.

The funeral obsequies were performed, according to the royal orders, with all due solemnity. The vicar and beneficiaries of the church of St. Saviour officiated on the occasion. The servants of the deceased were clad in mourning,—a token of respect recommended by Philip, who remarked, the servants were so few, that mourning might as well be given to them; and he was willing to take charge of this and the other expenses of the funeral, provided Montigny had not left money sufficient for the purpose. The place selected for his burial was a vault under one of the chapels of the building; and a decent monument indicated the spot where reposed the ashes of the last of the envoys who came from Flanders on the ill-starred mission to Madrid.

Such is a true account of this tragical affair, as derived from the king's own letters and those of his agents. Far different was the story put in circulation at the time. On the seventeenth of October, the day after Montigny’s death, despatches were received at court from Peralta, the alcayde of the fortress. They stated that, after writing his former letter, his prisoner's fever had so much increased, that he had called in the aid of a physician; and as the symptoms became more alarming, the latter had entered into a consultation with the medical adviser of the late regent, Joanna, so that nothing that human skill could afford should be wanting to the patient. He grew rapidly worse, however, and as, happily, Father Hernando del Castillo, of Valladolid, chanced to be then in Simancas, he came and administered the last consolations of religion to the dying man. Having done all that a good Christian at such a time should do, Montigny expired early on the morning of the sixteenth, manifesting at the last so Catholic a spirit, that good hopes might be entertained of his salvation.

This hypocritical epistle, it is hardly necessary to say, like the one that preceded it, had been manufactured at Madrid. Nor was it altogether devoid of truth. The physician of the place, named Viana, had been called in; and it was found necessary to intrust him with the secret. Every day he paid his visit to the castle, and every day returned with more alarming accounts of the condition of the patient; and thus the minds of the community were prepared for the fatal termination of his disorder. Not that, after all, this was unattended with suspicions of foul play in the matter, as people reflected how opportune was the occurrence of such an event. But suspicions were not proof. The secret was too well guarded for any one to penetrate the veil of mystery; and the few who were behind that veil loved their lives too well to raise it.

Despatches written in cipher, and containing a full and true account of the affair, were sent to the duke of Alva. The two letters of Peralta, which indeed were intended for the meridian of Brussels rather than of Madrid, were forwarded with them. The duke was told to show them incidentally, as it were, without obtruding them on any one's notice, that Montigny's friends in the Netherlands might be satisfied of their truth.

In his own private communication to Alva, Philip, in mentioning the orthodox spirit manifested by his victim in his last moments, shows that with the satisfaction which he usually expressed on such occasions was mingled some degree of scepticism. "If his inner man," he writes of Montigny, "was penetrated with as Christian a spirit as he exhibited in the outer, and as the friar who confessed him has reported, God, we may presume, will have mercy on his soul." In the original draft of the letter, as prepared by the king's secretary, it is further added: "Yet, after all, who can tell but this was a delusion of Satan, who, as we know, never deserts the heretic in his dying hour." This sentence—as appears from the manuscript still preserved in Simancas—was struck out by Philip, with the remark in his own hand, "Omit this, as we should think no evil of the dead!"

Notwithstanding this magnanimous sentiment, Philip lost no time in publishing Montigny to the world as a traitor, and demanding the confiscation of his estates. The Council of Blood learned a good lesson from the Holy Inquisition, which took care that even Death should not defraud it of its victims. Proceedings were instituted against the memory of Montigny, as had before been done against the memory of the marquis of Bergen. On the twenty-second of March, 1571, the duke of Alva pronounced sentence, condemning the memory of Florence de Montmorency, lord of Montigny, as guilty of high treason, and confiscating his goods and estates to the use of the crown; "it having come to his knowledge," the instrument went on to say, "that the said Montigny had deceased by natural death in the fortress of Simancas, where he had of late been held a prisoner!"

The proceedings of the Council of Blood against Montigny were characterized, as I have already said, by greater effrontery and a more flagrant contempt of the common forms of justice than were usually to be met with even in that tribunal. A bare statement of the facts is sufficient. The party accused was put on his trial—if trial it can be called—in one country, while he was held in close custody in another. The court before which he was tried—or rather the jury, for the council seems to have exercised more of the powers of a jury than of a judge—was on this occasion a packed body, selected to suit the purposes of the prosecution. Its sentence, instead of being publicly pronounced, was confided only to the party interested to obtain it,—the king. Even the sentence itself was not the one carried into effect; but another was substituted in its place, and a public execution was supplanted by a midnight assassination. It would be an abuse of language to dignify such a proceeding with the title of a judicial murder.

Yet Philip showed no misgivings as to his own course in the matter. He had made up his mind as to the guilt of Montigny. He had been false to his king and false to his religion; offences which death only could expiate. Still we find Philip resorting to a secret execution, although Alva, as we have seen, had supposed that sentence was to be executed on Montigny in the same open manner as it had been on the other victims of the bloody tribunal. But the king shrunk from exposing a deed to the public eye, which, independently of its atrocity in other respects, involved so flagrant a violation of good faith towards the party who had come, at his sovereign's own desire, on a public mission to Madrid. With this regard to the opinions of his own age, it may seem strange that Philip should not have endeavored to efface every vestige of his connection with the act, by destroying the records which established it. On the contrary, he not only took care that such records should be made, but caused them, and all other evidence of the affair, to be permanently preserved in the national archives. There they lay for the inspection of posterity, which was one day to sit in judgment on his conduct.

BOOK IV. SPANISH EMPIRE AT WAR WITH THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE