BOOK II.

WAR OF RELIGIONS IN NETHERLANDS

CHAPTER X.

VIEW OF THE NETHERLANDS.

We have now come to that portion of the narrative which seems to be rather in the nature of an episode, than part and parcel of our history; though from its magnitude and importance it is better entitled to be treated as an independent history by itself. This is the War of the Netherlands; opening the way to that great series of revolutions, the most splendid example of which is furnished by our own happy land. Before entering on this vast theme, it will be well to give a brief view of the country which forms the subject of it.

At the accession of Philip the Second, about the middle of the sixteenth century, the Netherlands, or Flanders, as the country was then usually called, comprehended seventeen provinces, occupying much the same territory, but somewhat abridged, with that included in the present kingdoms of Holland and Belgium. These provinces, under the various denominations of duchies, counties, and lordships, formed anciently so many separate states, each under the rule of its respective prince. Even when two or three of them, as sometimes happened, were brought together under one scepter, each still maintained its own independent existence. In their institutions these states bore great resemblance to one another, and especially in the extent of the immunities conceded to the citizens as compared with those enjoyed in most of the countries of Christendom. No tax could be imposed, without the consent of an assembly consisting of the clergy, the nobles, and the representatives of the towns. No foreigner was eligible to office, and the native of one province was regarded as a foreigner by every other. These were insisted on as inalienable rights, although in later times none were more frequently disregarded by the rulers.

The condition of the commons in the Netherlands, during the Middle Ages, was far in advance of what it was in most other European countries at the same period. For this they were indebted to the character of the people, or rather to the peculiar circumstances which formed that character. Occupying a soil which had been redeemed with infinite toil and perseverance from the waters, their life was passed in perpetual struggle with the elements. They were early familiarized to the dangers of the ocean. The Flemish mariner was distinguished for the intrepid spirit with which he pushed his voyages into distant and unknown seas. An extended commerce opened to him a wide range of observation and experience; and to the bold and hardy character of the ancient Netherlander was added a spirit of enterprise, with such enlarged and liberal views as fitted him for taking part in the great concerns of the community. Villages and towns grew up rapidly. Wealth flowed in from this commercial activity, and the assistance which these little communities were thus enabled to afford their princes drew from the latter the concession of important political privileges, which established the independence of the citizen.

The tendency of things, however, was still to maintain the distinct individuality of the provinces, rather than to unite them into a common political body. They were peopled by different races, speaking different languages. In some of the provinces French was spoken, in others a dialect of the German. Their position, moreover, had often brought these petty states into rivalry, and sometimes into open war, with one another. The effects of these feuds continued after the causes of them had passed away; and mutual animosities still lingered in the breasts of the inhabitants, operating as a permanent source of disunion.

From these causes, after the greater part of the provinces had been brought together under the scepter of the ducal house of Burgundy, in the fifteenth century, it was found impossible to fuse them into one nation. Even Charles the Fifth, with all his power and personal influence, found himself unequal to the task. He was obliged to relinquish the idea of consolidating the different states into one monarchy, and to content himself with the position—not too grateful to a Spanish despot—of head of a republic, or, to speak more properly, of a confederacy of republics.

There was, however, some approach made to a national unity in the institution which grew up after the states were brought together under one scepter. Thus, while each of the provinces maintained its own courts of justice, there was a supreme tribunal established at Mechlin, with appellate jurisdiction over all the provincial tribunals. In like manner, while each state had its own legislative assembly, there were the states-general, consisting of the clergy, the nobles, and the representatives of the towns, from each of the provinces. In this assembly—but rarely convened—were discussed the great questions having reference to the interests of the whole country. But the assembly was vested with no legislative authority. It could go no further than to present petitions to the sovereign for the redress of grievances. It possessed no right beyond the right of remonstrance. Even in questions of taxation, no subsidy could be settled in that body, without the express sanction of each of the provincial legislatures. Such a form of government, it must be admitted, was altogether too cumbrous in its operations for efficient executive movement. It was by means favorable to the promptness and energy demanded for military enterprise. But it was a government which, however ill-suited in this respect to the temper of Charles the Fifth, was well suited to the genius of the inhabitants, and to their circumstances, which demanded peace. They had no ambition for foreign conquest. By the arts of peace they had risen to this unprecedented pitch of prosperity, and by peace alone, not by war, could they hope to maintain it.

But under the long rule of the Burgundian princes, and still more under that of Charles the Fifth, the people of the Netherlands felt the influence of those circumstances which in other parts of Europe were gradually compelling the popular, or rather the feudal element, to give way to the spirit of centralization. Thus in time the sovereign claimed the right of nominating all the higher clergy. In some instances he appointed the judges of the provincial courts; and the supreme tribunal of Mechlin was so far dependent on his authority, that all the judges were named and their salaries paid by the crown. The sovereign's authority was even stretched so far as to interfere not unfrequently with the rights exercised by the citizens in the election of their own magistrates,—rights that should have been cherished by them as of the last importance. As for the nobles, we cannot over-estimate the ascendancy which the master of an empire like that of Charles the Fifth must have obtained over men to whom he could open such boundless prospects in the career of ambition.

But the personal character and the peculiar position of Charles tended still further to enlarge the royal authority. He was a Fleming by birth. He had all the tastes and habits of a Fleming. His early days had been passed in Flanders, and he loved to return to his native land as often as his busy life would permit him, and to seek in the free and joyous society of the Flemish capitals some relief from the solemn ceremonial of the Castilian court. This preference of their lord was repaid by the people of the Netherlands with feelings of loyal devotion.

But they had reason for feelings of deeper gratitude in the substantial benefits which the favor of Charles secured to them. It was for Flemings that the highest posts even in Spain were reserved, and the marked preference thus shown by the emperor to his countrymen was one great source of the troubles in Castile. The soldiers of the Netherlands accompanied Charles on his military expeditions, and their cavalry had the reputation of being the best appointed and best disciplined in the imperial army. The vast extent of his possessions, spreading over every quarter of the globe, offered a boundless range for the commerce of the Netherlands, which was everywhere admitted on the most favorable footing. Notwithstanding his occasional acts of violence and extortion, Charles was too sagacious not to foster the material interests of a country which contributed so essentially to his own resources. Under his protecting policy, the industry and ingenuity of the Flemings found ample scope in the various departments of husbandry, manufactures, and trade. The country was as thickly studded with large towns as other countries were with villages. In the middle of the sixteenth century it was computed to contain above three hundred and fifty cities, and more than six thousand three hundred towns of a smaller size. These towns were not the resort of monks and mendicants, as in other parts of the Continent, but they swarmed with a busy, laborious population. No man ate the bread of idleness in the Netherlands. At the period with which we are occupied Ghent counted 70,000 inhabitants, Brussels 75,000, and Antwerp 100,000. This was at a period when London itself contained but 150,000.

The country, fertilized by its countless canals and sluices, exhibited everywhere that minute and patient cultivation which distinguishes it at the present day, but which in the middle of the sixteenth century had no parallel but in the lands tilled by the Moorish inhabitants of the south of Spain. The ingenious spirit of the people was shown in their dexterity in the mechanical arts, and in the talent for invention which seems to be characteristic of a people accustomed from infancy to the unfettered exercise of their faculties. The processes for simplifying labor were carried so far, that children, as we are assured, began, at four or five years of age, to earn a livelihood. Each of the principal cities became noted for its excellence in some branch or other of manufacture. Lille was known for its woolen cloths, Brussels for its tapestry and carpets, Valenciennes for its camlets, while the towns of Holland and Zealand furnished a simpler staple in the form of cheese, butter, and salted fish. These various commodities were exhibited at the great fairs held twice a year, for the space of twenty days each, at Antwerp, which were thronged by foreigners as well as natives.

In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the Flemings imported great quantities of wool from England, to be manufactured into cloth at home. But Flemish emigrants had carried that manufacture to England; and in the time of Philip the Second the cloths themselves were imported from the latter country to the amount of above five millions of crowns annually, and exchanged for the domestic products of the Netherlands. This single item of trade with one of their neighbors may suggest some notion of the extent of the commerce of the Low Countries at this period.

But in truth the commerce of the country stretched to the remotest corners of the globe. The inhabitants of the Netherlands, trained from early youth to battle with the waves, found their true element on the ocean. "As much as Nature," says an enthusiastic writer, "restricted their domain on the land, so much the more did they extend their empire on the deep". Their fleets were to be found on every sea. In the Euxine and in the Mediterranean they were rivals of the Venetian and the Genoese, and they contended with the English, and even with the Spaniards, for superiority on the "narrow seas" and the great ocean.

The wealth which flowed into the country from this extended trade was soon shown in the crowded population of its provinces and the splendor of their capitals. At the head of these stood the city of Antwerp, which occupied the place in the sixteenth century that Bruges had occupied in the fifteenth, as the commercial metropolis of the Netherlands. Two hundred and fifty vessels might often be seen at the same time taking in their cargoes at her quays. Two thousand loaded wagons from the neighboring countries of France, Germany, and Lorraine daily passed through her gates; and a greater number of vessels, freighted with merchandise from different quarters of the world, were to be seen floating at the same time on the waters of the Scheldt.

The city, in common with the rest of Brabant, was distinguished by certain political privileges, which commended it as a place of residence even to foreigners. Women of the other provinces, it is said, when the time of their confinement drew near, would come to Brabant, that their offspring might claim the franchises of this favored portion of the Netherlands. So jealous were the people of this province of their liberties, that in their oath of allegiance to their sovereign, on his accession, it was provided that this allegiance might lawfully be withheld whenever he ceased to respect their privileges.

Under the shelter of its municipal rights, foreigners settled in great numbers in Antwerp. The English established a factory there. There was also a Portuguese company, an Italian company, a company of merchants from the Hanse Towns, and, lastly, a Turkish company, which took up its residence there for the purpose of pursuing a trade with the Levant. A great traffic was carried on in bills of exchange. Antwerp, in short, became the banking-house of Europe; and capitalists, the Rothschilds of their day, whose dealings were with sovereign princes, fixed their abode in Antwerp, which was to the rest of Europe in the sixteenth century what London is in the nineteenth,—the great heart of commercial circulation.

In 1531, the public Exchange was erected, the finest building of its kind at that time anywhere to be seen. The city, indeed, was filled with stately edifices, the largest of which, the great cathedral, having been nearly destroyed by fire, soon after the opening of the Exchange, was rebuilt, and still remains a noble specimen of the architectural science of the time. Another age was to see the walls of the same cathedral adorned with those exquisite productions of Rubens and his disciples, which raised the Flemish school to a level with the great Italian masters.

The rapidly increasing opulence of the city was visible in the luxurious accommodations and sumptuous way of living of the inhabitants. The merchants of Antwerp rivalled the nobles of other lands in the splendor of their dress and domestic establishments. Something of the same sort showed itself in the middle classes; and even in those of humbler condition, there was a comfort approaching to luxury in their households, which attracted the notice of an Italian writer of the sixteenth century. He commends the scrupulous regard to order and cleanliness observed in the arrangement of the dwellings, and expresses his admiration, not only of the careful attention given by the women to their domestic duties, but also of their singular capacity for conducting those business affairs usually reserved for the other sex. This was particularly the case in Holland. But this freedom of intercourse was no disparagement to their feminine qualities. The liberty they assumed did not degenerate into license; and he concludes his animated portraiture of these Flemish matrons by pronouncing them as discreet as they were beautiful.

The humbler classes, in so abject a condition in other parts of Europe at that day, felt the good effects of this general progress in comfort and civilization. It was rare to find one, we are told, so illiterate as not to be acquainted with the rudiments of grammar; and there was scarcely a peasant who could not both read and write;—this at a time when to read and write were accomplishments not always possessed, in other countries, by those even in the higher walks of life.

It was not possible that a people so well advanced in the elements of civilization should long remain insensible to the great religious reform which, having risen on their borders, was now rapidly spreading over Christendom. Besides the contiguity of the Netherlands to Germany, their commerce with other countries had introduced them to Protestantism as it existed there. The foreign residents, and the Swiss and German mercenaries quartered in the provinces, had imported along with them these same principles of the Reformation; and lastly the Flemish nobles, who, at that time, were much in the fashion of going abroad to study in Geneva, returned from that stronghold of Calvin well fortified with the doctrines of the great Reformer. Thus the seeds of the Reformation, whether in the Lutheran or the Calvinistic form, were scattered wide over the land, and took root in a congenial soil. The phlegmatic temperament of the northern provinces, especially, disposed them to receive a religion which addressed itself so exclusively to the reason, while they were less open to the influences of Catholicism, which, with its gorgeous accessories, appealing to the passions, is better suited to the lively sensibilities and kindling imaginations of the south.

It is not to be supposed that Charles the Fifth could long remain insensible to this alarming defection of his subjects in the Netherlands; nor that the man whose life was passed in battling with the Lutherans of Germany could patiently submit to see their detested heresy taking root in his own dominions. He dreaded this innovation no less in a temporal than in a spiritual view. Experience had shown that freedom of speculation in affairs of religion naturally led to free inquiry into political abuses; that the work of the reformer was never accomplished so long as anything remained to reform, in state as well as in church. Charles, with the instinct of Spanish despotism, sought a remedy in one of those acts of arbitrary power in which he indulged without scruple when the occasion called for them.

In March, 1520, he published the first of his barbarous edicts for the suppression of the new faith. It was followed by several others of the same tenor, repeated at intervals throughout his reign. The last appeared in September, 1550. As this in a manner suspended those that had preceded it, to which, however, it substantially conformed, and as it became the basis of Philip's subsequent legislation, it will be well to recite its chief provisions.

By this edict, or "placard," as it was called, it was ordained that all who were convicted of heresy should suffer death "by fire, by the pit, or by the sword;" in other words, should be burned alive, be buried alive, or be beheaded. These terrible penalties were incurred by all who dealt in heretical books, or copied or bought them, by all who held or attended conventicles, by all who disputed on the Scriptures in public or private, by all who preached or defended the doctrines of reform. Informers were encouraged by the promise of one half of the confiscated estate of the heretic. No suspected person was allowed to make any donation, or sell any of his effects, or dispose of them by will. Finally, the courts were instructed to grant no remission or mitigation of punishment under the fallacious idea of mercy to the convicted party, and it was made penal for the friends of the accused to solicit such indulgence on his behalf.

The more thoroughly to enforce these edicts, Charles took a hint from the terrible tribunal with which he was familiar in Spain,—the Inquisition. He obtained a bull from his old preceptor, Adrian the Sixth, appointing an inquisitor-general, who had authority to examine persons suspected of heresy, to imprison and torture them, to confiscate their property, and finally sentence them to banishment or death. These formidable powers were entrusted to a layman,—a lawyer of eminence, and one of the council of Brabant. But this zealous functionary employed his authority with so good effect, that it speedily roused the general indignation of his countrymen, who compelled him to fly for his life.

By another bull from Rome, four inquisitors were appointed in the place of the fugitive. These inquisitors were ecclesiastics, not of the fierce Dominican order, as in Spain, but members of the secular clergy. All public officers were enjoined to aid them in detecting and securing suspected persons, and the common prisons were allotted for the confinement of their victims.

  The people would seem to have gained little by the substitution of four inquisitors for one. But in fact they gained a great deal. The sturdy resistance made to the exercise of the unconstitutional powers of the inquisitor-general compelled Charles to bring those of the new functionaries more within the limits of the law. For twenty years or more their powers seem not to have been well defined. But in 1546 it was decreed that no sentence whatever could be pronounced by an inquisitor without the sanction of some member of the provincial council. Thus, however barbarous the law against heresy, the people of the Netherlands had this security, that it was only by their own regular courts of justice that this law was to be interpreted and enforced.

Such were the expedients adopted by Charles the Fifth for the suppression of heresy in the Netherlands. Notwithstanding the name of "inquisitors," the new establishment bore faint resemblance to the dread tribunal of the Spanish Inquisition, with which it has been often confounded. The Holy Office presented a vast and complicated machinery, skillfully adapted to the existing institutions of Castile. It may be said to have formed part of the government itself, and, however restricted in its original design, it became in time a formidable political engine, no less than a religious one. The grand-inquisitor was clothed with an authority before which the monarch himself might tremble. On some occasions, he even took precedence of the monarch. The courts of the Inquisition were distributed throughout the country, and were conducted with a solemn pomp that belonged to no civil tribunal. Spacious buildings were erected for their accommodation, and the gigantic prisons of the Inquisition rose up, like impregnable fortresses, in the principal cities of the kingdom. A swarm of menials and officials waited to do its bidding. The proudest nobles of the land held it an honor to serve as familiars of the Holy Office. In the midst of this external pomp, the impenetrable veil thrown over its proceedings took strong hold of the imagination, investing the tribunal with a sort of supernatural terror. An individual disappeared from the busy scenes of life. No one knew whither he had gone, till he reappeared, clothed in the fatal garb of the san benito, to take part in the tragic spectacle of an auto da fé. This was the great triumph of the Inquisition, rivalling the ancient Roman triumph in the splendor of the show, and surpassing it in the solemn and mysterious import of the ceremonial. It was hailed with enthusiasm by the fanatical Spaniard of that day, who, in the martyrdom of the infidel, saw only a sacrifice most acceptable to the Deity. The Inquisition succeeded in Spain, for it was suited to the character of the Spaniard.

But it was not suited to the free and independent character of the people of the Netherlands. Freedom of thought they claimed as their birthright; and the attempt to crush it by introducing the pernicious usages of Spain was everywhere received with execration. Such an institution was an accident, and could not become an integral part of the constitution. It was a vicious graft on a healthy stock. It could bear no fruit, and sooner or later it must perish.

Yet the Inquisition, such as it was, did its work while it lasted in the Netherlands. This is true, at least, if we are to receive the popular statement, that fifty thousand persons, in the reign of Charles the Fifth, suffered for their religious opinions by the hand of the executioner! This monstrous statement has been repeated by one historian after another, with apparently as little distrust as examination. It affords one among many examples of the facility with which men adopt the most startling results, especially when conveyed in the form of numerical estimates. There is something that strikes the imagination, in a numerical estimate, which settles a question so summarily, in a form so precise and so portable. Yet whoever has had occasion to make any researches into the past,—that land of uncertainty,—will agree that there is nothing less entitled to confidence.

In the present instance, such a statement might seem to carry its own refutation on the face of it. Llorente, the celebrated secretary of the Holy Office, whose estimates will never be accused of falling short of the amount, computes the whole number of victims sacrificed during the first eighteen years of the Inquisition in Castile, when it was in most active operation, at about ten thousand. The storm of persecution there, it will be remembered, fell chiefly on the Jews,—that ill-omened race, from whom every pious Catholic would have rejoiced to see his land purified by fire and fagot. It will hardly be believed that five times the number of these victims perished in a country like the Netherlands, in a term of time not quite double that occupied for their extermination in Spain;—the Netherlands, where every instance of such persecution, instead of being hailed as a triumph of the Cross, was regarded as a fresh outrage on the liberties of the nation. It is not too much to say, that such a number of martyrs as that pretended would have produced an explosion that would have unsettled the authority of Charles himself, and left for his successor less territory in the Netherlands at the beginning of his reign, than he was destined to have at the end of it.

Indeed, the frequent renewal of the edicts, which was repeated no less than nine times during Charles's administration, intimates plainly enough the very sluggish and unsatisfactory manner in which they had been executed. In some provinces, as Luxembourg and Groningen, the Inquisition was not introduced at all. Gueldres stood on its privileges, guaranteed to it by the emperor on his accession. And Brabant so effectually remonstrated on the mischief which the mere name of the Inquisition would do to the trade of the country, and especially of Antwerp, its capital, that the emperor deemed it prudent to qualify some of the provisions, and to drop the name of Inquisitor altogether. There is no way more sure of rousing the sensibilities of a commercial people, than by touching their pockets. Charles did not care to press matters to such extremity. He was too politic a prince, too large a gainer by the prosperity of his people, willingly to put it in peril, even for conscience' sake. In this lay the difference between him and Philip.

Notwithstanding, therefore, his occasional abuse of power, and the little respect he may have had at heart for the civil rights of his subjects, the government of Charles, as already intimated, was on the whole favorable to their commercial interests. He was well repaid by the enlarged resources of the country, and the aid they afforded him for the prosecution of his ambitious enterprises. In the course of a few years, as we are informed by a contemporary, he drew from the Netherlands no less than twenty-four millions of ducats. And this supply—furnished not ungrudgingly, it is true—was lavished, for the most part, on objects in which the nation had no interest. In like manner, it was the revenues of the Netherlands which defrayed great part of Philip's expenses in the war that followed his accession. "Here," exclaims the Venetian envoy, Soriano, "were the true treasures of the king of Spain; here were his mines, his Indies, which furnished Charles with the means of carrying on his wars for so many years with the French, the Germans, the Italians, which provided for the defense of his own states, and maintained his dignity and reputation."

Such then was the condition of the country at the time when the scepter passed from the hands of Charles the Fifth into those of Philip the Second;—its broad plains teeming with the products of an elaborate culture; its cities swarming with artisans, skilled in all kinds of ingenious handicraft; its commerce abroad on every sea, and bringing back rich returns from distant climes. The great body of its people, well advanced in the arts of civilization, rejoiced in "such abundance of all things," says a foreigner who witnessed their prosperity, "that there was no man, however humble, who did not seem rich for his station." In this active development of their powers, the inquisitive mind of the inhabitants naturally turned to those great problems in religion which were agitating the neighboring countries of France and Germany. All the efforts of Charles were unavailing to check the spirit of inquiry; and in the last year of his reign he bitterly confessed the total failure of his endeavor to stay the progress of heresy in the Netherlands. Well had it been for his successor, had he taken counsel by the failure of his father, and substituted a more lenient policy for the ineffectual system of persecution. But such was not the policy of Philip.

CHAPTER XI.

SYSTEM ESTABLISHED BY PHILIP. 1559.

Philip the Second was no stranger to the Netherlands. He had come there, as it will be remembered, when very young, to be presented by his father to his future subjects. On that occasion he had greatly disgusted the people by that impenetrable reserve which they construed into haughtiness, and which strongly contrasted with the gracious manners of the emperor. Charles saw with pain the impression which his son had left on his subjects; and the effects of his paternal admonitions were visible in a marked change in Philip's deportment on his subsequent visit to England. But nature lies deeper than manner; and when Philip returned, on his father's abdication, to assume the sovereignty of the Netherlands, he wore the same frigid exterior as in earlier days.

His first step was to visit the different provinces, and receive from them their oaths of allegiance. No better occasion could be offered for conciliating the good-will of the inhabitants. Everywhere his approach was greeted with festivities and public rejoicing. The gates of the capitals were thrown open to receive him, and the population thronged out, eager to do homage to their new sovereign. It was a season of jubilee for the whole nation.

In this general rejoicing, Philip's eye alone remained dark. Shut up in his carriage, he seemed desirous to seclude himself from the gaze of his new subjects, who crowded around, anxious to catch a glimpse of their young monarch. His conduct seemed like a rebuke of their enthusiasm. Thus chilled as they were in the first flow of their loyalty, his progress through the land, which should have won him all hearts, closed all hearts against him.

The emperor, when he visited the Netherlands, was like one coming back to his native country. He spoke the language of the people, dressed in their dress, conformed to their usages and way of life. But Philip was in everything a Spaniard. He spoke only the Castilian. He adopted the Spanish etiquette and burdensome ceremonial. He was surrounded by Spaniards, and, with few exceptions, it was to Spaniards only that he gave his confidence. Charles had disgusted his Spanish subjects by the marked preference he had given to his Flemish. The reverse now took place, and Philip displeased the Flemings by his partiality for the Spaniards. The people of the Netherlands felt with bitterness that the scepter of their country had passed into the hands of a foreigner.

During his progress Philip caused reports to be prepared for him of the condition of the several provinces, their population and trade,—presenting a mass of statistical details, in which, with his usual industry, he was careful to instruct himself. On his return, his first concern was to provide for the interests of religion. He renewed his father's edicts relating to the Inquisition, and in the following year confirmed the "placard" respecting heresy. In doing this, he was careful, by the politic advice of Granvelle, to conform as nearly as possible to the language of the original edicts, that no charge of innovation might be laid to him, and thus the odium of these unpopular measures might remain with their original author.

But the object which Philip had most at heart was a reform much needed in the ecclesiastical establishment of the country. It may seem strange that in all the Netherlands there were but three bishoprics,—Arras, Tournay, and Utrecht. A large part of the country was incorporated with some one or other of the contiguous German dioceses. The Flemish bishoprics were of enormous extent. That of Utrecht alone embraced no less than three hundred walled towns, and eleven hundred churches. It was impossible that any pastor, however diligent, could provide for the wants of a flock so widely scattered, or that he could exercise supervision over the clergy themselves, who had fallen into a lamentable decay both of discipline and morals.

Still greater evils followed from the circumstance of the episcopal authority's being entrusted to foreigners. From their ignorance of the institutions of the Netherlands, they were perpetually trespassing on the rights of the nation. Another evil consequence was the necessity of carrying up ecclesiastical causes, by way of appeal, to foreign tribunals; a thing, moreover, scarcely practicable in time of war.

Charles the Fifth, whose sagacious mind has left its impress on the permanent legislation of the Netherlands, saw the necessity of some reform in this matter. He accordingly applied to Rome for leave to erect six bishoprics, in addition to those previously existing in the country. But his attention was too much distracted by other objects to allow time for completing his design. With his son Philip, on the other hand, no object was allowed to come in competition with the interests of the Church. He proposed to make the reform on a larger scale than his father had done, and applied to Paul the Fourth for leave to create fourteen bishoprics and three archbishoprics. The chief difficulty lay in providing for the support of the new dignitaries. On consultation with Granvelle, who had not been advised of the scheme till after Philip's application to Rome, it was arranged that the income should be furnished by the abbey lands of the respective dioceses, and that the abbeys themselves should hereafter be placed under the control of priors or provosts depending altogether on the bishops. Meanwhile, until the bulls should be received from Rome, it was determined to keep the matter profoundly secret. It was easy to foresee that a storm of opposition would arise, not only among those immediately interested in preserving the present order of things, but among the great body of the nobles, who would look with an evil eye on the admission into their ranks of so large a number of persons servilely devoted to the interests of the crown.

Having concluded his arrangements for the internal settlement of the country, Philip naturally turned his thoughts towards Spain. He was the more desirous of returning thither from the reports he received, that even that orthodox land was becoming every day more tainted with the heretical doctrines so rife in the neighboring countries. There were no hostilities to detain him longer in the Netherlands, now that the war with France had been brought to a close. The provinces, as we have already stated, had furnished the king with important aid for carrying on that war, by the grant of a stipulated annual tax for nine years. This had not proved equal to his necessities. It was in vain, however, to expect any further concessions from the states. They had borne, not without murmurs, the heavy burdens laid on them by Charles,—a monarch whom they loved. They bore still more impatiently the impositions of a prince whom they loved so little as Philip. Yet the latter seemed ready to make any sacrifice of his permanent interests for such temporary relief as would extricate him from his present embarrassments. His correspondence with Granvelle on the subject, unfolding the suicidal schemes which he submitted to that minister, might form an edifying chapter in the financial history of that day. The difficulty of carrying on the government of the Netherlands in this crippled state of the finances doubtless strengthened the desire of the monarch to return to his native land, where the manners and habits of the people were so much more congenial with his own.

Before leaving the country, it was necessary to provide a suitable person to whom the reins of government might be entrusted. The duke of Savoy, who, since the emperor's abdication, had held the post of regent, was now to return to his own dominions, restored to him by the treaty of Cateau-Cambresis. There were several persons who presented themselves for this responsible office in the Netherlands. One of the most prominent was Lamoral, prince of Gavre, count of Egmont, the hero of St. Quentin and of Gravelines. The illustrious house from which he was descended, his chivalrous spirit, his frank and generous bearing, no less than his brilliant military achievements, had made him the idol of the people. There were some who insisted that these achievements inferred rather the successful soldier than the great captain; and that, whatever merit he could boast in the field, it was no proof of his capacity for so important a civil station as that of governor of the Netherlands. Yet it could not be doubted that his nomination would be most acceptable to the people. This did not recommend him to Philip.

Another candidate was Christine, duchess of Lorraine, the king's cousin. The large estates of her house lay in the neighborhood of the Netherlands. She had shown her talent for political affairs by the part she had taken in effecting the arrangements of Cateau-Cambresis. The prince of Orange, lately become a widower, was desirous, it was said, of marrying her daughter. Neither did this prove a recommendation with Philip, who was by no means anxious to raise the house of Orange higher in the scale, still less to entrust it with the destinies of the Netherlands. In a word, the monarch had no mind to confide the regency of the country to any one of its powerful nobles.

The individual on whom the king at length decided to bestow this mark of his confidence was his half-sister, Margaret, duchess of Parma. She was the natural daughter of Charles the Fifth, born about four years before his marriage with Isabella of Portugal. Margaret's mother, Margaret Vander Gheenst, belonged to a noble Flemish house. Her parents both died during her infancy. The little orphan was received into the family of Count Hoogstraten, who, with his wife, reared her with the same tenderness as they did their own offspring. At the age of seventeen she was unfortunate enough to attract the eye of Charles the Fifth, who, then in his twenty-third year, was captivated by the charms of the Flemish maiden. Margaret's virtue was not proof against the seductions of her royal suitor; and the victim of love—or of vanity—became the mother of a child, who received her own name of Margaret.

The emperor's aunt, then regent of the Netherlands, took charge of the infant; and on the death of that princess, she was taken into the family of the emperor's sister, Mary, queen of Hungary, who succeeded in the regency. Margaret's birth did not long remain a secret; and she received an education suited to the high station she was to occupy in life. When only twelve years of age, the emperor gave her in marriage to Alexander de' Medici, grand duke of Tuscany, some fifteen years older than herself. The ill-fated connection did not subsist long, as, before twelve months had elapsed, it was terminated by the violent death of her husband.

When she had reached the age of womanhood, the hand of the young widow was bestowed, together with the duchies of Parma and Placentia as her dowry, on Ottavio Farnese, grandson of Paul the Third. The bridegroom was but twelve years old. Thus again it was Margaret's misfortune that there should be such disparity between her own age and that of her husband as to exclude anything like sympathy or similarity in their tastes. In the present instance, the boyish years of Ottavio inspired her with a sentiment not very different from contempt, that in later life settled into an indifference in which both parties appear to have shared, and which, as a contemporary remarks with naïveté, was only softened into a kindlier feeling when the husband and wife had been long separated from each other.[407] In truth, Margaret was too ambitious of power to look on her husband in any other light than that of a rival.

In her general demeanor, her air, her gait, she bore great resemblance to her aunt, the regent. Like her, Margaret was excessively fond of hunting, and she followed the chase with an intrepidity that might have daunted the courage of the keenest sportsman. She had but little of the natural softness that belongs to the sex, but in her whole deportment was singularly masculine; so that, to render the words of the historian by a homely phrase, in her woman's dress she seemed like a man in petticoats. As if to add to the illusion, Nature had given her somewhat of a beard; and, to crown the whole, the malady to which she was constitutionally subject was a disease to which women are but rarely liable,—the gout. It was good evidence of her descent from Charles the Fifth.

Though masculine in her appearance, Margaret was not destitute of the kindlier qualities which are the glory of her sex. Her disposition was good; but she relied much on the advice of others, and her more objectionable acts may probably be referred rather to their influence than to any inclination of her own.

Her understanding was excellent, her apprehension quick. She showed much versatility in accommodating herself to the exigencies of her position, as well as adroitness in the management of affairs, which she may have acquired in the schools of Italian politics. In religion she was as orthodox as Philip the Second could desire. The famous Ignatius Loyola had been her confessor in early days. The lessons of humility which he inculcated were not lost on her, as may be inferred from the care she took to perform the ceremony, in Holy Week, of washing the dirty feet—she preferred them in this condition—of twelve poor maidens; outstripping, in this particular, the humility of the pope himself.—Such was the character of Margaret, duchess of Parma, who now, in the thirty-eighth year of her age, was called, at a most critical period, to take the helm of the Netherlands.

The appointment seems to have given equal satisfaction to herself and to her husband, and no objection was made to Philip's purpose of taking back with him to Castile their little son, Alexander Farnese,—a name destined to become in later times so renowned in the Netherlands. The avowed purpose was to give the boy a training suited to his rank, under the eye of Philip; combined with which, according to the historian, was the desire of holding a hostage for the fidelity of Margaret and of her husband, whose dominions in Italy lay contiguous to those of Philip in that country.

Early in June, 1559, Margaret of Parma, having reached the Low Countries, made her entrance in great state into Brussels, where Philip awaited her, surrounded by his whole court of Spanish and Flemish nobles. The duke of Savoy was also present, as well as Margaret's husband, the duke of Parma, then in attendance on Philip. The appointment of Margaret was not distasteful to the people of the Netherlands, for she was their countrywoman, and her early days had been passed amongst them. Her presence was not less welcome to Philip, who looked forward with eagerness to the hour of his departure. His first purpose was to present the new regent to the nation, and for this he summoned a meeting of the States-General at Ghent, in the coming August.

On the twenty-fifth of July, he repaired with his court to this ancient capital, which still smarted under the effects of that chastisement of his father, which, terrible as it was, had not the power to break the spirits of the men of Ghent. The presence of the court was celebrated with public rejoicings, which continued for three days, during which Philip held a chapter of the Golden Fleece for the election of fourteen knights. The ceremony was conducted with the magnificence with which the meetings of this illustrious order were usually celebrated. It was memorable as the last chapter of it ever held. Founded by the dukes of Burgundy, the order of the Golden Fleece drew its members immediately from the nobility of the Netherlands. When the Spanish sovereign, who remained at its head, no more resided in the country, the chapters were discontinued; and the knights derived their appointment from the simple nomination of the monarch.

On the eighth of August, the States-General assembled at Ghent. The sturdy burghers who took their seats in this body came thither in no very friendly temper to the government. Various subjects of complaint had long been rankling in their bosoms, and now found vent in the form of animated and angry debate. The people had been greatly alarmed by the avowed policy of their rulers to persevere in the system of religious persecution, as shown especially by the revival of the ancient edicts against heresy and in support of the Inquisition. Rumors had gone abroad, probably with exaggeration, of the proposed episcopal reforms. However necessary, they were now regarded only as part of the great scheme of persecution. Different nations, it was urged, required to be guided by different laws. What suited the Spaniards would not for that reason suit the people of the Netherlands. The Inquisition was ill adapted to men accustomed from their cradles to freedom of thought and action. Persecution was not to be justified in matters of conscience, and men were not to be reclaimed from spiritual error by violence, but by gentleness and persuasion.

But what most called forth the invective of the Flemish orators was the presence of a large body of foreign troops in the country. When Philip disbanded his forces after the French war had terminated, there still remained a corps of the old Spanish infantry, amounting to some three or four thousands, which he thought proper to retain in the western provinces. His avowed object was to protect the country from any violence on the part of the French. Another reason assigned by him was the difficulty of raising funds to pay their arrears. The true motive, in the opinion of the states, was to enforce the execution of the new measures, and overcome any resistance that might be made in the country. These troops, like most of the soldiers of that day, who served for plunder quite as much as for pay, had as little respect for the rights or the property of their allies, as for those of their enemies. They quartered themselves on the peaceful inhabitants of the country, and obtained full compensation for loss of pay by a system of rapine and extortion that beggared the people, and drove them to desperation. Conflicts with the soldiery occasionally occurred, and in some parts the peasantry even refused to repair the dikes, in order to lay the country under water rather than submit to such outrages! "How is it," exclaimed the bold syndic of Ghent, "that we find foreign soldiers thus quartered on us, in open violation of our liberties? Are not our own troops able to protect us from the dangers of invasion? Must we be ground to the dust by the exactions of these mercenaries in peace, after being burdened with the maintenance of them in war?" These remonstrances were followed by a petition to the throne, signed by members of the other orders as well as the commons, requesting that the king would be graciously pleased to respect the privileges of the nation, and send back the foreign troops to their own homes.

Philip, who sat in the assembly with his sister, the future regent, by his side, was not prepared for this independent spirit in the burghers of the Netherlands. The royal ear had been little accustomed to this strain of invective from the subject. For it was rare that the tone of remonstrance was heard in the halls of Castilian legislation, since the power of the commons had been broken on the field of Villalar. Unable or unwilling to conceal his displeasure, the king descended from his throne, and abruptly quitted the assembly.

Yet he did not, like Charles the First of England, rashly vent his indignation by imprisoning or persecuting the members who had roused it. Even the stout syndic of Ghent was allowed to go unharmed. Philip looked above him to a mark more worthy of his anger,—to those of the higher orders who had encouraged the spirit of resistance in the commons. The most active of these malecontents was William of Orange. That noble, as it may be remembered, was one of the hostages who remained at the Court of Henry the Second for the fulfilment of the treaty of Cateau-Cambresis. While there, a strange disclosure was made to the prince by the French monarch, who told him that, through the duke of Alva, a secret treaty had been entered into with his master, the king of Spain, for the extirpation of heresy throughout their dominions. This inconsiderate avowal of the French king was made to William on the supposition that he was stanch in the Roman Catholic faith, and entirely in his master's confidence. Whatever may have been the prince's claims to orthodoxy at this period, it is certain he was not in Philip's confidence. It is equally certain that he possessed one Christian virtue which belonged neither to Philip nor to Henry,—the virtue of toleration. Greatly shocked by the intelligence he had received, William at once communicated it to several of his friends in the Netherlands. One of the letters unfortunately fell into Philip's hands. The prince soon after obtained permission to return to his own country, bent, as he tells us in his Apology, on ridding it of the Spanish vermin. Philip, who understood the temper of his mind, had his eye on his movements, and knew well to what source, in part at least, he was to attribute the present opposition. It was not long after, that a Castilian courtier intimated to the prince of Orange and to Egmont, that it would be well for them to take heed to themselves; that the names of those who had signed the petition for the removal of the troops had been noted down, and that Philip and his council were resolved, when a fitting occasion offered, to call them to a heavy reckoning for their temerity.

Yet the king so far yielded to the wishes of the people as to promise the speedy departure of the troops. But no power on earth could have been strong enough to shake his purpose where the interests of religion were involved. Nor would he abate one jot of the stern provisions of the edicts. When one of his ministers, more hardy than the rest, ventured to suggest to him that perseverance in this policy might cost him the sovereignty of the provinces, "Better not reign at all," he answered, "than reign over heretics!"—an answer extolled by some as the height of the sublime, by others derided as the extravagance of a fanatic. In whatever light we view it, it must be admitted to furnish the key to the permanent policy of Philip in his government of the Netherlands.

Before dissolving the States-General, Philip, unacquainted with the language of the country, addressed the deputies through the mouth of the bishop of Arras. He expatiated on the warmth of his attachment to his good people of the Netherlands, and paid them a merited tribute for their loyalty both to his father and to himself. He enjoined on them to show similar respect to the regent, their own countrywoman, into whose hands he had committed the government. They would reverence the laws and maintain public tranquility. Nothing would conduce to this so much as the faithful execution of the edicts. It was their sacred duty to aid in the extermination of heretics,—the deadliest foes both of God and their sovereign. Philip concluded by assuring the states that he should soon return in person to the Netherlands, or send his son Don Carlos as his representative.

The answer of the legislature was temperate and respectful. They made no allusion to Philip's proposed ecclesiastical reforms, as he had not authorized this by any allusion to them himself. They still pressed, however, the removal of the foreign troops, and the further removal of all foreigners from office, as contrary to the constitution of the land. This last shaft was aimed at Granvelle, who held a high post in the government, and was understood to be absolute in the confidence of the king. Philip renewed his assurances of the dismissal of the forces, and that within the space, as he promised, of four months. The other request of the deputies he did not condescend to notice. His feelings on the subject were intimated in an exclamation he made to one of his ministers: "I too am a foreigner; will they refuse to obey me as their sovereign?"

The regent was to be assisted in the government by three councils which of old time had existed in the land;—the council of finance, for the administration, as the name implies, of the revenues; the privy council, for affairs of justice and the internal concerns of the country; and the council of state, for matters relating to peace and war, and the foreign policy of the nation. Into this last, the supreme council, entered several of the Flemish nobles, and among them the prince of Orange and Count Egmont. There were, besides, Count Barlaimont, president of the council of finance, Viglius, president of the privy council, and lastly Granvelle, bishop of Arras.

The regent was to act with the cooperation of these several bodies in their respective departments. In the conduct of the government, she was to be guided by the council of state. But by private instructions of Philip, questions of a more delicate nature, involving the tranquility of the country, might be first submitted to a select portion of this council; and in such cases, or when a spirit of faction had crept into the council, the regent, if she deemed it for the interest of the state, might adopt the opinion of the minority. The select body with whom Margaret was to advise in the more important matters was termed the Consulta; and the members who composed it were Barlaimont, Viglius, and the bishop of Arras.

The first of these men, Count Barlaimont, belonged to an ancient Flemish family. With respectable talents and constancy of purpose, he was entirely devoted to the interests of the crown. The second, Viglius, was a jurist of extensive erudition, at this time well advanced in years, and with infirmities that might have pressed heavily on a man less patient of toil. He was personally attached to Granvelle; and as his views of government coincided very nearly with that minister's, Viglius was much under his influence. The last of the three, Granvelle, from his large acquaintance with affairs, and his adroitness in managing them, was far superior to his colleagues; and he soon acquired such an ascendancy over them, that the government may be said to have rested on his shoulders. As there is no man who for some years is to take so prominent a part in the story of the Netherlands, it will be proper to introduce the reader to some acquaintance with his earlier history.

Anthony Perrenot—whose name of Granvelle was derived from an estate purchased by his father—was born in the year 1517, at Besançon, a town in Franche Comté. His father, Nicholas Perrenot, founded the fortunes of the family, and from the humble condition of a poor country attorney rose to the rank of chancellor of the empire. This extraordinary advancement was not owing to caprice, but to his unwearied industry, extensive learning, and a clear and comprehensive intellect, combined with steady devotion to the interests of his master, Charles the Fifth. His talent for affairs led him to be employed not merely in official business, but in diplomatic missions of great importance. In short, he possessed the confidence of the emperor to a degree enjoyed by no other subject; and when the chancellor died, in 1550, Charles pronounced his eulogy to Philip in a single sentence, saying that in Granvelle they had lost the man on whose wisdom they could securely repose.

Anthony Perrenot, distinguished from his father in later times as Cardinal Granvelle, was the eldest of eleven children. In his childhood he discovered such promise, that the chancellor bestowed much pains personally on his instruction. At fourteen he was sent to Padua, and after some years was removed to Louvain, then the university of greatest repute in the Netherlands. It was not till later that the seminary of Douay was founded, under the auspices of Philip the Second. At the university, the young Perrenot soon distinguished himself by the vivacity of his mind, the acuteness of his perceptions, an industry fully equal to his father's, and remarkable powers of acquisition. Besides a large range of academic study, he made himself master of seven languages, so as to read and converse in them with fluency. He seemed to have little relish for the amusements of the youth of his own age. His greatest amusement was a book. Under this incessant application his health gave way, and for a time his studies were suspended.

Whether from his father's preference or his own, young Granvelle embraced the ecclesiastical profession. At the age of twenty-one he was admitted to orders. The son of the chancellor was not slow in his advancement, and he was soon possessed of several good benefices. But the ambitious and worldly temper of Granvelle was not to be satisfied with the humble duties of the ecclesiastic. It was not long before he was called to court by his father, and there a brilliant career was opened to his aspiring genius.

The young man soon showed such talent for business, and such shrewd insight into character, as, combined with the stores of learning he had at his command, made his services of great value to his father. He accompanied the chancellor on some of his public missions, among others to the Council of Trent, where the younger Granvelle, who had already been promoted to the see of Arras, first had the opportunity of displaying that subtle, insinuating eloquence, which captivated as much as it convinced.

RISE AND CHARACTER OF GRANVELLE.

The emperor saw with satisfaction the promise afforded by the young statesman, and looked forward to the time when he would prove the same pillar of support to his administration that his father had been before him. Nor was that time far distant. As the chancellor's health declined, the son became more intimately associated with his father in the counsels of the emperor. He justified this confidence by the unwearied toil with which he devoted himself to the business of the cabinet; a toil to which even night seemed to afford no respite. He sometimes employed five secretaries at once, dictating to them in as many different languages. The same thing, or something as miraculous, has been told of other remarkable men, both before and since. As a mere tour de force Granvelle may possibly have amused himself with it. But it was not in this way that the correspondence was written which furnishes the best key to the events of the time. If it had been so written, it would never have been worth the publication.

Every evening Granvelle presented himself before the emperor, and read to him the programme he had prepared of the business of the following day, with his own suggestions. The foreign ambassadors who resided at the court were surprised to find the new minister so entirely in the secrets of his master; and that he was as well instructed in all their doings as the emperor himself. In short, the confidence of Charles, given slowly and with much hesitation, was at length bestowed as freely on the son as it had been on the father. The two Granvelles may be truly said to have been the two persons who most possessed the confidence of the emperor, from the time that he took the reins of government into his own hands.

When raised to the see of Arras, Granvelle was but twenty-five years old. It is rare that the mitre has descended on a man of a more ambitious spirit. Yet Granvelle was not averse to the good things of the world, nor altogether insensible to its pomps and vanities. He affected great state in his manner of living, and thus necessity, no less than taste, led him to covet the possession of wealth as well as of power. He obtained both; and his fortunes were rapidly advancing when, by the abdication of his royal master, the scepter passed into the hands of Philip the Second.

Charles recommended Granvelle to his son as every way deserving of his confidence. Granvelle knew that the best recommendation—the only effectual one—must come from himself. He studied carefully the character of his new sovereign, and showed a wonderful flexibility in conforming to his humors. The ambitious minister proved himself no stranger to those arts by which great minds, as well as little ones, sometimes condescend to push their fortunes in a court.

Yet, in truth, Granvelle did not always do violence to his own inclinations in conforming to those of Philip. Like the king, he did not come rapidly to results, but pondered long, and viewed a question in all its bearings, before arriving at a decision. He had, as we have seen, the same patient spirit of application as Philip, so that both may be said to have found their best recreation in labor. Neither was he less zealous than the king for the maintenance of the true faith, though his accommodating nature, if left to itself, might have sanctioned a different policy from that dictated by the stern, uncompromising spirit of his master.

Granvelle's influence was further aided by the charms of his personal intercourse. His polished and insinuating manners seem to have melted even the icy reserve of Philip. He maintained his influence by his singular tact in suggesting hints for carrying out his master's policy, in such a way that the suggestion might seem to have come from the king himself. Thus careful not to alarm the jealousy of his sovereign, he was content to forego the semblance of power for the real possession of it.

It was soon seen that he was as well settled in the confidence of Philip as he had previously been in that of Charles. Notwithstanding the apparent distribution of power between the regent and the several councils, the arrangements made by the king were such as to throw the real authority into the hands of Granvelle. Thus the rare example was afforded of the same man continuing the favorite of two successive sovereigns. Granvelle did not escape the usual fate of favorites; and whether from the necessity of the case, or that, as some pretend, he did not on his elevation bear his faculties too meekly, no man was so generally and so heartily detested throughout the country.

Before leaving the Netherlands, Philip named the governors of the several provinces,—the nominations, for the most part, only confirming those already in office. Egmont had the governments of Flanders and Artois; the prince of Orange, those of Holland, Zealand, Utrecht, and West Friesland. The commission to William, running in the usual form, noticed "the good, loyal, and notable services he had rendered both to the emperor and his present sovereign." The command of two battalions of the Spanish army was also given to the two nobles,—a poor contrivance for reconciling the nation to the continuance of these detested troops in the country.

Philip had anxiously waited for the arrival of the papal bull which was to authorize the erection of the bishoprics. Granvelle looked still more anxiously for it. He had read the signs of the coming storm, and would gladly have encountered it when the royal presence might have afforded some shelter from its fury. But the court of Rome moved at its usual dilatory pace, and the apostolic nuncio did not arrive with the missive till the eve of Philip's departure,—too late for him to witness its publication.

Having completed all his arrangements, about the middle of August the king proceeded to Zealand, where, in the port of Flushing, lay a gallant fleet, waiting to take him and the royal suite to Spain. It consisted of fifty Spanish and forty other vessels,—all well manned, and victualled for a much longer voyage. Philip was escorted to the place of embarkation by a large body of Flemish nobles, together with the foreign ambassadors and the duke and duchess of Savoy. A curious scene is reported to have taken place as he was about to go on board. Turning abruptly round to the prince of Orange, who had attended him on the journey, he bluntly accused him of being the true source of the opposition which his measures had encountered in the States-General. William, astonished at the suddenness of the attack, replied that the opposition was to be regarded, not as the act of an individual, but of the states. "No," rejoined the incensed monarch, shaking him at the same time violently by the wrist, "not the states, but you, you, you!" an exclamation deriving additional bitterness from the fact that the word you, thus employed, in the Castilian was itself indicative of contempt. William did not think it prudent to reply, nor did he care to trust himself with the other Flemish lords on board the royal squadron.

The royal company being at length all on board, on the twentieth of August, 1559, the fleet weighed anchor; and Philip, taking leave of the duke and duchess of Savoy, and the rest of the noble train who attended his embarkation, was soon wafted from the shores,—to which he was never to return.

Luc-Jean-Joseph Vandervynckt, to whom I have repeatedly had occasion to refer in the course of the preceding chapter, was a Fleming,—born at Ghent in 1691. He was educated to the law, became eminent in his profession, and at the age of thirty-eight was made a member of the council of Flanders. He employed his leisure in studying the historical antiquities of his own country. At the suggestion of Coblentz, prime minister of Maria Theresa, he compiled his work on the Troubles of the Netherlands. It was designed for the instruction of the younger branches of the imperial family, and six copies only of it were at first printed, in 1765. Since the author's death, which took place in 1779, when he had reached the great age of eighty-eight, the work has been repeatedly published.

As Vandervynckt had the national archives thrown open to his inspection, he had access to the most authentic sources of information. He was a man of science and discernment, fair-minded, and temperate in his opinions, which gives value to a book that contains, moreover, much interesting anecdote, not elsewhere to be found. The work, though making only four volumes, covers a large space of historical ground,—from the marriage of Philip the Fair, in 1495, to the peace of Westphalia, in 1648. Its literary execution is by no means equal to its other merits. The work is written in French; but Vandervynckt, unfortunately, while he both wrote and spoke Flemish, and even Latin, with facility, was but indifferently acquainted with French.

CHAPTER XII.

PROTESTANTISM IN SPAIN. 1559.

The voyage of King Philip was a short and prosperous one. On the twenty-ninth of August, 1559, he arrived off the port of Laredo. But while he was in sight of land, the weather, which had been so propitious, suddenly changed. A furious tempest arose, which scattered his little navy. Nine of the vessels foundered, and though the monarch had the good fortune, under the care of an experienced pilot, to make his escape in a boat, and reach the shore in safety, he had the mortification to see the ship which had borne him go down with the rest, and with her the inestimable cargo he had brought from the Low Countries. It consisted of curious furniture, tapestries, gems, pieces of sculpture, and paintings,—the rich productions of Flemish and Italian art, which his father, the emperor, had been employed many years of his life in collecting. Truly was it said of Charles, that "he had sacked the land only to feed the ocean." To add to the calamity, more than a thousand persons perished in this shipwreck.

The king, without delay, took the road to Valladolid; but on arriving at that capital, whether depressed by his late disaster, or from his habitual dislike of such empty parade, he declined the honors, with which the loyal inhabitants would have greeted the return of their sovereign to his dominions. Here he was cordially welcomed by his sister, the Regent Joanna, who, long since weary of the cares of sovereignty, resigned the scepter into his hands, with a better will than that with which most persons would have received it. Here, too, he had the satisfaction of embracing his son Carlos, the heir to his empire. The length of Philip's absence may have allowed him to see some favorable change in the person of the young prince, though, if report be true, there was little change for the better in his disposition, which, headstrong and imperious, had already begun to make men tremble for the future destinies of their country.

Philip had not been many days in Valladolid when his presence was celebrated by one of those exhibitions, which, unhappily for Spain, maybe called national. This was an auto da fé, not, however, as formerly, of Jews and Moors, but of Spanish Protestants. The Reformation had been silently, but not slowly, advancing in the Peninsula; and intelligence of this, as we have already seen, was one cause of Philip's abrupt departure from the Netherlands. The brief but disastrous attempt at a religious revolution in Spain is an event of too much importance to be passed over in silence by the historian.

Notwithstanding the remote position of Spain, under the imperial scepter of Charles she was brought too closely into contact with the other states of Europe not to feel the shock of the great religious reform which was shaking those states to their foundations. Her most intimate relations, indeed, were with those very countries in which the seeds of the Reformation were first planted. It was no uncommon thing for Spaniards, in the sixteenth century, to be indebted for some portion of their instruction to German universities. Men of learning, who accompanied the emperor, became familiar with the religious doctrines so widely circulated in Germany and Flanders. The troops gathered the same doctrines from the Lutheran soldiers, who occasionally served with them under the imperial banners. These opinions, crude for the most part as they were, they brought back to their own country; and a curiosity was roused which prepared the mind for the reception of the great truths which were quickening the other nations of Europe. Men of higher education, on their return to Spain, found the means of disseminating these truths. Secret societies were established; meetings were held; and, with the same secrecy as in the days of the early Christians, the Gospel was preached and explained to the growing congregation of the faithful. The greatest difficulty was the want of books. The enterprise of a few self-devoted proselytes at length overcame this difficulty.

A Castilian version of the Bible had been printed in Germany. Various Protestant publications, whether originating in the Castilian or translated into that language, appeared in the same country. A copy, now and then, in the possession of some private individual, had found its way, without detection, across the Pyrenees. These instances were rare, when a Spaniard named Juan Hernandez, resident in Geneva, where he followed the business of a corrector of the press, undertook, from no other motive but zeal for the truth, to introduce a larger supply of the forbidden fruit into his native land.

With great adroitness, he evaded the vigilance of the custom-house officers, and the more vigilant spies of the Inquisition, and in the end succeeded in landing two large casks filled with prohibited works, which were quickly distributed among the members of the infant church. Other intrepid converts followed the example of Hernandez, and with similar success; so that, with the aid of books and spiritual teachers, the number of the faithful multiplied daily throughout the country. Among this number was a much larger proportion, it was observed, of persons of rank and education than is usually found in like cases; owing doubtless to the circumstance that it was this class of persons who had most frequented the countries where the Lutheran doctrines were taught. Thus the Reformed Church grew and prospered, not indeed as it had prospered in the freer atmospheres of Germany and Britain, but as well as it could possibly do under the blighting influence of the Inquisition; like some tender plant, which, nurtured in the shade, waits only for a more genial season for its full expansion. That season was not in reserve for it in Spain.

It may seem strange that the spread of the Reformed religion should so long have escaped the detection of the agents of the Holy Office. Yet it is certain that the first notice which the Spanish inquisitors received of the fact was from their brethren abroad. Some ecclesiastics in the train of Philip, suspecting the heresy of several of their own countrymen in the Netherlands, had them seized and sent to Spain, to be examined by the Inquisition. On a closer investigation, it was found that a correspondence had long been maintained between these persons and their countrymen, of a similar persuasion with themselves, at home. Thus the existence, though not the extent, of the Spanish Reformation was made known.

No sooner was the alarm sounded, than Paul the Fourth, quick to follow up the scent of heresy in any quarter of his pontifical dominions, issued a brief, in February, 1558, addressed to the Spanish inquisitor-general. In this brief, his holiness enjoins it on the head of the tribunal to spare no efforts to detect and exterminate the growing evil; and he empowers that functionary to arraign and bring to condign punishment all suspected of heresy, of whatever rank or profession,—whether bishops or archbishops, nobles, kings, or emperors. Paul the Fourth was fond of contemplating himself as seated in the chair of the Innocents and the Gregories, and like them setting his pontifical foot on the necks of princes. His natural arrogance was probably not diminished by the concessions which Philip the Second had thought proper to make to him at the close of the Roman war.

Philip, far from taking umbrage at the swelling tone of this apostolical mandate, followed it up, in the same year, by a monstrous edict, borrowed from one in the Netherlands, which condemned all who bought, sold, or read prohibited works to be burned alive.

In the following January, Paul, to give greater efficacy to this edict, published another bull, in which he commanded all confessors, under pain of excommunication, to enjoin on their penitents to inform against all persons, however nearly allied to them, who might be guilty of such practices. To quicken the zeal of the informer, Philip, on his part, revived a law fallen somewhat into disuse, by which the accuser was to receive one fourth of the confiscated property of the convicted party. And finally, a third bull from Paul allowed the inquisitors to withhold a pardon from the recanting heretic, if any doubt existed of his sincerity; thus placing the life as well as fortune of the unhappy prisoner entirely at the mercy of judges who had an obvious interest in finding him guilty. In this way the pope and the king continued to play into each other's hands, and while his holiness artfully spread the toils, the king devised the means for driving the quarry into them.

Fortunately for these plans, the Inquisition was at this time under the direction of a man peculiarly fitted to execute them. This was Fernando Valdés, cardinal-archbishop of Seville, a person of a hard, inexorable nature, and possessed of as large a measure of fanaticism as ever fell to a grand-inquisitor since the days of Torquemada. Valdés readily availed himself of the terrible machinery placed under his control. Careful not to alarm the suspected parties, his approaches were slow and stealthy. He was the chief of a tribunal which sat in darkness, and which dealt by invisible agents. He worked long and silently under ground before firing the mine which was to bury his enemies in a general ruin.

His spies were everywhere abroad, mingling with the suspected, and insinuating themselves into their confidence. At length, by the treachery of some, and by working on the nervous apprehensions or the religions scruples of others, he succeeded in detecting the lurking-places of the new heresy, and the extent of ground which it covered. This was much larger than had been imagined, although the Reformation in Spain seemed less formidable from the number of its proselytes than from their character and position. Many of them were ecclesiastics, especially entrusted with maintaining the purity of the faith. The quarters in which the heretical doctrines most prevailed were Aragon, which held an easy communication with the Huguenots of France, and the ancient cities of Seville and Valladolid, indebted less to any local advantages than to the influence of a few eminent men, who had early embraced the faith of the Reformers.

At length, the preliminary information having been obtained, the proscribed having been marked out, the plan of attack settled, an order was given for the simultaneous arrest of all persons suspected of heresy, throughout the kingdom. It fell like a thunderbolt on the unhappy victims, who had gone on with their secret associations, little suspecting the ruin that hung over them. No resistance was attempted. Men and women, churchmen and laymen, persons of all ranks and professions, were hurried from their homes, and lodged in the secret chambers of the Inquisition. Yet these could not furnish accommodations for the number, and many were removed to the ordinary prisons, and even to convents and private dwellings. In Seville alone eight hundred were arrested on the first day. Fears were entertained of an attempt at rescue, and an additional guard was stationed over the places of confinement. The inquisitors were in the condition of a fisherman whose cast has been so successful that the draught of fishes seems likely to prove too heavy for his net.

The arrest of one party gradually led to the detection of others. Dragged from his solitary dungeon before the secret tribunal of the Inquisition, alone, without counsel to aid or one friendly face to cheer him, without knowing the name of his accuser, without being allowed to confront the witnesses who were there to swear away his life, without even a sight of his own process, except such garbled extracts as the wily judges thought fit to communicate, is it strange that the unhappy victim, in his perplexity and distress, should have been drawn into disclosures fatal to his associates and himself? If these disclosures were not to the mind of his judges, they had only to try the efficacy of the torture,—the rack, the cord, and the pulley,—until, when every joint had been wrenched from its socket, the barbarous tribunal was compelled to suspend, not terminate, the application, from the inability of the sufferer to endure it. Such were the dismal scenes enacted in the name of religion, and by the ministers of religion, as well as of the Inquisition,—scenes to which few of those who had once witnessed them, and escaped with life, dared ever to allude. For to reveal the secrets of the Inquisition was death.

At the expiration of eighteen months from the period of the first arrests, many of the trials had been concluded, the doom of the prisoners was sealed, and it was thought time that the prisons should disgorge their superfluous inmates. Valladolid was selected as the theatre of the first auto de fé, both from the importance of the capital and the presence of the court, which would thus sanction and give greater dignity to the celebration. This event took place in May, 1559. The Regent Joanna, the young prince of the Asturias, Don Carlos, and the principal grandees of the court, were there to witness the spectacle. By rendering the heir of the crown thus early familiar with the tender mercies of the Holy Office, it may have been intended to conciliate his favor to that institution. If such was the object, according to the report it signally failed, since the woeful spectacle left no other impressions on the mind of the prince than those of indignation and disgust.

The example of Valladolid was soon followed by autos da fé in Granada, Toledo, Seville, Barcelona,—in short, in the twelve capitals in which tribunals of the Holy Office were established. A second celebration at Valladolid was reserved for the eighth of October in the same year, when it would be graced by the presence of the sovereign himself. Indeed, as several of the processes had been concluded some months before this period, there is reason to believe that the sacrifice of more than one of the victims had been postponed, in order to give greater effect to the spectacle.

The auto da fé—"act of faith"—was the most imposing, as it was the most awful, of the solemnities authorized by the Roman Catholic Church. It was intended, somewhat profanely, as has been intimated, to combine the pomp of the Roman triumph with the terrors of the day of judgment. It may remind one quite as much of those bloody festivals prepared for the entertainment of the Caesars in the Coliseum. The religions import of the auto de fé was intimated by the circumstance of its being celebrated on a Sunday, or some other holiday of the Church. An indulgence for forty days was granted by his holiness to all who should be present at the spectacle; as if the appetite for witnessing the scenes of human suffering required to be stimulated by a bounty; that too in Spain, where the amusements were, and still are, of the most sanguinary character.

The scene for this second auto de fé at Valladolid was the great square in front of the church of St. Francis. At one end a platform was raised, covered with rich carpeting, on which were ranged the seats of the inquisitors, emblazoned with the arms of the Holy Office. Near to this was the royal gallery, a private entrance to which secured the inmates from molestation by the crowd. Opposite to this gallery a large scaffold was erected, so as to be visible from all parts of the arena, and was appropriated to the unhappy martyrs who were to suffer in the auto.

At six in the morning all the bells in the capital began to toll, and a solemn procession was seen to move from the dismal fortress of the Inquisition. In the van marched a body of troops, to secure a free passage for the procession. Then came the condemned, each attended by two familiars of the Holy Office, and those who were to suffer at the stake by two friars, in addition, exhorting the heretic to abjure his errors. Those admitted to penitence wore a sable dress; while the unfortunate martyr was enveloped in a loose sack of yellow cloth,—the san benito,—with his head surmounted by a cap of pasteboard of a conical form, which, together with the cloak, was embroidered with figures of flames and of devils fanning and feeding them; all emblematical of the destiny of the heretic's soul in the world to come, as well as of his body in the present. Then came the magistrates of the city, the judges of the courts, the ecclesiastical orders, and the nobles of the land on horseback. These were followed by the members of the dread tribunal, and the fiscal, bearing a standard of crimson damask, on one side of which were displayed the arms of the Inquisition, and on the other the insignia of its founders, Sixtus the Fifth and Ferdinand the Catholic. Next came a numerous train of familiars, well mounted, among whom were many gentry of the province, proud to act as the body-guard of the Holy Office. The rear was brought up by an immense concourse of the common people, stimulated on the present occasion, no doubt, by the loyal desire to see their new sovereign, as well as by the ambition to share in the triumphs of the auto da fé. The number thus drawn together from the capital and the country, far exceeding what was usual on such occasions, is estimated by one present at full two hundred thousand.

  As the multitude defiled into the square, the inquisitors took their place on the seats prepared for their reception. The condemned were conducted to the scaffold, and the royal station was occupied by Philip, with the different members of his household. At his side sat his sister, the late regent, his son, Don Carlos, his nephew, Alexander Farnese, several foreign ambassadors, and the principal grandees and higher ecclesiastics in attendance on the court. It was an august assembly of the greatest and the proudest in the land. But the most indifferent spectator, who had a spark of humanity in his bosom, might have turned with feelings of admiration from this array of worldly power, to the poor martyr, who, with no support but what he drew from within, was prepared to defy this power, and to lay down his life in vindication of the rights of conscience. Some there may have been, in that large concourse, who shared in these sentiments. But their number was small indeed in comparison with those who looked on the wretched victim as the enemy of God, and his approaching sacrifice as the most glorious triumph of the Cross.

The ceremonies began with a sermon, "the sermon of the faith," by the bishop of Zamora. The subject of it may well be guessed, from the occasion. It was no doubt plentifully larded with texts of Scripture, and, unless the preacher departed from the fashion of the time, with passages from the heathen writers, however much out of place they may seem in an orthodox discourse.

When the bishop had concluded, the grand-inquisitor administered an oath to the assembled multitude, who on their knees solemnly swore to defend the Inquisition, to maintain the purity of the faith, and to inform against any one who should swerve from it. As Philip repeated an oath of similar import, he suited the action to the word, and, rising from his seat, drew his sword from its scabbard, as if to announce himself the determined champion of the Holy Office. In the earlier autos of the Moorish and Jewish infidels, so humiliating an oath had never been exacted from the sovereign.

After this, the secretary of the tribunal read aloud an instrument reciting the grounds for the conviction of the prisoners, and the respective sentences pronounced against them. Those who were to be admitted to penitence, each, as his sentence was proclaimed, knelt down, and, with his hands on the missal, solemnly abjured his errors, and was absolved by the grand-inquisitor. The absolution, however, was not so entire as to relieve the offender from the penalty of his transgressions in this world. Some were doomed to perpetual imprisonment in the cells of the Inquisition, others to lighter penances. All were doomed to the confiscation of their property,—a point of too great moment to the welfare of the tribunal ever to be omitted. Besides this, in many cases the offender, and, by a glaring perversion of justice, his immediate descendants, were rendered for ever ineligible to public office of any kind, and their names branded with perpetual infamy. Thus blighted in fortune and in character, they were said, in the soft language of the Inquisition, to be reconciled.

As these unfortunate persons were remanded, under a strong guard, to their prisons, all eyes were turned on the little company of martyrs, who, clothed in the ignominious garb of the san benito, stood waiting the sentence of the judges,—with cords round their necks, and in their hands a cross, or sometimes an inverted torch, typical of their own speedy dissolution. The interest of the spectators was still further excited, in the present instance, by the fact that several of these victims were not only illustrious for their rank, but yet more so for their talents and virtues. In their haggard looks, their emaciated forms, and too often, alas! their distorted limbs, it was easy to read the story of their sufferings in their long imprisonment, for some of them had been confined in the dark cells of the Inquisition much more than a year. Yet their countenances, though haggard, far from showing any sign of weakness or fear, were lighted up with a glow of holy enthusiasm, as of men prepared to seal their testimony with their blood.

When that part of the process showing the grounds of their conviction had been read, the grand-inquisitor consigned them to the hands of the corregidor of the city, beseeching him to deal with the prisoners in all kindness and mercy; a honeyed, but most hypocritical phrase, since no choice was left to the civil magistrate, but to execute the terrible sentence of the law against heretics, the preparations for which had been made by him a week before.

The whole number of convicts amounted to thirty, of whom sixteen were reconciled, and the remainder relaxed to the secular arm,—in other words, turned over to the civil magistrate for execution. There were few of those thus condemned who, when brought to the stake, did not so far shrink from the dreadful doom that awaited them as to consent to purchase a commutation of it by confession before they died; in which case they were strangled by the garrote, before their bodies were thrown into the flames.

Of the present number there were only two whose constancy triumphed to the last over the dread of suffering, and who refused to purchase any mitigation of it by a compromise with conscience. The names of these martyrs should be engraven on the record of history.

One of them was Don Carlos de Seso, a noble Florentine, who had stood high in the favor of Charles the Fifth. Being united with a lady of rank in Castile, he removed to that country, and took up his residence in Valladolid. He had become a convert to the Lutheran doctrines, which he first communicated to his own family, and afterwards showed equal zeal in propagating among the people of Valladolid and its neighborhood. In short, there was no man to whose untiring and intrepid labors the cause of the Reformed religion in Spain was more indebted. He was, of course, a conspicuous mark for the Inquisition.

During the fifteen months in which he lay in its gloomy cells, cut off from human sympathy and support, his constancy remained unshaken. The night preceding his execution, when his sentence had been announced to him, De Seso called for writing materials. It was thought he designed to propitiate his judges by a full confession of his errors. But the confession he made was of another kind. He insisted on the errors of the Romish Church, and avowed his unshaken trust in the great truths of the Reformation. The document, covering two sheets of paper, is pronounced by the secretary of the Inquisition to be a composition equally remarkable for its energy and precision. When led before the royal gallery, on his way to the place of execution, De Seso pathetically exclaimed to Philip, "Is it thus that you allow your innocent subjects to be persecuted?" To which the king made the memorable reply, "If it were my own son, I would fetch the wood to burn him, were he such a wretch as thou art!" It was certainly a characteristic answer.

At the stake De Seso showed the same unshaken constancy, bearing his testimony to the truth of the great cause for which he gave up his life. As the flames crept slowly around him, he called on the soldiers to heap up the fagots, that his agonies might be sooner ended; and his executioners, indignant at the obstinacy—the heroism—of the martyr, were not slow in obeying his commands.

The companion and fellow-sufferer of De Seso was Domingo de Roxas, son of the marquis de Poza, an unhappy noble, who had seen five of his family, including his eldest son, condemned to various humiliating penances by the Inquisition for their heretical opinions. This one was now to suffer death. De Roxas was a Dominican monk. It is singular that this order, from which the ministers of the Holy Office were particularly taken, furnished many proselytes to the Reformed religion. De Roxas, as was the usage with ecclesiastics, was allowed to retain his sacerdotal habit until his sentence had been read, when he was degraded from his ecclesiastical rank, his vestments were stripped off one after another, and the hideous dress of the san benito thrown over him, amid the shouts and derision of the populace. Thus appareled, he made an attempt to address the spectators around the scaffold; but no sooner did he begin to raise his voice against the errors and cruelties of Rome, than Philip indignantly commanded him to be gagged. The gag was a piece of cleft wood, which, forcibly compressing the tongue, had the additional advantage of causing great pain, while it silenced the offender. Even when he was bound to the stake, the gag, though contrary to custom, was suffered to remain in the mouth of De Roxas, as if his enemies dreaded the effects of an eloquence that triumphed over the anguish of death.

The place of execution—the quemadero, the burning-place, as it was called—was a spot selected for the purpose without the walls of the city. Those who attended an auto da fé were not, therefore, necessarily, as is commonly imagined, spectators of the tragic scene that concluded it. The great body of the people, and many of higher rank, no doubt, followed to the place of execution. On this occasion, there is reason to think, from the language—somewhat equivocal, it is true—of Philip's biographer, that the monarch chose to testify his devotion to the Inquisition by witnessing in person the appalling close of the drama; while his guards mingled with the menials of the Holy Office, and heaped up the fagots round their victims.

Such was the cruel exhibition which, under the garb of a religious festival, was thought the most fitting ceremonial for welcoming the Catholic monarch to his dominions! During the whole time of its duration in the public square, from six in the morning till two in the afternoon, no symptom of impatience was exhibited by the spectators, and, as may well be believed, no sign of sympathy for the sufferers. It would be difficult to devise a better school for perverting the moral sense, and deadening the sensibilities of a nation.

PROSECUTION OF CARRANZA.

Under the royal sanction, the work of persecution now went forward more briskly than ever. No calling was too sacred, no rank too high, to escape the shafts of the informer. In the course of a few years, no less than nine bishops were compelled to do humiliating penance in some form or other for heterodox opinions. But the most illustrious victim of the Inquisition was Bartolomé Carranzo, archbishop of Toledo. The primacy of Spain might be considered as the post of the highest consideration in the Roman Catholic Church after the papacy. The proceedings against this prelate, on the whole, excited more interest throughout Christendom than any other case that came before the tribunal of the Inquisition.

Carranza, who was of an ancient Castilian family, had early entered a Dominican convent in the suburbs of Guadalajara. His exemplary life, and his great parts and learning, recommended him to the favor of Charles the Fifth, who appointed him confessor to his son Philip. The emperor also sent him to the Council of Trent, where he made a great impression by his eloquence, as well as by a tract which he published against plurality of benefices, which, however, excited no little disgust in many of his order. On Philip's visit to England to marry Queen Mary, Carranza accompanied his master, and while in that country he distinguished himself by the zeal and ability with which he controverted the doctrines of the Protestants. The alacrity, moreover, which he manifested in the work of persecution made him generally odious under the name of the "black friar,"—a name peculiarly appropriate, as it applied not less to his swarthy complexion than to the garb of his order. On Philip's return to Flanders, Carranza, who had twice refused a mitre, was raised—not without strong disinclination on his own part—to the archiepiscopal see of Toledo. The "nolo episcopari," in this instance, seems to have been sincere. It would have been well for him if it had been effectual. Carranza's elevation to the primacy was the source of all his troubles.

The hatred of theologians has passed into a proverb; and there would certainly seem to be no rancor surpassing that of a Spanish ecclesiastic. Among the enemies raised by Carranza's success, the most implacable was the grand-inquisitor, Valdés. The archbishop of Seville could ill brook that a humble Dominican should be thus raised from the cloister over the heads of the proud prelacy of Spain. With unwearied pains, such as hate only could induce, he sought out whatever could make against the orthodoxy of the new prelate, whether in his writings or his conversation. Some plausible ground was afforded for this from the fact, that, although Carranza, as his whole life had shown, was devoted to the Roman Catholic Church, yet his long residence in Protestant countries, and his familiarity with Protestant works, had given a coloring to his language, if not to his opinions, which resembled that of the Reformers. Indeed, Carranza seems to have been much of the same way of thinking with Pole, Contarini, Morone, and other illustrious Romanists, whose liberal natures and wide range of study, had led them to sanction more than one of the Lutheran dogmas which were subsequently proscribed by the Council of Trent. One charge strongly urged against the primate was his assent to the heretical doctrine of justification by faith. In support of this, Father Regla, the confessor, as the reader may remember, of Charles the Fifth, and a worthy coadjutor of Valdés, quoted words of consolation employed by Carranza, in his presence, at the death-bed of the emperor.

The exalted rank of the accused made it necessary for his enemies to proceed with the greatest caution. Never had the bloodhounds of the Inquisition been set on so noble a quarry. Confident in his own authority, the prelate had little reason for distrust. He could not ward off the blow, for it was an invisible arm stronger than his own that was raised to smite him. On the twenty-second of August, 1559, the emissaries of the Holy Office entered the primate's town of Torrelaguna. The doors of the episcopal palace were thrown open to the ministers of the terrible tribunal. The prelate was dragged from his bed at midnight, was hurried into a coach, and while the inhabitants were ordered not so much as to present themselves at the windows, he was conducted, under a strong guard, to the prisons of the Inquisition at Valladolid. The arrest of such a person caused a great sensation throughout the country, but no attempt was made at a rescue.

The primate would have appealed from the Holy Office to the pope, as the only power competent to judge him. But he was unwilling to give umbrage to Philip, who had told him in any extremity to rely on him. The king, however, was still in the Netherlands, where his mind had been preoccupied, through the archbishop's enemies, with rumors of his defection. And the mere imputation of heresy, in this dangerous crisis, and especially in one whom he had so recently raised to the highest post in the Spanish church, was enough, not only to efface the recollection of past services from the mind of Philip, but to turn his favor into aversion. For two years Carranza was suffered to languish in confinement, exposed to all the annoyances which the malice of his enemies could devise. So completely was he dead to the world, that he knew nothing of a conflagration which consumed more than four hundred of the principal houses in Valladolid, till some years after the occurrence.

At length the Council of Trent, sharing the indignation of the rest of Christendom at the archbishop's protracted imprisonment, called on Philip to interpose in his behalf, and to remove the cause to another tribunal. But the king gave little heed to the remonstrance, which the inquisitors treated as a presumptuous interference with their authority.

In 1566, Pius the Fifth ascended the pontifical throne. He was a man of austere morals and a most inflexible will. A Dominican, like Carranza, he was greatly scandalized by the treatment which the primate had received, and by the shameful length to which his process had been protracted. He at once sent his orders to Spain for the removal of the grand-inquisitor, Valdés, from office, summoning, at the same time, the cause and the prisoner before his own tribunal. The bold inquisitor, loth to lose his prey, would have defied the power of Rome, as he had done that of the Council of Trent. Philip remonstrated; but Pius was firm, and menaced both king and inquisitor with excommunication. Philip had no mind for a second collision with the papal court. In imagination he already heard the thunders of the Vatican rolling in the distance, and threatening soon to break upon his head. After a confinement of now more than seven years' duration, the archbishop was sent under a guard to Rome. He was kindly received by the pontiff, and honorably lodged in the castle of St. Angelo, in apartments formerly occupied by the popes themselves. But he was still a prisoner.

Pius now set seriously about the examination of Carranza's process. It was a tedious business, requiring his holiness to wade through an ocean of papers, while the progress of the suit was perpetually impeded by embarrassments thrown in his way by the industrious malice of the inquisitors. At the end of six years more, Pius was preparing to give his judgment, which it was understood would be favorable to Carranza, when, unhappily for the primate, the pontiff died.

The Holy Office, stung by the prospect of its failure, now strained every nerve to influence the mind of the new pope, Gregory the Thirteenth, to a contrary decision. New testimony was collected, new glosses were put on the primate's text, and the sanction of the most learned Spanish theologians was brought in support of them. At length, at the end of three years further, the holy father announced his purpose of giving his final decision. It was done with great circumstance. The pope was seated on his pontifical throne, surrounded by all his cardinals, prelates, and functionaries of the apostolic chamber. Before this august assembly, the archbishop presented himself unsupported and alone, while no one ventured to salute him. His head was bare. His once robust form was bent by infirmity more than by years; and his care-worn features told of that sickness which arises from hope deferred. He knelt down at some distance from the pope, and in this humble attitude received his sentence.

He was declared to have imbibed the pernicious doctrines of Luther. The decree of the Inquisition prohibiting the use of his catechism was confirmed. He was to abjure sixteen propositions found in his writings; was suspended from the exercise of his episcopal functions for five years, during which time he was to be confined in a convent of his order at Orvieto; and, finally, he was required to visit seven of the principal churches in Rome, and perform mass there by way of penance.

This was the end of eighteen years of doubt, anxiety, and imprisonment. The tears streamed down the face of the unhappy man, as he listened to the sentence; but he bowed in silent submission to the will of his superior. The very next day he began his work of penance. But nature could go no further; and on the second of May, only sixteen days after his sentence had been pronounced, Carranza died of a broken heart. The triumph of the Inquisition was complete.

The pope raised a monument to the memory of the primate, with a pompous inscription, paying a just tribute to his talents and his scholarship, endowing him with a full measure of Christian worth, and particularly commending the exemplary manner in which he had discharged the high trusts reposed in him by his sovereign.

Such is the story of Carranza's persecution,—considering the rank of the party, the unprecedented length of the process, and the sensation it excited throughout Europe, altogether the most remarkable on the records of the Inquisition. Our sympathy for the archbishop's sufferings may be reasonably mitigated by the reflection, that he did but receive the measure which he had meted out to others.

While the persecution of Carranza was going on, the fires lighted for the Protestants continued to burn with fury in all parts of the country, until at length they gradually slackened and died away, from mere want of fuel to feed them. The year 1570 may be regarded as the period of the last auto de fé in which the Lutherans played a conspicuous part. The subsequent celebrations were devoted chiefly to relapsed Jews and Mahometans; and if a Protestant heretic was sometimes added to this list, it was "but as the gleaning of grapes after the vintage is done."

Never was there a persecution which did its work more thoroughly. The blood of the martyr is commonly said to be the seed of the church. But the storm of persecution fell as heavily on the Spanish Protestants as it did on the Albigenses in the thirteenth century; blighting every living thing, so that no germ remained for future harvests. Spain might now boast that the stain of heresy no longer defiled the hem of her garment. But at what a price was this purchased! Not merely by the sacrifice of the lives and fortunes of a few thousands of the existing generation but by the disastrous consequences entailed for ever on the country. Folded under the dark wing of the Inquisition, Spain was shut out from the light which in the sixteenth century broke over the rest of Europe, stimulating the nations to greater enterprise in every department of knowledge. The genius of the people was rebuked, and their spirit quenched, under the malignant influence of an eye that never slumbered, of an unseen arm ever raised to strike. How could there be freedom of thought, where there was no freedom of utterance? Or freedom of utterance, where it was as dangerous to say too little as too much? Freedom cannot go along with fear. Every way the mind of the Spaniard was in fetters.

His moral sense was miserably perverted. Men were judged, not by their practice, but by their professions. Creed became a substitute for conduct. Difference of faith made a wider gulf of separation than difference of race, language, or even interest. Spain no longer formed one of the great brotherhood of Christian nations. An immeasurable barrier was raised between that kingdom and the Protestants of Europe. The early condition of perpetual warfare with the Arabs who overran the country had led the Spaniards to mingle religion strangely with their politics. The effect continued when the cause had ceased. Their wars with the European nations became religious wars. In fighting England or the Netherlands, they were fighting the enemies of God. It was the same everywhere. In their contest with the unoffending natives of the New World, they were still battling with{ the enemies of God. Their wars took the character of a perpetual crusade, and were conducted with all the ferocity which fanaticism could inspire.

The same dark spirit of fanaticism seems to brood over the national literature; even that lighter literature which in other nations is made up of the festive sallies of wit, or the tender expression of sentiment. The greatest geniuses of the nation, the masters of the drama and of the ode, while they astonish us by their miracles of invention, show that they have too often kindled their inspiration at the altars of the Inquisition.

Debarred as he was from freedom of speculation, the domain of science was closed against the Spaniard. Science looks to perpetual change. It turns to the past to gather warning, as well as instruction, for the future. Its province is to remove old abuses, to explode old errors, to unfold new truths. Its condition, in short, is that of progress. But in Spain, everything not only looked to the past, but rested on the past. Old abuses gathered respect from their antiquity. Reform was innovation, and innovation was a crime. Far from progress, all was stationary. The hand of the Inquisition drew the line which said, "No further!" This was the limit of human intelligence in Spain.

The effect was visible in every department of science,—not in the speculative alone, but in the physical and the practical; in the declamatory rant of its theology and ethics, in the childish and chimerical schemes of its political economists. In every walk were to be seen the symptoms of premature decrepitude, as the nation clung to the antiquated systems which the march of civilization in other countries had long since effaced. Hence those frantic experiments, so often repeated, in the financial administration of the kingdom, which made Spain the byword of the nations, and which ended in the ruin of trade, the prostration of credit, and finally the bankruptcy of the state.—But we willingly turn from this sad picture of the destinies of the country to a more cheerful scene in the history of Philip.

CHAPTER XIII.

PHILIP'S THIRD MARRIAGE. 1560.

So soon as Philip should be settled in Spain, it had been arranged that his young bride, Elizabeth of France, should cross the Pyrenees. Early in January, 1560, Elizabeth,—or Isabella, to use the corresponding name by which she was known to the Spaniards,—under the protection of the Cardinal de Bourbon and some of the French nobility, reached the borders of Navarre, where she was met by the duke of Infantado, who was to take charge of the princess, and escort her to Castile.

Iñigo Lopez de Mendoza, fourth duke of Infantado, was the head of the most illustrious house in Castile. He was at this time near seventy years of age, having passed most of his life in attendance at court, where he had always occupied the position suited to his high birth and his extensive property, which, as his title intimated, lay chiefly in the north. He was a fine specimen of the old Castilian hidalgo, and displayed a magnificence in his way of living that became his station. He was well educated, for the time; and his fondness for books did not prevent his excelling in all knightly exercises. He was said to have the best library and the best stud of any gentleman in Castile.

He appeared on this occasion in great state, accompanied by his household and his kinsmen, the heads of the noblest families in Spain. The duke was attended by some fifty pages, who, in their rich dresses of satin and brocade, displayed the gay colors of the house of Mendoza. The nobles in his train, all suitably mounted, were followed by twenty-five hundred gentlemen, well equipped, like themselves. So lavish were the Castilians of that day in the caparisons of their horses, that some of these are estimated, without taking into account the jewels with which they were garnished, to have cost no less than two thousand ducats! The same taste is visible at this day in their descendants, especially in South America and Mexico, where the love of barbaric ornament in the housings and caparisons of their steeds is conspicuous among all classes of the people.

Several days were spent in settling the etiquette to be observed before the presentation of the duke and his followers to the princess,—a perilous matter with the Spanish hidalgo. When at length the interview took place, the cardinal of Burgos, the duke's brother, opened it by a formal and rather long address to Isabella, who replied in a tone of easy gaiety, which, though not undignified, savored much more of the manners of her own country than those of Spain. The place of meeting was at Roncesvalles,—a name which to the reader of romance may call up scenes very different from those presented by the two nations now met together in kindly courtesy.

From Roncesvalles the princess proceeded, under the strong escort of the duke, to his town of Guadalajara in New Castile, where her marriage with King Philip was to be solemnized. Great preparations were made by the loyal citizens for celebrating the event in a manner honorable to their own master and their future queen. A huge mound, or what might be called a hill, was raised at the entrance of the town, where a grove of natural oaks had been transplanted, amongst which was to be seen abundance of game. Isabella was received by the magistrates of the place, and escorted through the principal streets by a brilliant cavalcade, composed of the great nobility of the court. She was dressed in ermine, and rode a milk-white palfrey, which she managed with an easy grace that delighted the multitude. On one side of her rode the duke of Infantado, and on the other the cardinal of Burgos. After performing her devotions at the church, where Te Deum was chanted, she proceeded to the ducal palace, in which the marriage ceremony was to be performed. On her entering the court, the princess Joanna came down to receive her sister-in-law, and, after an affectionate salutation, conducted her to the saloon, where Philip, attended by his son, was awaiting his bride.

It was the first time that Isabella had seen her destined lord. She now gazed on him so intently, that he good-humoredly asked her "if she were looking to see if he had any gray hairs in his head?" The bluntness of the question somewhat disconcerted her. Philip's age was not much less than that at which the first gray hairs made their appearance on his father's temples. Yet the discrepancy between the ages of the parties in the present instance was not greater than often happens in a royal union. Isabella was in her fifteenth year, and Philip in his thirty-fourth.

From all accounts, the lady's youth was her least recommendation. "Elizabeth de Valois," says Brantôme, who know her well, "was a true daughter of France,—discreet, witty, beautiful, and good, if ever woman was so." She was well made, and tall of stature, and on this account the more admired in Spain, where the women are rarely above the middle height. Her eyes were dark, and her luxuriant tresses, of the same dark color, shaded features that were delicately fair. There was sweetness mingled with dignity in her deportment, in which Castilian stateliness seemed to be happily tempered by the vivacity of her own nation. "So attractive was she," continues the gallant old courtier, "that no cavalier durst look on her long, for fear of losing his heart, which in that jealous court might have proved the loss of his life."

Some of the chroniclers notice a shade of melancholy as visible on Isabella's features, which they refer to the comparison the young bride was naturally led to make between her own lord and his son, the prince of Asturias, for whom her hand had been originally intended. But the daughter of Catherine de Medicis, they are careful to add, had been too well trained, from her cradle, not to know how to disguise her feelings. Don Carlos had one advantage over his father, in his youth; though, in this respect, since he was but a boy of fourteen, he might be thought to fall as much too short of the suitable age as the king exceeded it. It is also intimated by the same gossiping writers, that from this hour of their meeting, touched by the charms of his step-mother, the prince nourished a secret feeling of resentment against his father, who had thus come between him and his beautiful betrothed. It is this light gossip of the chroniclers that has furnished the romancers of later ages with the flimsy materials for that web of fiction, which displays in such glowing colors the loves of Carlos and Isabella. I shall have occasion to return to this subject when treating of the fate of this unhappy prince.

When the nuptials were concluded, the good people of Guadalajara testified their loyalty by all kinds of festivities in honor of the event,—by fireworks, music, and dancing. The fountains flowed with generous liquor. Tables were spread in the public squares, laden with good cheer, and freely open to all. In the evening, the regidores of the town, to the number of fifty or more, presented themselves before the king and queen. They were dressed in their gaudy liveries of crimson and yellow velvet, and each one of these functionaries bore a napkin on his arm, while he carried a plate of sweetmeats, which he presented to the royal pair and the ladies of the court. The following morning Philip and his consort left the hospitable walls of Guadalajara, and set out with their whole suite for Toledo. At parting, the duke of Infantado made the queen and her ladies presents of jewels, lace, and other rich articles of dress; and the sovereigns took leave of their noble host, well pleased with the princely entertainment he had given them.

At Toledo preparations were made for the reception of Philip and Isabella in a style worthy of the renown of that ancient capital of the Visigoths. In the broad vega before the city, three thousand of the old Spanish infantry engaged in a mock encounter with a body of Moorish cavalry, having their uniforms and caparisons fancifully trimmed and ornamented in the Arabesque fashion. Then followed various national dances by beautiful maidens of Toledo, dances of the Gypsies, and the old Spanish "war-dance of the swords."

On entering the gates, the royal pair were welcomed by the municipality of the city, who supported a canopy of cloth of gold over the heads of the king and queen, emblazoned with their ciphers. A procession was formed, consisting of the principal magistrates, the members of the military orders, the officers of the Inquisition,—for Toledo was one of the principal stations of the secret tribunal,—and, lastly, the chief nobles of the court. In the cavalcade might be discerned the iron form of the duke of Alva, and his more courtly rival, Ruy Gomez de Silva, count of Melito,—the two nobles highest in the royal confidence. Triumphal arches, ornamented with quaint devices and emblematical figures from ancient mythology, were thrown across the streets, which were filled with shouting multitudes. Gay wreaths of flowers and flaunting streamers adorned the verandas and balconies, which were crowded with spectators of both sexes in their holiday attire, making a display of gaudy colors that reminds an old chronicler of the richly tinted tapestries and carpetings of Flanders. In this royal state, the new-married pair moved along the streets towards the great cathedral; and after paying their devotions at its venerable shrine, they repaired to the alcazar,—the palace-fortress of Toledo.

For some weeks, during which the sovereigns remained in the capital, there was a general jubilee. All the national games of Spain were exhibited to the young queen; the bull-fight, the Moorish sport of the cañas, or tilt of reeds, and tournaments on horseback and on foot, in both of which Philip often showed himself armed cap-à-pie in the lists, and did his devoir in the presence of his fair bride, as became a loyal knight. Another show, which might have been better reserved for a less joyous occasion, was exhibited to Isabella. As the court and the cortes were drawn together in Toledo, the Holy Office took the occasion to celebrate an auto da fé, which, from the number of the victims and quality of the spectators, was the most imposing spectacle of the kind ever witnessed in that capital.

No country in Europe has so distinct an individuality as Spain; shown not merely in the character of the inhabitants, but in the smallest details of life,—in their national games, their dress, their social usages. The tenacity with which the people have clung to these amidst all the changes of dynasties and laws is truly admirable. Separated by their mountain barrier from the central and eastern parts of Europe, and during the greater part of their existence brought into contact with Oriental forms of civilization, the Spaniards have been but little exposed to those influences which have given a homogeneous complexion to the other nations of Christendom. The system under which they have been trained is too peculiar to be much affected by these influences, and the ideas transmitted from their ancestors are too deeply settled in their minds to be easily disturbed. The present in Spain is but the mirror of the past, in other countries fashions become antiquated, old errors exploded, early tastes reformed. Not so in the Peninsula. The traveler has only to cross the Pyrenees to find himself a contemporary of the sixteenth century.

The festivities of the court were suddenly terminated by the illness of Isabella, who was attacked by the small-pox. Her life was in no danger; but great fears were entertained lest the envious disease should prove fatal to her beauty. Her mother, Catherine de Medicis, had great apprehensions on this point; and couriers crossed the Pyrenees frequently, during the queen's illness, bringing prescriptions—some of them rather extraordinary—from the French doctors for preventing the ravages of the disorder. Whether it was by reason of these nostrums, or her own excellent constitution, the queen was fortunate enough to escape from the sick-room without a scar.

Philip seems to have had much reason to be contented not only with the person, but the disposition, of his wife. As her marriage had formed one of the articles in the treaty with France, she was called by the Spaniards Isabel de la Paz,—"Isabella of the Peace." Her own countrymen no less fondly styled her "the Olive-Branch of Peace,"—intimating the sweetness of her disposition. In this respect she may be thought to have formed a contrast to Philip's former wife, Mary of England; at least after sickness and misfortune had done their work upon that queen's temper, in the latter part of her life.

If Isabella was not a scholar, like Mary, she at least was well instructed for the time, and was fond of reading, especially poetry. She had a ready apprehension, and learned in a short time to speak the Castilian with tolerable fluency, while there was something pleasing in her foreign accent, that made her pronunciation the more interesting. She accommodated herself so well to the usages of her adopted nation, that she soon won the hearts of the Spaniards. "No queen of Castile," says the loyal Brantôme, "with due deference to Isabella the Catholic, was ever so popular in the country." When she went abroad, it was usually with her face uncovered, after the manner of her countrywomen. The press was always great around her whenever she appeared in public, and happy was the man who could approach so near as to get a glimpse of her beautiful countenance.

Yet Isabella never forgot the land of her birth; and such of her countrymen as visited the Castilian court were received by her with distinguished courtesy. She brought along with her in her train to Castile several French ladies of rank, as her maids of honor. But a rivalry soon grew up between them and the Spanish ladies in the palace, which compelled the queen, after she had in vain attempted to reconcile the parties, to send back most of her own countrywomen. In doing so, she was careful to provide them with generous marriage portions.

The queen maintained great state in her household, as was Philip's wish, who seems to have lavished on his lovely consort those attentions for which the unfortunate Mary Tudor had pined in vain. Besides a rare display of jewels, Isabella's wardrobe was exceedingly rich. Few of her robes cost less than three or four hundred crowns each,—a great sum for the time. Like her namesake and contemporary, Elizabeth of England, she rarely wore the same dress twice. But she gave away the discarded suit to her attendants, unlike in this to the English queen, who hoarded up her wardrobe so carefully, that at her death it must have displayed every fashion of her reign. Brantôme, who, both as a Frenchman and as one who had seen the queen often in the court of Castile, may be considered a judge in the matter, dwells with rapture on the elegance of her costume, the matchless taste in its arrangement, and the perfection of her coiffure.

A manuscript of the time, by an eye-witness, gives a few particulars respecting her manner of living, in which some readers may take an interest. Among the persons connected with the queen's establishment, the writer mentions her confessor, her almoner, and four physicians. The medical art seems to have been always held in high repute in Spain, though in no country, considering the empirical character of its professors, with so little reason. At dinner the queen was usually attended by some thirty of her ladies. Two of them, singularly enough as it may seem to us, performed the office of carvers. Another served as cupbearer, and stood by her majesty's chair. The rest of her attendants stood round the apartment, conversing with their gallants, who, in a style to which she had not been used in the French courts, kept their heads covered during the repast. "They were there," they said, "not to wait on the queen, but her ladies." After her solitary meal was over, Isabella retired with her attendants to her chamber, where, with the aid of music, and such mirth as the buffoons and jesters of the palace could afford, she made shift to pass the evening.

Such is the portrait which her contemporaries have left us of Elizabeth of France; and such the accounts of her popularity with the nation, and the state maintained in her establishment. Well might Brantôme sadly exclaim, "Alas! what did it all avail?" A few brief years only were to pass away before this spoiled child of fortune, the delight of the monarch, the ornament and pride of the court, was to exchange the pomps and glories of her royal state for the dark chambers of the Escorial.

From Toledo the court proceeded to Valladolid, long the favorite residence of the Castilian princes, though not the acknowledged capital of the country. Indeed there was no city, since the time of the Visigoths, that could positively claim that preëminence. This honor was reserved for Madrid, which became the established residence of the court under Philip, who in this but carried out the ideas of his father, Charles the Fifth.

The emperor had passed much time in this place, where, strange to say, the chief recommendation to him seems to have been the climate. Situated on a broad expanse of table-land, at an elevation of twenty-four hundred feet above the level of the sea, the brisk and rarefied atmosphere of Madrid proved favorable to Charles's health. It preserved him, in particular, from attacks of the fever and ague, which racked his constitution almost as much as the gout. In the ancient alcazar of the Moors he found a stately residence, which he made commodious by various alterations. Philip extended these improvements. He added new apartments, and spent much money in enlarging and embellishing the old ones. The ceilings were gilded and richly carved. The walls were hung with tapestries, and the saloons and galleries decorated with sculpture and with paintings,—many of them the productions of native artists, the first disciples of a school which was one day to rival the great masters of Italy. Extensive grounds were also laid out around the palace, and a park was formed, which in time came to be covered with a growth of noble trees, and well stocked with game. The alcazar, thus improved, became a fitting residence for the sovereign of Spain. Indeed, if we may trust the magnificent vaunt of a contemporary, it was "allowed by foreigners to be the rarest thing of the kind possessed by any monarch in Christendom." It continued to be the abode of the Spanish princes until, in 1734, in the reign of Philip the Fifth, the building was destroyed by a fire, which lasted nearly a week. But it rose like a phoenix from its ashes; and a new palace was raised on the site of the old one, of still larger dimensions, presenting in the beauty of its materials as well as of its execution one of the noblest monuments of the architecture of the eighteenth century.

Having completed his arrangements, Philip established his residence at Madrid in 1563. The town then contained about twelve thousand inhabitants. Under the forcing atmosphere of a court, the population rose by the end of his long reign to three hundred thousand,—a number which it has probably not since exceeded. The accommodations in the capital kept pace with the increase of population. Everything was built for duration. Instead of flimsy houses that might serve for a temporary residence, the streets were lined with strong and substantial edifices. Under the royal patronage public works on a liberal scale were executed. Madrid was ornamented with bridges, aqueducts, hospitals, the Museum, the Armory,—stately structures which even now challenge our admiration, not less by the excellence of their designs than by the richness of their collections and the enlightened taste which they infer at this early period.

In the opinion of its inhabitants, indeed we may say of the nation, Madrid surpassed, not only every other city in the country, but in Christendom. "There is but one Madrid," says the Spanish proverb. "When Madrid is the theme, the world listens in silence!" In a similar key, the old Castilian writers celebrate the glories of their capital,—the nursery of wit, genius, and gallantry,—and expatiate on the temperature of a climate propitious alike to the beauty of the women and the bravery of the men.

Yet, with all this lofty panegyric, the foreigner is apt to see things through a very different medium from that through which they are seen by the patriotic eye of the native. The traveler to Madrid finds little to praise in a situation where the keen winds from the mountains come laden with disease, and where the subtle atmosphere, to use one of the national proverbs, that can hardly put out a candle, will extinguish the life of a man; where the capital, insulated in the midst of a dreary expanse of desert, seems to be cut off from sympathy, if not from intercourse, with the provinces; and where, instead of a great river that might open to it a commerce with distant quarters of the globe, it is washed only by a stream,—"the far-famed Manzanares,"—the bed of which in summer is a barren watercourse. The traveler may well doubt whether the fanciful advantage, so much vaunted, of being the center of Spain, is sufficient to compensate the manifold evils of such a position, and even whether those are far from truth who find in this position one of the many causes of the decline of the national prosperity.

A full experience of the inconveniences of the site of the capital led Charles the Third to contemplate its removal to Seville. But it was too late. Madrid had been too long, in the Castilian boast, "the only court in the world,"—the focus to which converged talent, fashion, and wealth from all quarters of the country. Too many patriotic associations had gathered round it to warrant its desertion; and, in spite of its local disadvantages, the capital planted by Philip the Second continued to remain, as it will probably ever remain, the capital of the Spanish monarchy.

CHAPTER XIV.

DISCONTENT IN THE NETHERLANDS.

The middle of the sixteenth century presented one of those crises which have occurred at long intervals in the history of Europe, when the course of events has had a permanent influence on the destiny of nations. Scarcely forty years had elapsed since Luther had thrown down the gauntlet to the Vatican, by publicly burning the papal bull at Wittenberg. Since that time, his doctrines had been received in Denmark and Sweden. In England, after a state of vacillation for three reigns, Protestantism, in the peculiar form which it still wears, was become the established religion of the state. The fiery cross had gone round over the hills and valleys of Scotland, and thousands and tens of thousands had gathered to hear the word of life from the lips of Knox. The doctrines of Luther were spread over the northern parts of Germany, and freedom of worship was finally guarantied there, by the treaty of Passau. The Low Countries were the "debatable land," on which the various sects of Reformers, the Lutheran, the Calvinist, the English Protestant, contended for mastery with the established church. Calvinism was embraced by some of the cantons of Switzerland, and at Geneva its great apostle had fixed his head-quarters. His doctrines were widely circulated through France, till the divided nation was preparing to plunge into that worst of all wars, in which the hand of brother is raised against brother. The cry of reform had even passed the Alps, and was heard under the walls of the Vatican. It had crossed the Pyrenees. The king of Navarre declared himself a Protestant; and the spirit of the Reformation had secretly insinuated itself into Spain, and taken hold, as we have seen, of the middle and southern provinces of the kingdom.

A contemporary of the period, who reflected on the onward march of the new religion over every obstacle in its path, who had seen it gather under its banners states and nations once the most loyal and potent vassals of Rome, would have had little reason to doubt that, before the end of the century, the Reform would have extended its sway over the whole of Christendom. Fortunately for Catholicism, the most powerful empire in Europe was in the hands of a prince who was devoted with his whole soul to the interests of the Church. Philip the Second understood the importance of his position. His whole life proves that he felt it to be his especial mission to employ his great resources to restore the tottering fortunes of Catholicism, and stay the progress of the torrent which was sweeping away every landmark of the primitive faith.

We have seen the manner in which he crushed the efforts of the Protestants in Spain. This was the first severe blow struck at the Reformation. Its consequences cannot well be exaggerated; not the immediate results, which would have been little without the subsequent reforms and increased activity of the Church of Rome itself. But the moral influence of such a blow, when the minds of men had been depressed by a long series of reverses, is not to be estimated. In view of this, one of the most eminent Roman Catholic writers does not hesitate to remark, that "the power and abilities of Philip the Second afforded a counterpoise to the Protestant cause, which prevented it from making itself master of Europe." The blow was struck; and from this period little beyond its present conquests was to be gained for the cause of the Reformation.

It was not to be expected that Philip, after having exterminated heresy in one part of his dominions, should tolerate its existence in any other, least of all, in a country so important as the Netherlands. Yet a little reflection might have satisfied him that the same system of measures could hardly be applied with a prospect of success to two countries so differently situated as Spain and the Netherlands. The Romish faith may be said to have entered into the being of the Spaniard. It was not merely cherished as a form of religion, but as a principle of honor. It was part of the national history. For eight centuries the Spaniard had been fighting at home the battles of the Church. Nearly every inch of soil in his own country was won by arms from the infidel. His wars, as I have more than once had occasion to remark, were all wars of religion. He carried the same spirit across the waters. There he was still fighting the infidel. His life was one long crusade. How could this champion of the Church desert her in her utmost need?

With this predisposition, it was easy for Philip to enforce obedience in a people naturally the most loyal to their princes, to whom, moreover, since the fatal war of the Comunidades, they had been accustomed to pay an almost Oriental submission. Intrenched behind the wall of the Pyrenees, Spain, we must bear in mind, felt little of the great shock which was convulsing France and the other states of Europe; and with the aid of so formidable an engine as the Inquisition, it was easy to exterminate, before they could take root, such seeds of heresy as had been borne by the storm across the mountains.

The Netherlands, on the other hand, lay like a valley among the hills, which drinks in all the waters of the surrounding country. They were a common reservoir for the various opinions which agitated the nations on their borders. On the south were the Lutherans of Germany. The French Huguenots pressed them on the west; and by the ocean they held communication with England and the nations of the Baltic. The soldier quartered on their territory, the seaman who visited their shores, the trader who trafficked in their towns, brought with them different forms of the new religion. Books from France and from Germany circulated widely among a people, nearly all of whom, as we have seen, were able to read.

The new doctrines were discussed by men accustomed to think and act for themselves. Freedom of speculation on religious topics soon extended to political. It was the natural tendency of reform. The same spirit of free inquiry which attacked the foundations of unity of faith, stood ready next to assail those of unity of government; and men began boldly to criticize the rights of kings and the duties of subjects.

The spirit of independence was fostered by the institutions of the country. The provinces of the Netherlands, if not republican in form, were filled with the spirit of republics. In many of their features they call to mind the free states of Italy in the Middle Ages. Under the petty princes who ruled over them in early days, they had obtained charters, as we have seen, which secured a certain degree of constitutional freedom. The province of Brabant, above all, gloried in its "Joyeuse Entrée," which guarantied privileges and immunities of a more liberal character than those possessed by the other states of the Netherlands. When the provinces passed at length under the scepter of a single sovereign, he lived at a distance, and the government was committed to a viceroy. Since their connection with Spain, the administration had been for the most part in the hands of a woman; and the delegated authority of a woman pressed but lightly on the independent temper of the Flemings.

Yet Charles the Fifth, as we have seen, partial as he was to his countrymen in the Netherlands, could ill brook their audacious spirit, and made vigorous efforts to repress it. But his zeal for the spiritual welfare of his people never led him to overlook their material interests. He had no design by his punishments to cripple their strength, much less to urge them to extremity. When the regent, Mary of Hungary, his sister, warned him that his laws bore too heavily on the people to be endured, he was careful to mitigate their severity. His edicts in the name of religion were, indeed, written in blood. But the frequency of their repetition shows, as already remarked, the imperfect manner in which they were executed. This was still further proved by the prosperous condition of the people, the flourishing aspect of the various branches of industry, and the great enterprises to facilitate commercial intercourse and foster the activity of the country. At the close of Charles's reign, or rather at the commencement of his successor's, in 1560, was completed the grand canal extending from Antwerp to Brussels, the construction of which had consumed thirty years, and one million eight hundred thousand florins. Such a work, at such a period,—the fruit, not of royal patronage, but of the public spirit of the citizens,—is evidence both of large resources and of wisdom in the direction of them. In this state of things, it is not surprising that the Flemings, feeling their own strength, should have assumed a free and independent tone little grateful to the ear of a sovereign. So far had this spirit of liberty or license, as it was termed, increased, in the latter part of the emperor's reign, that the Regent Mary, when her brother abdicated, chose also to resign, declaring, in a letter to him, that "she would not continue to live with, much less to reign over, a people whose manners had undergone such a change,—in whom respect for God and man seemed no longer to exist."

A philosopher who should have contemplated at that day the condition of the country, and the civilization at which it had arrived, might feel satisfied that a system of toleration in religious matters would be the one best suited to the genius of the people and the character of their institutions. But Philip was no philosopher; and toleration was a virtue not understood, at that time, by Calvinist any more than by Catholic. The question, therefore, is not whether the end he proposed was the best one;—on this, few at the present day will differ;—but whether Philip took the best means for effecting that end. This is the point of view from which his conduct in the Netherlands should be criticized.

Here, in the outset, he seems to have fallen into a capital error, by committing so large a share in the government to the hands of a foreigner,—Granvelle. The country was filled with nobles, some of them men of the highest birth, whose ancestors were associated with the most stirring national recollections, and who were endeared, moreover, to their countrymen by their own services. To several of these Philip himself was under no slight obligations for the aid they had afforded him in the late war,—on the fields of Gravelines and St. Quentin, and in the negotiation of the treaty which closed his hostilities with France. It was hardly to be expected that these proud nobles, conscious of their superior claims, and accustomed to so much authority and deference in their own land, would tamely submit to the control of a stranger, a man of obscure family, like his father indebted for his elevation to the royal favor.

Besides these great lords, there was a numerous aristocracy, inferior nobles and cavaliers, many of whom had served under the standard of Charles in his long wars. They there formed those formidable companies of ordonnance, whose fame perhaps stood higher than that of any other corps of the imperial cavalry. The situation of these men, now disbanded, and, with their roving military habits, hanging loosely on the country, has been compared by a modern author to that which, on the accession of the Bourbons, was occupied by the soldiers whom Napoleon had so often led to victory. To add to their restlessness, many of these, as well as of the higher nobility, were embarrassed by debts contracted in their campaigns, or by too ambitious expenditure at home, especially in rivalry with the ostentatious Spaniard. "The Flemish nobles," says a writer of the time, "were too many of them oppressed by heavy debts and the payment of exorbitant interest. They spent twice as much as they were worth on their palaces, furniture, troops of retainers, costly liveries, their banquets and sumptuous entertainments of every description,—in fine, in every form of luxury and superfluity that could be devised. Thus discontent became prevalent through the country, and men anxiously looked forward to some change."

Still another element of discontent, and one that extended to all classes, was antipathy to the Spaniards. It had not been easy to repress this even under the rule of Charles the Fifth, who had shown such manifest preference for his Flemish subjects. But now it was more decidedly called out, under a monarch, whose sympathies lay altogether on the side of their rivals. No doubt this popular sentiment is to be explained partly by the contrast afforded by the characters of the two nations, so great as hardly to afford a point of contact between them. But it may be fairly charged, to a great extent, on the Spaniards themselves, who, while they displayed many noble and magnanimous traits at home, seemed desirous to exhibit only the repulsive side of their character to the eye of the stranger. Cold and impenetrable, assuming an arrogant tone of superiority over every other nation, in whatever land it was their destiny to be cast, England, Italy, or the Netherlands, as allies or as enemies, we find the Spaniards of that day equally detested. Brought with them, as the people of the Netherlands were, under a common sceptre, a spirit of comparison and rivalry grew up, which induced a thousand causes of irritation.

The difficulty was still further increased by the condition of the neighboring countries, where the minds of the inhabitants were now in the highest state of fermentation in matters of religion. In short, the atmosphere seemed everywhere to be in that highly electrified condition which bodes the coming tempest. In this critical state of things, it was clear that it was only by a most careful and considerate policy that harmony could be maintained in the Netherlands; a policy manifesting alike tenderness for the feelings of the nation and respect for its institutions.

Having thus shown the general aspect of things when the duchess of Parma entered on her regency, towards the close of 1559, it is time to go forward with the narrative of the prominent events which led to the War of the Revolution.

We have already seen that Philip, on leaving the country, lodged the administration nominally in three councils, although in truth it was on the council of state that the weight of government actually rested. Even here the nobles who composed it were of little account in matters of real importance, which were reserved for a consulta, consisting, besides the regent, of Granvelle, Count Barlaimont, and the learned jurist Viglius. As the last two were altogether devoted to Granvelle, and the regent was instructed to defer greatly to his judgment, the government of the Netherlands may be said to have been virtually deposited in the hands of the bishop of Arras.

At the head of the Flemish nobles in the council of state, and indeed in the country, taking into view their rank, fortune, and public services, stood Count Egmont and the prince of Orange. I have already given some account of the former, and the reader has seen the important part which he took in the great victories of Gravelines and St. Quentin. To the prince of Orange Philip had also been indebted for his counsel in conducting the war, and still more for the aid which he had afforded in the negotiations for peace. It will be proper, before going further, to give the reader some particulars of this celebrated man, the great leader in the war of the Netherlands.

WILLIAM OF ORANGE

William, prince of Orange, was born at Dillenburg, in the German duchy of Nassau, on the twenty-fifth of April, 1533. He was descended from a house, one of whose branches had given an emperor to Germany; and William's own ancestors were distinguished by the employments they had held, and the services they had rendered, both in Germany and the Low Countries. It was a proud vaunt of his, that Philip was under larger obligations to him than he to Philip; and that, but for the house of Nassau, the king of Spain would not be able to write as many titles as he now did after his name.

When eleven years old, by the death of his cousin René he came into possession of a large domain in Holland, and a still larger property in Brabant, where he held the title of Lord of Breda. To these was added, the splendid inheritance of Châlons, and of the principality of Orange; which, however, situated at a distance, in the heart of France, might seem to be held by a somewhat precarious tenure.

William's parents were both Lutherans, and in their faith he was educated. But Charles saw with displeasure the false direction thus given to one who at a future day was to occupy so distinguished a position among his Flemish vassals. With the consent of his parents, the child, in his twelfth year, was removed to Brussels, to be brought up in the family of the emperor's sister, the Regent Mary of Hungary. However their consent to this step may be explained, it certainly seems that their zeal for the spiritual welfare of their son was not such as to stand in the way of his temporal. In the family of the regent the youth was bred a Catholic, while in all respects he received an education suited to his rank. It is an interesting fact, that his preceptor was a younger brother of Granvelle,—the man with whom William was afterwards to be placed in an attitude of such bitter hostility.

  When fifteen years of age, the prince was taken into the imperial household, and became the page of Charles the Fifth. The emperor was not slow in discerning the extraordinary qualities of the youth; and he showed it by entrusting him, as he grew older, with various important commissions. He was accompanied by the prince on his military expeditions, and Charles gave a remarkable proof of his confidence in his capacity, by raising him, at the age of twenty-two, over the heads of veteran officers, and giving him the command of the imperial forces engaged in the siege of Marienburg. During the six months that William was in command, they were still occupied with this siege, and with the construction of a fortress for the protection of Flanders. There was little room for military display. But the troops were in want of food and of money, and their young commander's conduct under these embarrassments was such as to vindicate the wisdom of his appointment. Charles afterwards employed him on several diplomatic missions,—a more congenial field for the exercise of his talents, which appear to have been better suited to civil than to military affairs.

The emperor's regard for the prince seems to have increased with his years, and he gave public proof of it, in the last hour of his reign, by leaning on William's shoulder at the time of his abdication, when he made his parting address to the states of the Netherlands. He showed this still further by selecting him for the honorable mission of bearing the imperial crown to Ferdinand.

On his abdication, Charles earnestly commended William to his successor. Philip profited by his services in the beginning of his reign, when the prince of Orange, who had followed him in the French war, was made one of the four plenipotentiaries for negotiating the treaty of Cateau-Cambresis, for the execution of which he remained as one of the hostages in France.

While at the court of Henry the Second, it will be remembered, the prince became acquainted with the secret designs of the French and Spanish monarchs against the Protestants in their dominions; and he resolved, from that hour, to devote all his strength to expel the "Spanish vermin" from the Netherlands. One must not infer from this, however, that William, at this early period, meditated the design of shaking off the rule of Spain altogether. The object he had in view went no further than to relieve the country from the odious presence of the Spanish troops, and to place the administration in those hands to which it rightfully belonged. They, however, who set a revolution in motion have not always the power to stop it. If they can succeed in giving it a direction, they will probably be carried forward by it beyond their intended limits, until, gathering confidence with success, they aim at an end far higher than that which they had originally proposed. Such, doubtless, was the case with William of Orange.

Notwithstanding the emperor's recommendation, the prince of Orange was not the man whom Philip selected for his confidence. Nor was it possible for William to regard the king with the same feelings which he had entertained for the emperor. To Charles the prince was under obvious obligations for his nurture in early life. His national pride, too, was not wounded by having a Spaniard for his sovereign, since Charles was not by birth, much less in heart, a Spaniard. All this was reversed in Philip, in whom William saw only the representative of a detested race. The prudent reserve which marked the character of each, no doubt, prevented the outward demonstration of their sentiments; but from their actions we may readily infer the instinctive aversion which the two parties entertained for each other.

At the early age of eighteen, William married Anne of Egmont, daughter of the count of Büren. The connection was a happy one, if we may trust the loving tone of their correspondence. Unhappily, in a few years their union was dissolved by the lady's death. The prince did not long remain a widower, before he made proposals to the daughter of the duchess of Lorraine. The prospect of such a match gave great dissatisfaction to Philip, who had no mind to see his Flemish vassal allied with the family of a great feudatory of France. Disappointed in this quarter, William next paid his addresses to Anne of Saxony, an heiress, whose large possessions made her one of the most brilliant matches in Germany. William's passion and his interest, it was remarked, kept time well together.

The course of love, however, was not destined to run smoothly on the present occasion. Anne was the daughter of Maurice, the great Lutheran champion, the implacable enemy of Charles the Fifth. Left early an orphan, she had been reared in the family of her uncle, the elector of Saxony, in the strictest tenets of the Lutheran faith. Such a connection was, of course, every way distasteful to Philip, to whom William was willing so far to defer as to solicit his approbation, though he did not mean to be controlled by it. The correspondence on the subject, in which both the regent and Granvelle took an active part, occupies as much space in collections of the period as more important negotiations. The prince endeavored to silence the king's scruples, by declaring that he was too much a Catholic at heart to marry any woman who was not of the same persuasion as himself; and that he had received assurances from the elector that his wife in this respect should entirely conform to his wishes. The elector had scruples as to the match, no less than Philip, though on precisely the opposite grounds; and, after the prince's assurance to the king, one is surprised to find that an understanding must have existed with the elector that Anne should be allowed the undisturbed enjoyment of her own religion. This double dealing leaves a disagreeable impression in regard to William's character. Yet it does not seem, to judge from his later life, to be altogether inconsistent with it. Machiavelli is the author whom he is said to have had most frequently in his hand; and in the policy with which he shaped his course, we may sometimes fancy that we can discern the influence of the Italian statesman.

The marriage was celebrated with great pomp at Leipsic, on the twenty-fifth of August, 1561. The king of Denmark, several of the electors, and many princes and nobles of both Germany and the Low Countries, were invited guests; and the whole assembly present on the occasion was estimated at nearly six thousand persons. The king of Spain complimented the bride by sending her a jewel worth three thousand ducats. It proved, however, as Granvelle had predicted, an ill-assorted union. After living together for nearly thirteen years, the prince, weary of the irregularities of his wife, separated from her, and sent her back to her friends in Germany.

During his residence in Brussels, William easily fell into the way of life followed by the Flemish nobles. He was very fond of the healthy exercise of the chase, and especially of hawking. He was social, indeed convivial, in his habits, after the fashion of his countrymen; and was addicted to gallantries, which continued long enough, it is said, to suggest an apology for the disorderly conduct of his wife. He occupied the ancient palace of his family at Brussels, where he was surrounded by lords and cavaliers, and a numerous retinue of menials. He lived in great state, displaying a profuse magnificence in his entertainments; and few there were, natives or foreigners, who had any claim on his hospitality, that did not receive it. By this expensive way of life, he encumbered his estate with a heavy debt; amounting, if we may take Granvelle's word, to nine hundred thousand florins. Yet, if William's own account, but one year later, be true, the debt was then brought within a very moderate compass.

With his genial habits and love of pleasure, and with manners the most attractive, he had not the free and open temper which often goes along with them. He was called by his contemporaries "William the Silent." Perhaps the epithet was intended to indicate not so much his taciturnity, as that impenetrable reserve which locked up his secrets closely within his bosom. No man knew better how to keep his counsel, even from those who acted with him. But while masking his own designs, no man was more sagacious in penetrating those of others. He carried on an extensive correspondence in foreign countries, and employed every means for getting information. Thus, while he had it in his power to outwit others, it was very rare that he became their dupe. Though on ordinary occasions frugal of words, when he did speak it was with effect. His eloquence was of the most persuasive kind; and as towards his inferiors he was affable, and exceedingly considerate of their feelings, he acquired an unbounded ascendancy over his countrymen. It must be admitted that the prince of Orange possessed many rare qualities for the leader of a great revolution.

The course William took in respect to his wife's religion might lead one to doubt whether he were at heart Catholic or Protestant; or indeed whether he were not equally indifferent to both persuasions. The latter opinion might be strengthened by a remark imputed to him, that "he would not have his wife trouble herself with such melancholy books as the Scriptures, but instead of them amuse herself with Amadis de Gaul, and other pleasant works of the kind." "The prince of Orange," says a writer of the time, "passed for a Catholic among Catholics, a Lutheran among Lutherans. If he could, he would have had a religion compounded of both. In truth, he looked on the Christian religion like the ceremonies which Numa introduced, as a sort of politic invention." Granvelle, in a letter to Philip, speaks much to the same purpose. These portraits were by unfriendly hands. Those who take a different view of his character, while they admit that in his early days his opinions in matters of faith were unsettled, contend that in time he became sincerely attached to the doctrines which he defended with his sword. This seems to be no more than natural. But the reader will have an opportunity of judging for himself, when he has followed the great chief through the changes of his stormy career.

It would be strange, indeed, if the leader in a religious revolution should have been himself without any religious convictions. One thing is certain, he possessed a spirit of toleration, the more honorable that in that day it was so rare. He condemned the Calvinists as restless and seditious; the Catholics, for their bigoted attachment to a dogma. Persecution in matters of faith he totally condemned, for freedom of judgment in such matters he regarded as the inalienable right of man. These conclusions, at which the world, after an incalculable amount of human suffering, has been three centuries in arriving, (has it altogether arrived at them yet?) must be allowed to reflect great credit on the character of William.

CHAPTER XV.

OPPOSITION TO THE GOVERNMENT. 1559-1562.

The first cause of trouble, after Philip's departure from the Netherlands, arose from the detention of the Spanish troops there. The king had pledged his word, it will be remembered, that they should leave the country by the end of four months, at farthest. Yet that period had long since passed, and no preparations were made for their departure. The indignation of the people rose higher and higher at the insult thus offered by the presence of these detested foreigners. It was a season of peace. No invasion was threatened from abroad; no insurrection existed at home. There was nothing to require the maintenance of an extraordinary force, much less of one composed of foreign troops. It could only be that the king, distrusting his Flemish subjects, designed to overawe them by his mercenaries, in sufficient strength to enforce his arbitrary acts. The free spirit of the Netherlanders was roused by these suggestions, and they boldly demanded the removal of the Spaniards.

Granvelle himself, who would willingly have pleased his master by retaining a force in the country on which he could rely, admitted that the project was impracticable. "The troops must be withdrawn," he wrote, "and that speedily, or the consequence will be an insurrection." The states would not consent, he said, to furnish the necessary subsidies while they remained. The prince of Orange and Count Egmont threw up the commands entrusted to them by the king. They dared no longer hold them, as the minister added, it was so unpopular.

The troops had much increased the difficulty by their own misconduct. They were drawn from the great mass, often the dregs, of the people; and their morals, such as they were, had not been improved in the life of the camp. However strict their discipline in time of active service, it was greatly relaxed in their present state of inaction; and they had full license, as well as leisure, to indulge their mischievous appetites, at the expense of the unfortunate districts in which they were quartered.

Yet Philip was slow in returning an answer to the importunate letters of the regent and the minister; and when he did reply, it was to evade their request, lamenting his want of funds, and declaring his purpose to remove the forces so soon as he could pay their arrears. The public exchequer was undoubtedly at a low ebb; lower in Spain than in the Netherlands. But no one could believe the royal credit so far reduced as not to be able to provide for the arrears of three or four thousand soldiers. The regent, however, saw that, with or without instructions, it was necessary to act. Several of the members of the council became sureties for the payment of the arrears, and the troops were ordered to Zealand, in order to embark for Spain. But the winds proved unfavorable. Two months longer they were detained, on shore or on board the transports. They soon got into brawls with the workmen employed on the dikes; and the inhabitants, still apprehensive of orders from the king countermanding the departure of the Spaniards, resolved, in such an event, to abandon the dikes, and lay the country under water! Fortunately, they were not driven to this extremity. In January, 1561, more than a year after the date assigned by Philip, the nation was relieved of the presence of the intruders.

Philip's conduct in this affair is not very easy to explain. However much he might have desired originally to maintain the troops in the Netherlands, as an armed police on which he could rely to enforce the execution of his orders, it had become clear that the good they might do in quelling an insurrection was more than counterbalanced by the probability of their exciting one. It was characteristic of the king, however, to be slow in retreating from any position he had taken; and, as we shall often have occasion to see, there was a certain apathy or sluggishness in his nature, which led him sometimes to leave events to take their own course, rather than to shape a course for them himself.

This difficulty was no sooner settled, than it was followed by another scarcely less serious. We have seen, in a former chapter, the arrangements made for adding thirteen new bishoprics to the four already existing in the Netherlands. The measure, in itself a good one, and demanded by the situation of the country, was, from the posture of affairs at that time, likely to meet with opposition, if not to occasion great excitement. For this reason, the whole affair had been kept profoundly secret by the government. It was not till 1561 that Philip disclosed his views, in a letter to some of the principal nobles in the council of state. But, long before that time, the project had taken wind, and created a general sensation through the country.

The people looked on it as an attempt to subject them to the same ecclesiastical system which existed in Spain. The bishops, by virtue of their office, were possessed of certain inquisitorial powers, and these were still further enlarged by the provisions of the royal edicts. Philip's attachment to the Inquisition was well understood, and there was probably not a child in the country who had not heard of the auto da fé which he had sanctioned by his presence on his return to his dominions. The present changes were regarded as part of a great scheme for introducing the Spanish Inquisition into the Netherlands. However erroneous these conclusions, there is little reason to doubt they were encouraged by those who knew their fallacy.

The nobles had other reasons for opposing the measure. The bishops would occupy in the legislature the place formerly held by the abbots, who were indebted for their election to the religious houses over which they presided. The new prelates, on the contrary, would receive their nomination from the crown; and the nobles saw with alarm their own independence menaced by the accession of an order of men who would naturally be subservient to the interests of the monarch. That the crown was not insensible to these advantages is evident from a letter of the minister, in which he sneers at the abbots, as "men fit only to rule over monasteries, ever willing to thwart the king, and as perverse as the lowest of the people."

But the greatest opposition arose from the manner in which the new dignitaries were to be maintained. This was to be done by suppressing the offices of the abbots, and by appropriating the revenues of their houses to the maintenance of the bishops. For this economical arrangement Granvelle seems to have been chiefly responsible. Thus the income—amounting to fifty thousand ducats—of the Abbey of Afflighen, one of the wealthiest in Brabant, was to be bestowed on the archiepiscopal see of Mechlin, to be held by the minister himself. In virtue of that dignity, Granvelle would become primate of the Netherlands.

Loud was the clamor excited by this arrangement among the members of the religious fraternities, and all those who directly or indirectly had any interest in them. It was a manifest perversion of the funds from the objects for which they had been given to the institutions. It was interfering with the economy of these institutions, protected by the national charters; and the people of Brabant appealed to the "Joyeuse Entrée." Jurists of the greatest eminence, in different parts of Europe, were consulted as to the legality of these proceedings. Thirty thousand florins were expended by Brabant alone in this matter, as well as in employing an agent at the court of Rome to exhibit the true state of the affair to his holiness, and to counteract the efforts of the Spanish government.

The reader may remember, that, just before Philip's departure from the Netherlands, a bull arrived from Rome authorizing the erection of the new bishoprics. This was but the initiatory step. Many other proceedings were necessary before the consummation of the affair. Owing to impediments thrown in the way by the provinces, and the habitual tardiness of the court of Rome, nearly three years elapsed before the final briefs were expedited by Pius the Fourth. New obstacles were raised by the jealous temper of the Flemings, who regarded the whole matter as a conspiracy of the pope and the king against the liberties of the nation. Utrecht, Gueldres, and three other places, refused to receive their bishops; and they never obtained a footing there. Antwerp, which was to have been made an episcopal see, sent a commission to the king to represent the ruin this would bring on its trade, from the connection supposed to exist between the episcopal establishment and the Spanish Inquisition. For a year the king would not condescend to give any heed to the remonstrance. He finally consented to defer the decision of the question till his arrival in the country; and Antwerp was saved from its bishop.

In another place we find the bishop obtaining an admission through the management of Granvelle, who profited by the temporary absence of the nobles. Nowhere were the new prelates received with enthusiasm, but, on the contrary, wherever they were admitted, it was with a coldness and silence that intimated too plainly the aversion of the inhabitants. Such was the case with the archbishop of Mechlin himself, who made his entry into the capital of his diocese with not a voice to cheer or to welcome him. In fact, everywhere the newly elected prelate seemed more like the thief stealthily climbing into the fold, than the good shepherd who had come to guard it.

Meanwhile the odium of these measures fell on the head of the minister. No other man had been so active in enforcing them, and he had the credit universally with the people of having originated the whole scheme, and proposed it to the sovereign. But from this Philip expressly exonerates him in a letter to the regent, in which he says, that the whole plan had been settled long before it was communicated to Granvelle. Indeed, the latter, with some show of reason, demanded whether, being already one of four bishops in the country, he should be likely to recommend a plan which would make him only one of seventeen. This appeal to self-interest did not wholly satisfy those who thought that it was better to be the first of seventeen, than to be merely one of four where all were equal.

Whatever may have been Granvelle's original way of thinking in the matter, it is certain that, whether it arose from his accommodating temper, or from his perceptions of the advantages of the scheme being quickened by his prospect of the primacy, he soon devoted himself, heart as well as hand, to carry out the royal views. "I am convinced," he writes, in the spring of 1560, to Philip's secretary, Perez, "that no measure could be more advantageous to the country, or more necessary for the support of religion; and if necessary to the success of the scheme, I would willingly devote to it my fortune and my life."

Accordingly we find him using all his strength to carry the project through, devising expedients for raising the episcopal revenues, and thus occupying a position which exposed him to general obloquy. He felt this bitterly, and at times, even with all his constancy, was hardly able to endure it. "Though I say nothing," he writes in the month of September, 1561, to the Spanish ambassador in Rome, "I feel the danger of the situation in which the king has placed me. All the odium of these measures falls on my head; and I only pray that a remedy for the evil may be found, though it should be by the sacrifice of myself. Would to God the erection of these bishoprics had never been thought of!"

In February, 1561, Granvelle received a cardinal's hat from Pope Pius the Fourth. He did not show the alacrity usually manifested in accepting this distinguished honor. He had obtained it by the private intercession of the duchess of Parma; and he feared lest the jealousy of Philip might be alarmed, were it to any other than himself that his minister owed this distinction. But the king gave the proceeding his cordial sanction, declaring to Granvelle that the reward was no higher than his desert.

Thus clothed with the Roman purple, primate of the Netherlands, and first minister of state, Granvelle might now look down on the proudest noble in the land. He stood at the head of both the civil and the ecclesiastical administration of the country. All authority centred in his person. Indeed, such had been the organization of the council of state, that the minister might be said to be not so much the head of the government as the government itself.

The affairs of the council were conducted in the manner prescribed by Philip. Ordinary business passed through the hands of the whole body; but affairs of moment were reserved for the cardinal and his two coadjutors to settle with the regent. On such occasions the other ministers were not even summoned, or, if summoned, such only of the despatches from Spain as the minister chose to communicate were read, and the remainder reserved for the consulta. When, as did sometimes happen, the nobles carried a measure in opposition to Granvelle, he would refer the whole question to the court at Madrid. By this expedient he gained time for the present, and probably obtained a decision in his favor at last. The regent conformed entirely to the cardinal's views. The best possible understanding seems to have subsisted between them, to judge from the tone of their correspondence with Philip, in which each of the parties bestows the most unqualified panegyric on the other. Yet there was a strange reserve in their official intercourse. Even when occupying the same palace, they are said to have communicated with each other by writing. The reason suggested for this singular proceeding is, that it might not appear, from their being much together, that the regent was acting so entirely under the direction of the minister. It is certain that both Margaret and Granvelle had an uncommon passion for letter-writing, as is shown by the length and number of their epistles, particularly to the king. The cardinal especially went into a gossiping minuteness of detail, to which few men in his station would have condescended. But his master, to whom his letters at this period were chiefly addressed, had the virtue of patience in an extraordinary degree, as is evinced by the faithful manner in which he perused these dispatches, and made notes upon them with his own hand.

The minister occupied a palace in Brussels, and had another residence at a short distance from the capital. He maintained great pomp in his establishment, was attended by a large body of retainers, and his equipage and liveries were distinguished by their magnificence. He gave numerous banquets, held large levées, and, in short, assumed a state in his manner of living which corresponded with his station, and did no violence to his natural taste. We may well believe that the great lords of the country, whose ancestors had for centuries filled its highest places, must have chafed as they saw themselves thrown into the shade by one whose fortunes had been thus suddenly forced to this unnatural height by the sunshine of royal favor. Their indignation was heightened by the tricky arrangement, which, while it left them ciphers in the administration, made them responsible to the people for its measures. And if the imputation to Granvelle of arrogance, in the pride of his full-blown fortunes, was warranted, feelings of a personal nature may have mingled with those of general discontent.

But, however they may have felt, the Flemish lords must be allowed not to have been precipitate in the demonstration of their feelings. It is not till 1562 that we observe the cardinal, in his correspondence with Spain, noticing any discourtesy in the nobles, or intimating the existence of any misunderstanding with them. In the spring of the preceding year we find the prince of Orange "commending himself cordially and affectionately to the cardinal's good will;" and subscribing himself, "your very good friend to command." In four months after this, on the twenty-third of July, we have a letter from this "very good friend" and count Egmont, addressed to Philip. In this epistle the writers complain bitterly of their exclusion from all business of importance in the council of state. They were only invited to take part in deliberations of no moment. This was contrary to the assurance of his majesty when they reluctantly accepted office; and it was in obedience to his commands to advise him if this should occur that they now wrote to him. Nevertheless, they should have still continued to bear the indignity in silence, had they not found that they were held responsible by the people for measures in which they had no share.—Considering the arrangement Philip had made for the consulta, one has little reason to commend his candor in this transaction, and not much to praise his policy. As he did not redress the evil, his implied disavowal of being privy to it would hardly go for anything with the injured party. In his answer, Philip thanked the nobles for their zeal in his service, and promised to reply to them more at large on the return of Count Hoorne to Flanders.

There is no reason to suppose that Granvelle was ever acquainted with the fact of the letter having been written by the two lords. The privilege claimed by the novelist, who looks over the shoulders of his heroes and heroines when they are inditing their epistles, is also enjoyed by the historian. With the materials rescued from the moldering archives of the past, he can present the reader with a more perfect view of the motives and opinions of the great actors in the drama three centuries ago, than they possessed in respect to one another. This is particularly true of the period before us, when the correspondence of the parties interested was ample in itself, and, through the care taken of it, in public and private collections, has been well preserved. Such care was seldom bestowed on historical documents of this class before the sixteenth century.

It is not till long—nearly a year—after the date of the preceding letter, that anything appears to intimate the existence of a coldness, much less of an open rupture, between Granvelle and the discontented nobles. Meanwhile, the religious troubles in France had been fast gathering to a head; and the opposite factions ranged themselves under the banners of their respective chiefs, prepared to decide the question by arms. Philip the Second, who stood forth as the champion of Catholicism, not merely in his own dominions, but throughout Christendom, watched with anxiety the struggle going forward in the neighboring kingdom. It had the deeper interest for him, from its influence on the Low Countries. His Italian possessions were separated from France by the Alps; his Spanish, by the Pyrenees. But no such mountain barrier lay between France and Flanders. They were not even separated, in the border provinces, by difference of language. Every shock given to France must necessarily be felt in the remotest corner of the Netherlands. Granvelle was so well aware of this, that he besought the king to keep an eye on his French neighbors, and support them in the maintenance of the Roman Catholic religion. "That they should be maintained in this is quite as important to us as it is to them. Many here," he adds, "would be right glad to see affairs go badly for the Catholics in that kingdom. No noble as yet among us has openly declared himself. Should any one do so, God only could save the country from the fate of France."

Acting on these hints, and conformably to his own views, Philip sent orders to the regent to raise two thousand men, and send them across the borders to support the French Catholics. The orders met with decided resistance in the council of state. The great Flemish lords, at this time, must have affected, if they did not feel, devotion to the established religion. But they well knew there was too large a leaven of heresy in the country to make these orders palatable. They felt no desire, moreover, thus unnecessarily to mix themselves up with the feuds of France. They represented that the troops could not safely be dispensed with in the present state of feeling at home; and that, if they marched against the Protestants of France, the German Protestants might be expected to march against them.

Granvelle, on the other hand, would have enforced the orders of Philip, as essential to the security of the Netherlands themselves. Margaret, thus pressed by the opposite parties, felt the embarrassment of either course. The alternative presented was, that of disobeying the king, or of incurring the resentment, perhaps the resistance, of the nation. Orange and Egmont besought her to convoke the states-general, as the only safe counsellors in such an emergency. The states had often been convened on matters of less moment by the former regent, Mary of Hungary. But the cardinal had no mind to invoke the interference of that "mischievous animal, the people." He had witnessed a convocation of the states previous to the embarkation of Philip; and he had not forgotten the independent tone then assumed by that body. It had been, indeed, the last injunction of the king to his sister, on no account to call a meeting of the national legislature till his return to the country.

But while on this ground Margaret refused to summon the states-general, she called a meeting of the order of the Golden Fleece, to whom she was to apply for counsel on extraordinary occasions. The knights of the order consisted of persons of the highest consideration in the country, including the governors of the provinces. In May, 1562, they assembled at Brussels. Before meeting in public, the prince of Orange invited them to a conference in his own palace. He there laid before them the state of the country, and endeavored to concert with the members some regular system of resistance to the exclusive and arbitrary course of the minister. Although no definite action took place at that time, most of those present would seem to have fallen in with the views of the prince. There were some, however, who took opposite ground, and who declared themselves content with Granvelle, and not disposed to prescribe to their sovereign the choice of his ministers. The foremost of these were the duke of Arschot, a zealous Catholic, and Count Barlaimont, president of the council of finance, and, as we have already seen, altogether devoted to the minister. This nobleman communicated to Margaret the particulars of the meeting in the prince's palace; and the regent was careful to give the knights of the order such incessant occupation during the remainder of their stay in the capital, as to afford the prince of Orange no opportunity of pursuing his scheme of agitation.

Before the assembly of the Golden Fleece had been dissolved, it was decided to send an envoy to the king to lay before him the state of the country, both in regard to the religious excitement, much stimulated in certain quarters by the condition of France, and to the financial embarrassments, which now pressed heavily on the government. The person selected for the office was Florence de Montmorency, lord of Montigny, a cavalier who had the boldness to avow his aversion to any interference with the rights of conscience, and whose sympathies, it will be believed, were not on the side of the minister.

Soon after his departure, the vexed question of aid to France was settled in the council by commuting personal service for money. It was decided to raise a subsidy of fifty thousand crowns, to be remitted at once to the French government.

Montigny reached Spain in June, 1562. He was graciously received by Philip, who, in a protracted audience, gathered from him a circumstantial account of the condition of the Netherlands. In answer to the royal queries, the envoy also exposed the misunderstanding which existed between the minister and the nobles.

But the duchess of Parma did not trust this delicate affair to the representations of Montigny. She wrote herself to her brother, in Italian, which, when she would give her own views on matters of importance, she used instead of French, ordinarily employed by the secretaries. In Italian she expressed herself with the greatest fluency, and her letters in that language, for the purpose of secrecy, were written with her own hand.

The duchess informed the king of the troubles that had arisen with the nobles; charging Orange and Egmont, especially, as the source of them. She accused them of maliciously circulating rumors that the cardinal had advised Philip to invade the country with an armed force, and to cut off the heads of some five or six of the principal malecontents. She paid a high tribute to the minister's loyalty, and his talent for business; and she besought the king to disabuse Montigny in respect to the common idea of a design to introduce the Spanish Inquisition into the country, and to do violence to its institutions.

The war was now openly proclaimed between the cardinal and the nobles. Whatever decorum might be preserved in their intercourse, there was no longer any doubt as to the hostile attitude in which they were hereafter to stand in respect to each other. In a letter written a short time previous to that of the regent, the cardinal gives a brief view of his situation to the king. The letter is written in the courageous spirit of one who does not shrink from the dangers that menace him. After an observation intimating no great confidence in the orthodoxy of the prince of Orange, he remarks: "Though the prince shows me a friendly face, when absent he is full of discontent. They have formed a league against me," he continues, "and threaten my life. But I have little fear on that score, as I think they are much too wise to attempt any such thing. They complain of my excluding them from office, and endeavoring to secure an absolute authority for your majesty. All which they repeat openly at their banquets, with no good effect on the people. Yet never were there governors of the provinces who possessed so much power as they have, or who had all appointments more completely in their own hands. In truth, their great object is to reduce your majesty and the regent to the condition of mere ciphers in the government."

"They refuse to come to my table," he adds, "at which I smile. I find guests enough in the gentry of the country, the magistrates, and even the worthy burghers of the city, whose good-will it is well to conciliate against a day of trouble. These evils I bear with patience, as I can. For adversity is sent by the Almighty, who will recompense those who suffer for religion and justice." The cardinal was fond of regarding himself in the light of a martyr.

He concludes this curious epistle with beseeching the king to come soon to the Netherlands; "to come well attended, and with plenty of money; since, thus provided, he will have no lack of troops, if required to act abroad, while his presence will serve to calm the troubled spirits at home." The politic minister says nothing of the use that might be made of these troops at home. Such an intimation would justify the charges already brought against him. He might safely leave his master to make that application for himself.

In December, 1562, Montigny returned from his mission, and straightway made his report to the council of state. He enlarged on the solicitude which Philip had shown for the interests of the country. Nothing had been further from his mind than to introduce into it the Spanish Inquisition. He was only anxious to exterminate the growing heresy from the land, and called on those in authority to aid in the good work with all their strength. Finally, though pressed by want of funds, he promised, so soon as he could settle his affairs in Spain, to return to Flanders.—It was not unusual for Philip to hold out the idea of his speedy return to the country. The king's gracious reception seems to have had some effect on Montigny. At all events, he placed a degree of confidence in the royal professions, in which the skeptical temper of William was far from acquiescing. He intimated as much to his friend, and the latter, not relishing the part of a dupe, which the prince's language seemed to assign to him, retorted in an angry manner; and something like altercation took place between the two lords, in the presence of the duchess. At least, such is the report of the historians.[542] But historians in a season of faction are not the best authorities. In the troubles before us we have usually a safer guide in the correspondence of the actors.

By Montigny despatches were also brought from Philip for the duchess of Parma. They contained suggestions as to her policy in reference to the factious nobles, whom the king recommended to her, if possible, to divide by sowing the seeds of jealousy among them. Egmont was a stanch Catholic, loyal in his disposition, ambitious, and vain. It would not be difficult to detach him from his associates by a show of preference, which, while it flattered his vanity, would excite in them jealousy and distrust.

In former times there had been something of these feelings betwixt Egmont and the prince of Orange. At least there had been estrangement. This might, in some degree, be referred to the contrast in their characters. Certainly no two characters could be more strongly contrasted with each other. Egmont, frank, fiery, impulsive in his temper, had little in common with the cool, cautious, and calculating William. The showy qualities of the former, lying on the surface, more readily caught the popular eye. There was a depth in William's character not easy to be fathomed,—an habitual reserve, which made it difficult even for those who knew him best always to read him right. Yet the coolness between these two nobles may have arisen less from difference of character than from similarity of position. Both, by their rank and services, took the foremost ground in public estimation, so that it was scarcely possible they should not jostle each other in the career of ambition. But however divided formerly, they were now too closely united by the pressure of external circumstances to be separated by the subtle policy of Philip. Under the influence of a common disgust with the administration and its arbitrary measures, they continued to act in concert together, and, in their union, derived benefit from the very opposition of their characters. For what better augury of success than that afforded by the union of wisdom in council with boldness in execution?

The consequences of the troubles in France, as had been foreseen, were soon visible in the Low Countries. The Protestants of that time constituted a sort of federative republic, or rather a great secret association, extending through the different parts of Europe, but so closely linked together that a blow struck in one quarter instantly vibrated to every other. The Calvinists in the border provinces of the Low Countries felt, in particular, great sympathy with the movements of their French brethren. Many Huguenots took shelter among them. Others came to propagate their doctrines. Tracts in the French tongue were distributed and read with avidity. Preachers harangued in the conventicles; and the people, by hundreds and thousands, openly assembled, and, marching in procession, chanted the Psalms of David in the translation of Marot.

This open defiance of the edicts called for the immediate interposition of the government. At Tournay two Calvinist preachers were arrested, and, after a regular trial, condemned and burned at the stake. In Valenciennes two others were seized, in like manner, tried, and sentenced to the same terrible punishment. But as the marquis of Bergen, the governor of the province, had left the place on a visit to a distant quarter, the execution was postponed till his return. Seven months thus passed, when the regent wrote to the marquis, remonstrating on his unseasonable absence from his post. He had the spirit to answer, that "it neither suited his station nor his character to play the part of an executioner." The marquis of Bergen had early ranged himself on the side of the prince of Orange, and he is repeatedly noticed by Granvelle, in his letters, as the most active of the malecontents. It may well be believed he was no friend to the system of persecution pursued by the government. Urged by Granvelle, the magistrates of the city at length assumed the office of conducting the execution themselves. On the day appointed, the two martyrs were escorted to the stake. The funeral pile was prepared, and the torch was about to be applied, when, at a signal from one of the prisoners, the multitude around broke in upon the place of execution, trampled down the guards and officers of justice, scattered the fagots collected for the sacrifice, and liberated the victims. Then, throwing themselves into a procession, they paraded the streets of the city, singing their psalms and Calvinistic hymns.

Meanwhile the officers of justice succeeded in again arresting the unfortunate men, and carrying them back to prison. But it was not long before their friends, assembling in greater numbers than before, stormed the fortress, forced the gates, and, rescuing the prisoners, carried them off in triumph.

These high-handed measures caused, as may be supposed, great indignation at the court of the regent. She instantly ordered a levy of three thousand troops, and, placing them under the marquis of Bergen, sent them against the insurgents. The force was such as to overcome all resistance. Arrests were made in great numbers, and the majesty of the law was vindicated by the trial and punishment of the ringleaders.

"Rigorous and severe measures," wrote Philip, "are the only ones to be employed in matters of religion. It is by fear only that the rabble"—meaning by this the Reformers—"can be made to do their duty, and not always then." This liberal sentiment found less favor in the Low Countries than in Spain. "One must ponder well," writes the cardinal to Perez, the royal secretary, "before issuing those absolute decrees, which are by no means as implicitly received here as they are in Italy." The Fleming appealed to his laws, and, with all the minister's zeal, it was found impossible to move forward at the fiery pace of the Spanish Inquisition.

"It would raise a tumult at once," he writes, "should we venture to arrest a man without the clearest evidence. No man can be proceeded against without legal proof." But an insurmountable obstacle in the way of enforcing the cruel edicts lay in the feelings of the nation. No law repugnant to such feelings can long be executed. "I accuse none of the nobles of being heretics," writes the regent to her brother; "but they show little zeal in the cause of religion, while the magistrates shrink from their duty from fear of the people." "How absurd is it," exclaims Granvelle, "for depositions to be taken before the Inquisition in Spain, in order to search out heretics in Antwerp, where thousands are every day walking about whom no one meddles with!" "It is more than a year," he says, "since a single arrest on a charge of heresy has taken place in that city." Yet whatever may have been the state of persecution at the present time, the vague dread of the future must have taken strong hold of people's minds, if, as a contemporary writes, there were no less than eighteen or twenty thousand refugees then in England, who had fled from Flanders for the sake of their religion.

The odium of this persecution all fell on the head of Granvelle. He was the tool of Spain. Spain was under the yoke of the Inquisition. Therefore it was clearly the minister's design to establish the Spanish Inquisition over the Netherlands. Such was the concise logic by which people connected the name of Granvelle with that of the most dreaded of tribunals. He was held responsible for the contrivance of the most unpopular measures of government, as well as for their execution. A thousand extravagant stories were circulated both of his private and his political life, which it is probably doing no injustice to the nobles to suppose they did not take much pains to correct. The favorite of the prince is rarely the favorite of the people. But no minister had ever been so unpopular as Granvelle in the Netherlands. He was hated by the nobles for his sudden elevation to power, and for the servile means, as they thought, by which he had risen to it. The people hated him, because he used that power for the ruin of their liberties. No administration—none certainly, if we except that of the iron Alva—was more odious to the nation.

Notwithstanding Granvelle's constancy, and the countenance he received from the regent and a few of the leading councilors, it was hard to bear up under this load of obloquy. He would gladly have had the king return to the country, and sustain him by his presence. It is the burden of his correspondence at this period. "It is a common notion here," he writes to the secretary, Perez, "that they are all ready in Spain to sacrifice the Low Countries. The lords talk so freely, that every moment I fear an insurrection.... For God's sake, persuade the king to come, or it will lie heavy on his conscience." The minister complains to the secretary that he seems to be entirely abandoned by the government at home. "It is three months," he writes, "since I have received a letter from the court. We know as little of Spain here as of the Indies. Such delays are dangerous, and may cost the king dear."—It is clear his majesty exercised his royal prerogative of having the correspondence all on one side. At least his own share in it, at this period, was small, and his letters were concise indeed in comparison with the voluminous epistles of his minister. Perhaps there was some policy in this silence of the monarch. His opinions, nay, his wishes, would have, to some extent, the weight of laws. He would not, therefore, willingly commit himself. He preferred to conform to his natural tendency to trust to the course of events, instead of disturbing them by too precipitate action. The cognomen by which Philip is recognized on the roll of Castilian princes is "the Prudent."

CHAPTER XVI.

GRANVELLE COMPELLED TO WITHDRAW. 1562-1564.

While the state of feeling towards Granvelle, in the nation generally, was such as is described in the preceding chapter, the lords who were in the council of state chafed more and more under their exclusion from business. As the mask was now thrown away, they no longer maintained the show of deference which they had hitherto paid to the minister. From opposition to his measures, they passed to irony, ridicule, sarcasm; till, finding that their assaults had little effect to disturb Granvelle's temper, and still less to change his policy, they grew at length less and less frequent in their attendance at the council, where they played so insignificant a part. This was a sore embarrassment to the regent, who needed the countenance of the great nobles to protect her with the nation, in the unpopular measures in which she was involved.

Even Granvelle, with all his equanimity, considered the crisis so grave as to demand some concession, or at least a show of it, on his own part, to conciliate the good-will of his enemies. He authorized the duchess to say that he was perfectly willing that they should be summoned to the consulta, and to absent himself from its meetings; indeed, to resign the administration altogether, provided the king approved of it. Whether Margaret communicated this to the nobles does not appear; at all events, as nothing came of these magnanimous concessions of the minister, they had no power to soothe the irritation of his enemies.

On the contrary, the disaffected lords were bending their efforts to consolidate their league, of which Granvelle, it may be recollected, noticed the existence in a letter of the preceding year. We now find the members binding themselves to each other by an oath of secrecy. The persons who formed this confederacy were the governors of the provinces, the knights of the Golden Fleece, and, in short, most of the aristocracy of any consideration in the country. It seemed impossible that any minister could stand against such a coalition, resting, moreover, on the sympathies of the people. This formidable association, seeing that all attempts to work on the cardinal were ineffectual, resolved at length to apply directly to the king for his removal. They stated that, knowing the heavy cares which pressed on his majesty, they had long dissembled and kept silence, rather than aggravate these cares by their complaints. If they now broke this silence, it was from a sense of duty to the king, and to save the country from ruin. They enlarged on the lamentable condition of affairs, which, without specifying any particular charges, they imputed altogether to the cardinal, or rather to the position in which he stood in reference to the nation. It was impossible, they said, that the business of the country could prosper, where the minister who directed it was held in such general detestation by the people. They earnestly implored the king to take immediate measures for removing an evil which menaced the speedy ruin of the land. And they concluded with begging that they might be allowed to resign their seats in the council of state, where, in the existing state of affairs, their presence could be of no service.—This letter, dated the eleventh of March, 1563, was signed, on behalf of the coalition, by three lords who had places in the council of state,—the prince of Orange, Count Egmont, and Count Hoorne.

The last nobleman was of an ancient and most honorable lineage. He held the high office of admiral of the Netherlands, and had been governor both of Zütphen and of Gueldres. He accompanied Philip to Spain, and during his absence the province of Gueldres was transferred to another, Count Megen, for which Hoorne considered that he was indebted to the good offices of the cardinal. On his return to his own country, he at once enrolled himself in the ranks of the opposition. He was a man of indisputable bravery, of a quick and impatient temper; one, on the whole, who seems to have been less indebted for his celebrity to his character, than to the peculiar circumstances in which he was placed.

On the day previous to this dispatch of the nobles, we find a letter to the king from Granvelle, who does not seem to have been ignorant of what was doing by the lords. He had expostulated with them, he tells Philip, on the disloyalty of their conduct in thus banding against the government,—a proceeding which in other times might have subjected them to a legal prosecution. He mentions no one by name except Egmont, whom he commends as more tractable and open to reason than his confederates. He was led away by evil counsellors, and Granvelle expresses the hope that he will one day open his eyes to his errors, and return to his allegiance.

It is difficult to conceive the detestation, he goes on to say, in which the Spaniards are held by the nation. The Spaniards only, it was everywhere said, were regarded by the court of Madrid as the lawful children; the Flemings, as illegitimate. It was necessary to do away this impression to place the Flemings on the same footing with the Spaniards; to give them lucrative appointments, for they greatly needed them, in Spain or in Italy; and it might not be amiss to bestow the viceroyalty of Sicily on the prince of Orange.—Thus, by the same act, the politic minister would both reward his rivals and remove them from the country. But he greatly misunderstood the character of William, if he thought in this way to buy him off from the opposition.

It was four months before the confederates received an answer; during which time affairs continued to wear the same gloomy aspect as before. At length came the long-expected epistle from the monarch, dated on the sixth of June. It was a brief one. Philip thanked the lords for their zeal and devotion to his service. After well considering the matter, however, he had not found any specific ground of complaint alleged, to account for the advice given him to part with his minister. The king hoped before long to visit the Low Countries in person. Meanwhile, he should be glad to see any one of the nobles in Spain, to learn from him the whole state of the affair; as it was not his wont to condemn his ministers without knowing the grounds on which they were accused.

The fact that the lords had not specified any particular subject of complaint against the cardinal gave the king an obvious advantage in the correspondence. It seemed to be too much to expect his immediate dismissal of the minister, on the vague pretext of his unpopularity, without a single instance of misconduct being alleged against him. Yet this was the position in which the enemies of Granvelle necessarily found themselves. The minister acted by the orders of the king. To have assailed the minister's acts, therefore, would have been to attack the king himself. Egmont, some time after this, with even more frankness than usual, is said to have declared at table to a friend of the cardinal, that "the blow was aimed not so much at the minister as at the monarch."

The discontent of the lords at receiving this laconic epistle may be imagined. They were indignant that so little account should be made of their representations, and that both they and the country should be sacrificed to the king's partiality for his minister. The three lords waited on the regent, and extorted from her a reluctant consent to assemble the knights of the order, and to confer with them and the other nobles as to the course to be taken.

It was there decided that the lords should address a second letter, in the name of the whole body, to Philip, and henceforth should cease to attend the council of state.

In this letter, which bears the date of July the twenty-ninth, they express their disappointment that his majesty had not come to a more definite resolution, when prompt and decisive measures could alone save the country from ruin. They excuse themselves from visiting Spain in the critical state of affairs at home. At another time, and for any other purpose, did the king desire it, they would willingly do so. But it was not their design to appear as accusers, and institute a process against the minister. They had hoped their own word in such an affair would have sufficed with his majesty. It was not the question whether the minister was to be condemned, but whether he was to be removed from an office for which he was in no respect qualified. They had hoped their attachment and tried fidelity to the crown would have made it superfluous for them to go into a specification of charges. These, indeed, could be easily made, but the discontent and disorder which now reigned throughout the country were sufficient evidence of the minister's incapacity.

They stated that they had acquainted the regent with their intention to absent themselves in future from the council, where their presence could be no longer useful; and they trusted this would receive his majesty's sanction. They expressed their determination loyally and truly to discharge every trust reposed in them by the government; and they concluded by apologizing for the homely language of their epistle,—for they were no haranguers or orators, but men accustomed to act rather than to talk, as was suited to persons of their quality.—This last shaft was doubtless aimed at the cardinal.—The letter was signed by the same triumvirate as the former. The abstract here given does no justice to the document, which is of considerable length, and carefully written. The language is that of men who to the habitual exercise of authority united a feeling of self-respect, which challenged the respect of their opponents. Such were not the men to be cajoled or easily intimidated. It was the first time that Philip had been addressed in this lofty tone by his great vassals. It should have opened his eyes to the condition and the character of his subjects in the Netherlands.

The coalition drew up, at the same time, an elaborate "remonstrance," which they presented to Margaret. In it they set forth the various disorders of the country, especially those growing out of the state of religion and the embarrassment of the finances. The only remedy for these evils is to be found in a meeting of the states-general. The king's prohibition of this measure must have proceeded, no doubt, from the evil counsels of persons hostile to the true interests of the nation. As their services can be of little use while they are thus debarred from a resort to their true and only remedy in their embarrassments, they trust the regent will not take it amiss, that, so long as the present policy is pursued, they decline to take their seats in the council of state, to be merely shadows there, as they have been for the last four years.

From this period the malecontent lords no more appeared in council. The perplexity of Margaret was great. Thus abandoned by the nobles in whom the country had the greatest confidence, she was left alone, as it were, with the man whom the country held in the greatest abhorrence. She had long seen with alarm the storm gathering round the devoted head of the minister. To attempt alone to uphold his falling fortunes would be probably to bury herself in their ruins. In her extremity, she appealed to the confederates, and, since she could not divide them, endeavored to divert them from their opposition. They, on the other hand, besought the regent no longer to connect herself with the desperate cause of a minister so odious to the country. Possibly they infused into her mind some suspicions of the subordinate part she was made to play, through the overweening ambition of the cardinal. At all events, an obvious change took place in her conduct, and while she deferred less and less to Granvelle, she entered into more friendly relations with his enemies. This was especially the case with Egmont, whose frank and courteous hearing and loyal disposition seem to have won greatly on the esteem of the duchess.

Satisfied, at last, that it would be impracticable to maintain the government much longer on its present basis, Margaret resolved to write to her brother on the subject, and at the same time to send her confidential secretary, Armenteros, to Spain, to acquaint the king with the precise state of affairs in the Netherlands.

After enlarging on the disorders and difficulties of the country, the duchess came to the quarrel between the cardinal and the nobles. She had made every effort to reconcile the parties; but that was impossible. She was fully sensible of the merits of Granvelle, his high capacity, his experience in public affairs, his devotion to the interests both of the king and of religion. But, on the other hand, to maintain him in the Netherlands, in opposition to the will of the nobles, was to expose the country, not merely to great embarrassments, but to the danger of insurrection. The obligations of the high place which she occupied compelled her to lay the true state of the case before the king, and he would determine the course to be pursued.—With this letter, bearing the date of August twelfth, and fortified with ample instructions from the duchess, Armenteros was forthwith despatched on his mission to Spain.

It was not long before the state of feeling in the cabinet of Brussels was known, or at least surmised, throughout the country. It was the interest of some of the parties that it should not be kept secret. The cardinal, thus abandoned by his friends, became a more conspicuous mark for the shafts of his enemies. Libels, satires, pasquinades, were launched against him from every quarter. Such fugitive pieces, like the insect which dies when it has left its sting, usually perish with the occasion that gives them birth. But some have survived to the present day, or at least were in existence at the close of the last century, and are much commended by a critic for the merits of their literary execution.

It was the custom, at the period of our narrative, for the young people to meet in the towns and villages, and celebrate what were called "academic games," consisting of rhetorical discussions on the various topics of the day, sometimes of a theological or a political character. Public affairs furnished a fruitful theme at this crisis; and the cardinal, in particular, was often roughly handled. It was in vain the government tried to curb this license. It only served to stimulate the disputants to new displays of raillery and ridicule.

Granvelle, it will be readily believed, was not slow to perceive his loss of credit with the regent, and the more intimate relations into which she had entered with his enemies. But whatever he may have felt, he was too proud or too politic to betray his mortification to the duchess. Thus discredited by all but an insignificant party, who were branded as the "Cardinalists," losing influence daily with the regent, at open war with the nobles, and hated by the people, never was there a minister in so forlorn a situation, or one who was able to maintain his post a day in such circumstances. Yet Granvelle did not lose heart; as others failed him, he relied the more on himself; and the courage which he displayed, when thus left alone, as it were, to face the anger of the nation, might have well commanded the respect of his enemies. He made no mean concession to secure the support of the nobles, or to recover the favor of the regent. He did not shrink from the dangers or the responsibilities of his station; though the latter, at least, bore heavily on him. Speaking of the incessant pressure of his cares, he writes to his correspondent, Perez, "My hairs have turned so white you would not recognize me." He was then but forty-six. On one occasion, indeed, we do find him telling the king, that, "if his majesty does not soon come to the Netherlands, he must withdraw from them." This seems to have been a sudden burst of feeling, as it was a solitary one, forced from him by the extremity of his situation. It was much more in character that he wrote afterwards to the secretary, Perez: "I am so beset with dangers on every side, that most people give me up for lost. But I mean to live as long, by the grace of God, as I can; and if they do take away my life, I trust they will not gain everything for all that." He nowhere intimates a wish to be recalled. Nor would his ambition allow him to resign the helm; but the fiercer the tempest raged, the more closely did he cling to the wreck of his fortunes.

The arrival of Armenteros with the dispatches, and the tidings that he brought, caused a great sensation in the court of Madrid. "We are on the eve of a terrible conflagration," writes one of the secretaries of Philip; "and they greatly err who think it will pass away as formerly." He expresses the wish that Granvelle would retire from the country, where, he predicts, they would soon wish his return. "But ambition," he adds, "and the point of honor are alike opposed to this. Nor does the king desire it."

Yet it was not easy to say what the king did desire,—certainly not what course he would pursue. He felt a natural reluctance to abandon the minister, whose greatest error seemed to be that of too implicit an obedience to his master's commands. He declared he would rather risk the loss of the Netherlands than abandon him. Yet how was that minister to be maintained in his place, in opposition to the will of the nation? In this perplexity, Philip applied for counsel to the man in whom he most confided,—the{219} duke of Alva; the very worst counsellor possible in the present emergency.

The duke's answer was eminently characteristic of the man. "When I read the letters of these lords," he says, "I am so filled with rage, that, did I not make an effort to suppress it, my language would appear to you that of a madman." After this temperate exordium, he recommends the king on no account to remove Granvelle from the administration of the Netherlands. "It is a thing of course," he says, "that the cardinal should be the first victim. A rebellion against the prince naturally begins with an attack on his ministers. It would be better," he continues, "if all could be brought at once to summary justice. Since that cannot be, it may be best to divide the nobles; to win over Egmont and those who follow him by favors; to show displeasure to those who are the least offenders. For the greater ones, who deserve to lose their heads, your majesty will do well to dissemble, until you can give them their deserts."

Part of this advice the king accepted; for to dissemble did no violence to his nature. But the more he reflected on the matter, the more he was satisfied that it would be impossible to retain the obnoxious minister in his place. Yet when he had come to this decision, he still shrunk from announcing it. Months passed, and yet Armenteros, who was to carry back the royal dispatches, was still detained at Madrid. It seemed as if Philip here, as on other occasions of less moment, was prepared to leave events to take their own course, rather than direct them himself.

Early in January, 1564, the duchess of Parma admonished her brother that the lords chafed much under his long silence. It was a common opinion, she said, that he cared little for Flanders, and that he was under the influence of evil counsellors, who would persuade him to deal with the country as a conquered province. She besought him to answer the letter of the nobles, and especially to write in affectionate terms to Count Egmont, who well deserved this for the zeal he had always shown for his sovereign's interests.

One is struck with the tone in which the regent here speaks of one of the leaders of the opposition, so little in unison with her former language. It shows how completely she was now under their influence. In truth, however, we see constantly, both in her letters and those of the cardinal, a more friendly tone of feeling towards Egmont than to either of his associates. On the score of orthodoxy in matters of religion he was unimpeachable. His cordial manners, his free and genial temper, secured the sympathy of all with whom he came in contact. It was a common opinion, that it would not be difficult to detach him from the party of malecontents with whom his lot was cast. Such were not the notions entertained of the prince of Orange.

In a letter from Granvelle to Philip, without a date, but written perhaps about this period, we have portraits, or rather outlines, of the two great leaders of the opposition, touched with a masterly hand. Egmont he describes as firm in his faith, loyally disposed, but under the evil influence of William. It would not be difficult to win him over by flattery and favors. The prince, on the other hand, is a cunning and dangerous enemy, of profound views, boundless ambition, difficult to change, and impossible to control. In the latter character we see the true leader of the revolution.

Disgusted with the indifference of the king, shown in his long-protracted silence, the nobles, notwithstanding the regent's remonstrances, sent orders to their courier, who had been waiting in Madrid for the royal dispatches, to wait no longer, but return without them to the Netherlands. Fortunately Philip now moved, and at the close of January, 1564, sent back Armenteros with his instructions to Brussels. The most important of them was a letter of dismissal to the cardinal himself. It was very short. "On considering what you write," said the king, "I deem it best that you should leave the Low Countries for some days, and go to Burgundy to see your mother, with the consent of the duchess of Parma. In this way, both my authority and your own reputation will be preserved."

It has been a matter of dispute how far the resignation of the cardinal was voluntary. The recent discovery of this letter of Philip determines that question. It was by command of the sovereign. Yet that command was extorted by necessity, and so given as best to save the feelings and the credit of the minister. Neither party anticipated that Granvelle's absence would continue for a long time, much less that his dismissal was final. Even when inditing the letter to the cardinal, Philip cherished the hope that the necessity for his departure might be avoided altogether. This appears from the dispatches sent at the same time to the regent.

Shortly after his note to Granvelle, on the nineteenth of February, Philip wrote an answer to the lords in all the tone of offended majesty. He expressed his astonishment that they should have been led, by any motive whatever, to vacate their seats at the council, where he had placed them. They would not fail to return there at once, and show that they preferred the public weal to all private considerations. As for the removal of the minister, since they had not been pleased to specify any charges against him, the king would deliberate further before deciding on the matter. Thus, three weeks after Philip had given the cardinal his dismissal, did he write to his enemies as if the matter were still in abeyance; hoping, it would seem, by the haughty tone of authority, to rebuke the spirit of the refractory nobles, and intimidate them into a compliance with his commands. Should this policy succeed, the cardinal might still hold the helm of government.

But Philip had not yet learned that he was dealing with men who had little of that spirit of subserviency to which he was accustomed in his Castilian vassals. The peremptory tone of his letter fired the blood of the Flemish lords, who at once waited on the regent, and announced their purpose not to reenter the council. The affair was not likely to end here; and Margaret saw with alarm the commotion that would be raised when the letter of the king should be laid before the whole body of the nobles. Fearing some rash step, difficult to be retrieved, she resolved either that the cardinal should announce his intended departure, or that she would do so for him. Philip's experiment had failed. Nothing, therefore, remained but for the minister publicly to declare, that, as his brother, the late envoy to France, had returned to Brussels, he had obtained permission from the regent to accompany him on a visit to their aged mother, whom Granvelle had not seen for fourteen years.

The news of the minister's resignation and speedy departure spread like wildfire over the country. The joy was universal; and the wits of the time redoubled their activity, assailing the fallen minister with libels, lampoons, and caricatures, without end. One of these caricatures, thrust into his own hand under the pretense of its being a petition, represented him as hatching a brood of young bishops, who were crawling out of their shells. Hovering above might be seen the figure of the Devil; while these words were profanely made to issue from his month: "This is my son; hear ye him!"

It was at this time that, at a banquet at which many of the Flemish nobles were present, the talk fell on the expensive habits of the aristocracy, especially as shown in the number and dress of their domestics. It was the custom for them to wear showy and very costly liveries, intimating by the colors the family to which they belonged. Granvelle had set an example of this kind of ostentation. It was proposed to regulate their apparel by a more modest and uniform standard. The lot fell on Egmont to devise some suitable livery, of the simple kind used by the Germans. He proposed a dark-gray habit, which, instead of the aiguillettes commonly suspended from the shoulders, should have flat pieces of cloth, embroidered with the figure of a head and a fool's cap. The head was made marvelously like that of the cardinal, and the cap, being red, was thought to bear much resemblance to a cardinal's hat. This was enough. The dress was received with acclamation. The nobles instantly clad their retainers in the new livery, which had the advantage of greater economy. It became the badge of party. The tailors of Brussels could not find time to supply their customers. Instead of being confined to Granvelle, the heads occasionally bore the features of Arschot, Aremberg, or Viglius, the cardinal's friends. The duchess at first laughed at the jest, and even sent some specimens of the embroidery to Philip. But Granvelle looked more gravely on the matter, declaring it an insult to the government, and the king interfered to have the device given up. This was not easy, from the extent to which it had been adopted. But Margaret at length succeeded in persuading the lords to take another, not personal in its nature. The substitute was a sheaf of arrows. Even this was found to have an offensive application, as it intimated the league of the nobles. It was the origin, it is said, of the device afterwards assumed by the Seven United Provinces.

On the thirteenth of March, 1564, Granvelle quitted Brussels,—never to return. "The joy of the nobles at his departure," writes one of the privy council, "was excessive. They seemed like boys let loose from school." The three lords, members of the council of state, in a note to the duchess, declared that they were ready to resume their places at the board; with the understanding, however, that they should retire whenever the minister returned. Granvelle had given out that his absence would be of no long duration. The regent wrote to her brother in warm commendation of the lords. It would not do for Granvelle ever to return. She was assured by the nobles, if he did return, he would risk the loss of his life, and the king the loss of the Netherlands.

The three lords wrote each to Philip, informing him that they had reentered the council, and making the most earnest protestations of loyalty. Philip, on his part, graciously replied to each, and in particular to the prince of Orange, who had intimated that slanderous reports respecting himself had found their way to the royal ear. The king declared "he never could doubt for a moment that William would continue to show the same zeal in his service that he had always done; and that no one should be allowed to cast a reproach on a person of his quality, and one whom Philip knew so thoroughly." It might almost seem that a double meaning lurked under this smooth language. But whatever may have been felt, no distrust was exhibited on either side. To those who looked on the surface only,—and they were a hundred to one,—it seemed as if the dismissal of the cardinal had removed all difficulties; and they now confidently relied on a state of permanent tranquility. But there were others whose eyes looked deeper than the calm sunshine that lay upon the surface; who saw, more distinctly than when the waters were ruffled by the tempest, the rocks beneath, on which the vessel of state was afterward to be wrecked.

The cardinal, on leaving the Low Countries, retired to his patrimonial estate at Besançon,—embellished with all that wealth and a cultivated taste could supply. In this pleasant retreat the discomfited statesman found a solace in those pursuits which in earlier, perhaps happier, days had engaged his attention. He had particularly a turn for the physical sciences. But he was fond of letters, and in all his tastes showed the fruits of a liberal culture. He surrounded himself with scholars and artists, and took a lively interest in their pursuits. Justus Lipsius, afterwards so celebrated, was his secretary. He gave encouragement to Plantin, who rivalled in Flanders the fame of the Aldi in Venice. His generous patronage was readily extended to genius, in whatever form it was displayed. It is some proof how widely extended, that, in the course of his life, he is said to have received more than a hundred dedications. Though greedy of wealth, it was not to hoard it, and his large revenues were liberally dispensed in the foundation of museums, colleges, and public libraries. Besançon, the place of his residence, did not profit least by this munificence.

Such is the portrait which historians have given to us of the minister in his retirement. His own letters show that, with these sources of enjoyment, he did not altogether disdain others of a less spiritual character. A letter to one of the regent's secretaries, written soon after the cardinal's arrival at Besançon, concludes in the following manner: "I know that God will recompense men according to their deserts. I have confidence that he will aid me; and that I shall yet be able to draw profit from what my enemies designed for my ruin. This is my philosophy, with which I endeavor to live as joyously as I can, laughing at the world, its calumnies and its passions."

With all this happy mixture of the Epicurean and the Stoic, the philosophic statesman did not so contentedly submit to his fate as to forego the hope of seeing himself soon reinstated in authority in the Netherlands. "In the course of two months," he writes, "you may expect to see me there." He kept up an active correspondence with the friends whom he had left in Brussels, and furnished the results of the information thus obtained, with his own commentaries, to the court at Madrid. His counsel was courted, and greatly considered, by Philip; so that from the shades of his retirement the banished minister was still thought to exercise an important influence on the destiny of Flanders.

A singular history is attached to the papers of Granvelle. That minister resembled his master, Philip the Second, in the fertility of his epistolary vein. That the king had a passion for writing, notwithstanding he could throw the burden of the correspondence, when it suited him, on the other party, is proved by the quantity of letters he left behind him. The example of the monarch seems to have had its influence on his courtiers; and no reign of that time is illustrated by a greater amount of written materials from the hands of the principal actors in it. Far from a poverty of materials, therefore, the historian has much more reason to complain of an embarras de richesses.

Granvelle filled the highest posts in different parts of the Spanish empire; and in each of these—in the Netherlands, where he was minister, in Naples, where he was viceroy, in Spain, where he took the lead in the cabinet, and in Besançon, whither he retired from public life—he left ample memorials under his own hand of his residence there. This was particularly the case with Besançon, his native town, and the favorite residence to which he turned, as he tells us, from the turmoil of office to enjoy the sweets of privacy,—yet not, in truth, so sweet to him as the stormy career of the statesman, to judge from the tenacity with which he clung to office.

The cardinal made his library at Besançon the depository, not merely of his own letters, but of such as were addressed to him. He preserved them all, however humble the sources whence they came, and, like Philip, he was in the habit of jotting down his own reflections in the margin. As Granvelle's personal and political relations connected him with the most important men of his time, we may well believe that the mass of correspondence which he gathered together was immense. Unfortunately, at his death, instead of bequeathing his manuscripts to some public body, who might have been responsible for the care of them, he left them to heirs who were altogether ignorant of their value. In the course of time the manuscripts found their way to the garret, where they soon came to be regarded as little better than waste paper. They were pilfered by the children and domestics, and a considerable quantity was sent off to a neighboring grocer, who soon converted the correspondence of the great statesman into wrapping-paper for his spices.

From this ignominious fate the residue of the collection was happily rescued by the generous exertions of the Abbé Boissot. This excellent and learned man was the head of the Benedictines of St. Vincent in Besançon, of which town he was himself a native. He was acquainted with the condition of the Granvelle papers, and comprehended their importance. In the course of eighty years, which had elapsed since the cardinal's death, his manuscripts had come to be distributed among several heirs, some of whom consented to transfer their property gratuitously to the Abbé Boissot, while he purchased that of others. In this way he at length succeeded in gathering together all that survived of the large collection; and he made it the great business of his subsequent life to study its contents and arrange the chaotic mass of papers with reference to their subjects. To complete his labors, he caused the manuscripts thus arranged to be bound, in eighty-two volumes, folio, thus placing them in that permanent form which might best secure them against future accident.

The abbé did not live to publish to the world an account of his collection, which at his death passed by his will to his brethren of the abbey of St. Vincent, on condition that it should be for ever open for the use of the town of Besançon. It may seem strange that, notwithstanding the existence of this valuable body of original documents was known to scholars, they should so rarely have resorted to it for instruction. Its secluded situation, in the heart of a remote province, was doubtless regarded as a serious obstacle by the historical inquirer, in an age when the public took things too readily on trust to be very solicitous about authentic sources of information. It is more strange that Boissot's Benedictine brethren should have shown themselves so insensible to the treasures under their own roof. One of their body, Dom Prosper l'Evesque, did indeed profit by the Boissot collection to give to the world his Mémoires de Granvelle, a work in two volumes, duodecimo, which, notwithstanding the materials at the writer's command, contain little of any worth, unless it be an occasional extract from Granvelle's own correspondence.

At length, in 1834, the subject drew the attention of M. Guizot, then Minister of Public Instruction in France. By his direction a commission of five scholars was instituted, with the learned Weiss at its head, for the purpose of examining the Granvelle papers, with a view to their immediate publication. The work was performed in a prompt and accurate manner, that must have satisfied its enlightened projector. In 1839 the whole series of papers had been subjected to a careful analysis, and the portion selected that was deemed proper for publication. The first volume appeared in 1841; and the president of the commission, M. Weiss, expressed in his preface the confident hope that in the course of 1843 the remaining papers would all be given to the press. But these anticipations have not been realized. In 1854 only nine volumes had appeared. How far the publication has since advanced I am ignorant.

The Papiers d'Etat, besides Granvelle's own letters, contain a large amount of historical materials, such as official documents, state papers, and diplomatic correspondence of foreign ministers,—that of Renard, for example, so often quoted in these pages. There are, besides, numerous letters both of Philip and of Charles the Fifth, for the earlier volumes embrace the times of the emperor.—The minister's own correspondence is not the least valuable part of the collection. Granvelle stood so high in the confidence of his sovereign, that, when not entrusted himself with the conduct of affairs, ha was constantly consulted by the king as to the best mode of conducting them. With a different fate from that of most ministers, he retained his influence when he had lost his place. Thus there were few transactions of any moment in which he was not called on directly or indirectly to take part. And his letters furnish a clew for conducting the historical student through more than one intricate negotiation, by revealing the true motives of the parties who were engaged in it.

Granvelle was in such intimate relations with the most eminent persons of the time, that his correspondence becomes in some sort the mirror of the age, reflecting the state of opinion on the leading topics of the day. For the same reason it is replete with matters of personal as well as political interest; while the range of its application, far from being confined to Spain, embraces most of the states of Europe with which Spain held intercourse. The French government has done good service by the publication of a work which contains so much for the illustration of the history of the sixteenth century. M. Weiss, the editor, has conducted his labors on the true principles by which an editor should be guided; and, far from magnifying his office, and unseasonably obtruding himself on the reader's attention, he has sought only to explain what is obscure in the text, and to give such occasional notices of the writers as may enable the reader to understand their correspondence.

CHAPTER XVII.

CHANGES DEMANDED BY THE LORDS. 1564-1565.

We have now arrived at an epoch in the history of the revolution, when, the spirit of the nation having been fully roused, the king had been compelled to withdraw his unpopular minister, and to entrust the reins of government to the hands of the nobles. Before proceeding further, it will be well to take a brief survey of the ground, that we may the better comprehend the relations in which the parties stood to each other at the commencement of the contest.

  In a letter to his sister, the regent, written some two years after this period, Philip says: "I have never had any other object in view than the good of my subjects. In all that I have done, I have but trod in the footsteps of my father, under whom the people of the Netherlands must admit they lived contented and happy. As to the Inquisition, whatever people may say of it, I have never attempted anything new. With regard to the edicts, I have been always resolved to live and die in the Catholic faith. I could not be content to have my subjects do otherwise. Yet I see not how this can be compassed without punishing the transgressors. God knows how willingly I would avoid shedding a drop of Christian blood,—above all, that of my people in the Netherlands; and I should esteem it one of the happiest circumstances of my reign to be spared this necessity."

Whatever we may think of the sensibility of Philip, or of his tenderness for his Flemish subjects in particular, we cannot deny that the policy he had hitherto pursued was substantially that of his father. Yet his father lived beloved, and died lamented, by the Flemings; while Philip's course, from the very first, had encountered only odium and opposition. A little reflection will show us the reasons of these different results.

Both Charles and Philip came forward as the great champions of Catholicism. But the emperor's zeal was so far tempered by reason, that it could accommodate itself to circumstances. He showed this on more than one occasion, both in Germany and in Flanders. Philip, on the other hand, admitted of no compromise. He was the inexorable foe of heresy. Persecution was his only remedy, and the Inquisition the weapon on which he relied. His first act on setting foot on his native shore was to assist at an auto de fé. This proclaimed his purpose to the world, and associated his name indelibly with that of the terrible tribunal.

The free people of the Netherlands felt the same dread of the Inquisition that a free and enlightened people of our own day might be supposed to feel. They looked with gloomy apprehension to the unspeakable misery it was to bring to their firesides, and the desolation and ruin to their country. Everything that could in any way be connected with it took the dismal coloring of their fears. The edicts of Charles the Fifth, written in blood, became yet more formidable, as declaring the penalties to be inflicted by this tribunal. Even the erection of the bishoprics, so necessary a measure, was regarded with distrust on account of the inquisitorial powers which of old were vested in the bishops, thus seeming to give additional strength to the arm of persecution. The popular feeling was nourished by every new convert to the Protestant faith, as well as by those who, from views of their own, were willing to fan the flame of rebellion.

Another reason why Philip's policy met with greater opposition than that of his predecessor was the change in the condition of the people themselves. Under the general relaxation of the law, or rather of its execution, in the latter days of Charles the Fifth, the number of the Reformers had greatly multiplied. Calvinism predominated in Luxemburg, Artois, Flanders, and the states lying nearest to France. Holland, Zealand, and the North, were the chosen abode of the Anabaptists. The Lutherans swarmed in the districts bordering on Germany; while Antwerp, the commercial capital of Brabant, and the great mart of all nations, was filled with sectaries of every description. Even the Jew, the butt of persecution in the Middle Ages, is said to have lived there unmolested. For such a state of things, it is clear that very different legislation was demanded than for that which existed under Charles the Fifth. It was one thing to eradicate a few noxious weeds, and quite another to crush the sturdy growth of heresy, which in every direction now covered the land.

A further reason for the aversion to Philip, and one that cannot be too often repeated, was that he was a foreigner. Charles was a native Fleming; and much may be forgiven in a countryman. But Philip was a Spaniard,—one of a nation held in greatest aversion by the men of the Netherlands. It should clearly have been his policy, therefore, to cover up this defect in the eyes of the inhabitants by consulting their national prejudices, and by a show, at least, of confidence in their leaders. Far from this, Philip began with placing a Spanish army on their borders in time of peace. The administration he committed to the hands of a foreigner. And while he thus outraged the national feeling at home, it was remarked that into the royal council at Madrid, where the affairs of the Low Countries, as of the other provinces, were settled in the last resort, not a Fleming was admitted. The public murmured. The nobles remonstrated and resisted. Philip was obliged to retrace his steps. He made first one concession, then another. He recalled his troops, removed his minister. The nobles triumphed, and the administration of the country passed into their hands. People thought the troubles were at an end. They were but begun. Nothing had been done towards the solution of the great problem of the rights of conscience. On this the king and the country were at issue as much as ever. All that had been done had only cleared the way to the free discussion of this question, and to the bloody contest that was to follow.

On the departure of Granvelle, the discontented lords, as we have seen, again took their seats in the council of state. They gave the most earnest assurances of loyalty to the king, and seemed as if desirous to make amends for the past by an extraordinary devotion to public business. Margaret received these advances in the spirit in which they were made; and the confidence which she had formerly bestowed on Granvelle, she now transferred in full measure to his successful rivals.

It is amusing to read her letters at this period, and to compare them with those which she wrote to Philip the year preceding. In the new coloring given to the portraits it is hard to recognize a single individual. She cannot speak too highly of the services of the lords,—of the prince of Orange, and Egmont above all,—of their devotion to the public weal and the interests of the sovereign. She begs her brother again and again to testify his own satisfaction by the most gracious letters to those nobles that he can write. The suggestion seems to have met with little favor from Philip. No language, however, is quite strong enough to express Margaret's disgust with the character and conduct of her former minister, Granvelle. It is he that has so long stood betwixt the monarch and the love of the people. She cannot feel easy that he should still remain so near the Netherlands. He should be sent to Rome.[609] She distrusts his influence, even now, over the cabinet at Madrid. He is perpetually talking, she understands, of the probability of his speedy return to Brussels. The rumor of this causes great uneasiness in the country. Should he be permitted to return, it would undoubtedly be the signal for an insurrection.—It is clear the duchess had sorely suffered from the tyranny of Granvelle.

But notwithstanding the perfect harmony which subsisted between Margaret and the principal lords, it was soon seen that the wheels of government were not destined to run on too smoothly. Although the cardinal was gone, there still remained a faction of Cardinalists, who represented his opinions, and who, if few in number, made themselves formidable by the strength of their opposition. At the head of these were the viscount de Barlaimont and the President Viglius.

The former, head of the council of finance, was a Flemish noble of the first class,—yet more remarkable for his character than for his rank. He was a man of unimpeachable integrity, stanch in his loyalty both to the Church and to the crown, with a resolute spirit not to be shaken, for it rested on principle.

His coadjutor, Viglius, was an eminent jurist, an able writer, a sagacious statesman. He had been much employed by the emperor in public affairs, which he managed with a degree of caution that amounted almost to timidity. He was the personal friend of Granvelle, had adopted his views, and carried on with him a constant correspondence, which is among our best sources of information. He was frugal and moderate in his habits, not provoking criticism, like that minister, by his ostentation and irregularities of life. But he was nearly as formidable, from the official powers with which he was clothed, and the dogged tenacity with which he clung to his purposes. He filled the high office of president both of the privy council and of the council of state, and was also keeper of the great seal. It was thus obviously in his power to oppose a great check to the proceedings of the opposite party. That he did thus often thwart them is attested by the reiterated complaints of the duchess. "The president," she tells her brother, "makes me endure the pains of hell by the manner in which he traverses my measures." His real object, like that of Granvelle and of their followers, she says on another occasion, is to throw the country into disorder. They would find their account in fishing in the troubled waters. They dread a state of tranquility, which would afford opportunity for exposing their corrupt practices in the government.

To these general charges of delinquency the duchess added others, of a more vulgar peculation. Viglius, who had taken priest's orders for the purpose, was provost of the church of St. Bavon. Margaret openly accused him of purloining the costly tapestries, the plate, the linen, the jewels, and even considerable sums of money belonging to the church. She insisted on the impropriety of allowing such a man to hold office under the government.

Nor was the president silent on his part, and in his correspondence with Granvelle he retorts similar accusations in full measure on his enemies. He roundly taxes the great nobles with simony and extortion. Offices, both ecclesiastical and secular, were put up for sale in a shameless manner, and disposed of to the highest bidder. It was in this way that the bankrupt nobles paid their debts, by bestowing vacant places on their creditors. Nor are the regent's hands, he intimates, altogether clean from the stain of these transactions. He accuses the lords, moreover, of using their authority to interfere perpetually with the course of justice. They had acquired an unbounded ascendancy over Margaret, and treated her with a deference which, he adds, "is ever sure to captivate the sex." She was more especially under the influence of her secretary, Armenteros, a creature of the nobles, who profited by his position to fill his own coffers at the expense of the exchequer. For himself, he is in such disgrace for his resistance to these disloyal proceedings, that the duchess excludes him as far as possible from the management of affairs, and treats him with undisguised coldness. Nothing but the desire to do his duty would induce him to remain a day longer in a post like this, from which his only wish is that his sovereign would release him.

The president seems never to have written directly to Philip. It would only expose him, he said, to the suspicions and the cavils of his enemies. The wary statesman took warning by the fate of Granvelle. But as his letters to the banished minister were all forwarded to Philip, the monarch, with the dispatches of his sister before him, had the means of contemplating both sides of the picture, and of seeing that, to whichever party he entrusted the government, the interests of the country were little likely to be served. Had it been his father, the emperor, who was on the throne, such knowledge would not have been in his possession four and twenty hours, before he would have been on his way to the Netherlands. But Philip was of a more sluggish temper. He was capable, indeed, of much passive exertion,—of incredible toil in the cabinet,—and from his palace, as was said, would have given law to Christendom. But rather than encounter the difficulties of a voyage, he was willing, it appears, to risk the loss of the finest of his provinces.

Yet he wrote to his sister to encourage her with the prospect of his visiting the country as soon as he could be released from a war in which he was engaged with the Turks. He invited her, at the same time, to send him further particulars of the misconduct of Viglius, and expressed the hope that some means might be found of silencing his opposition.

It is not easy at this day to strike the balance between the hostile parties, so as to decide on the justice of these mutual accusations, and to assign to each the proper share of responsibility for the mismanagement of the government. That it was mismanaged is certain. That offices were put up for sale is undeniable; for the duchess frankly discusses the expediency of it, in a letter to her brother. This, at least, absolves the act from the imputation of secrecy. The conflict of the council of state with the two other councils often led to disorders, since the decrees passed by the privy council, which had cognizance of matters of justice, were frequently frustrated by the amnesties and pardons granted by the council of state. To remedy this, the nobles contended that it was necessary to subject the decrees of the other councils to the revision of the council of state, and, in a word, to concentrate in this last body the whole authority of government. The council of state, composed chiefly of the great aristocracy, looked down with contempt on those subordinate councils, made up for the most part of men of humbler condition, pledged by their elevation to office to maintain the interests of the crown. They would have placed the administration of the country in the hands of an oligarchy, made up of the great Flemish nobles. This would be to break up that system of distribution into separate departments established by Charles the Fifth for the more perfect dispatch of business. It would, in short, be such a change in the constitution of the country as would of itself amount to a revolution.

In the state of things above described, the Reformation gained rapidly in the country. The nobles generally, as has been already intimated, were loyal to the Roman Catholic Church. Many of the younger nobility, however, who had been educated at Geneva, returned tinctured with heretical doctrines from the school of Calvin. But whether Catholic or Protestant, the Flemish aristocracy looked with distrust on the system of persecution, and held the Inquisition in the same abhorrence as did the great body of the people. It was fortunate for the Reformation in the Netherlands, that at its outset it received the support even of the Catholics, who resisted the Inquisition as an outrage on their political liberties.

Under the lax administration of the edicts, exiles who had fled abroad from persecution now returned to Flanders. Calvinist ministers and refugees from France crossed the borders, and busied themselves with the work of proselytism. Seditious pamphlets were circulated, calling on the regent to confiscate the ecclesiastical revenues, and apply them to the use of the state, as had been done in England. The Inquisition became an object of contempt almost as much as of hatred. Two of the principal functionaries wrote to Philip, that, without further support, they could be of no use in a situation which exposed them only to derision and danger.[624] At Bruges and at Brussels the mob entered the prisons, and released the prisoners. A more flagrant violation of justice occurred at Antwerp. A converted friar, named Fabricius, who had been active in preaching and propagating the new doctrines, was tried and sentenced to the stake. On the way to execution, the people called out to him, from the balconies and the doorways, to "take courage, and endure manfully to the last." When the victim was bound to the stake, and the pile was kindled, the mob discharged such a volley of stones at the officers as speedily put them to flight. But the unhappy man, though unscathed by the fire, was stabbed to the heart by the executioner, who made his escape in the tumult. The next morning, placards written in blood were found affixed to the public buildings, threatening vengeance on all who had any part in the execution of Fabricius; and one of the witnesses against him, a woman, hardly escaped with life from the hands of the populace.

The report of these proceedings caused a great sensation at Madrid; and Philip earnestly called on his sister to hunt out and pursue the offenders. This was not easy, where most, even of those who did not join in the act, fully shared in the feeling which led to it. Yet Philip continued to urge the necessity of enforcing the laws for the preservation of the Faith, as the thing dearest to his heart. He would sometimes indicate in his letters the name of a suspicious individual, his usual dress, his habits, and appearance,—descending into details which may well surprise us, considering the multitude of affairs of a weightier character that pressed upon his mind. One cannot doubt that Philip was at heart an inquisitor.

Yet the fires of persecution were not permitted wholly to slumber. The historian of the Reformation enumerates seventeen who suffered capitally for their religious opinions in the course of the year 1564. This, though pitiable, was a small number—if indeed it be the whole number—compared with the thousands who are said to have perished in the same space of time in the preceding reign. It was too small to produce any effect as a persecution, while the sight of the martyr, singing hymns in the midst of the flames, only kindled a livelier zeal in the spectators, and a deeper hatred for their oppressors.

The finances naturally felt the effects of the general disorder of the country. The public debt, already large, as we have seen, was now so much increased, that the yearly deficiency in the revenue, according to the regent's own statement, amounted to six hundred thousand florins; and she knew of no way of extricating the country from its embarrassments, unless the king should come to its assistance. The convocation of the states-general was insisted on as the only remedy for these disorders. That body alone, it was contended, was authorized to vote the requisite subsidies, and to redress the manifold grievances of the nation.—Yet, in point of fact, its powers had hitherto been little more than to propose the subsidies for the approbation of the several provinces, and to remonstrate on the grievances of the nation. To invest the states-general with the power of redressing these grievances would bestow on them legislative functions which they had rarely, if ever, exercised. This would be to change the constitution of the country, by the new weight it would give to the popular element; a change which the great lords, who had already the lesser nobles entirely at their disposal, would probably know well how to turn to account. Yet Margaret had now so entirely resigned herself to their influence, that, notwithstanding the obvious consequences of these measures, she recommended to Philip both to assemble the states-general and to remodel the council of state;—and this to a monarch more jealous of his authority than any other prince in Europe!

To add to the existing troubles, orders were received from the court of Madrid to publish the decrees of the Council of Trent throughout the Netherlands. That celebrated council had terminated its long session in 1563, with the results that might have been expected,—those of widening the breach between Protestant and Catholic, and of enlarging, or at least more firmly establishing, the authority of the pope. One good result may be mentioned, that of providing for a more strict supervision of the morals and discipline of the clergy;—a circumstance which caused the decrees to be in extremely bad odor with that body.

It was hoped that Philip would imitate the example of France, and reject decrees which thus exalted the power of the pope. Men were led to expect this the more, from the mortification which the king had lately experienced from a decision of the pontiff on a question of precedence between the Castilian and French ambassadors at his court. This delicate matter, long pending, had been finally determined in favor of France by Pius the Fifth, who may have thought it more politic to secure a fickle ally than to reward a firm one. The decision touched Philip to the quick. He at once withdrew his ambassador from Rome, and refused to receive an envoy from his holiness. It seemed that a serious rupture was likely to take place between the parties. But it was not in the nature of Philip to be long at feud with the court of Rome. In a letter to the duchess of Parma, dated August 6, 1564, he plainly intimated that in matters of faith he was willing at all times to sacrifice his private feelings to the public weal. He subsequently commanded the decrees of the Council of Trent to be received as law throughout his dominions, saying that he could make no exception for the Netherlands, when he made none for Spain.

The promulgation of the decrees was received, as had been anticipated, with general discontent. The clergy complained of the interference with their immunities. The men of Brabant stood stoutly on the chartered rights secured to them by the "Joyeuse Entrée". And the people generally resisted the decrees, from a vague idea of their connection with the Inquisition; while, as usual when mischief was on foot, they loudly declaimed against Granvelle as being at the bottom of it.

In this unhappy condition of affairs, it was determined by the council of state to send some one to Madrid to lay the grievances of the nation before the king, and to submit to him what in their opinion would be the most effectual remedy. They were the more induced to this by the unsatisfactory nature of the royal correspondence. Philip, to the great discontent of the lords, had scarcely condescended to notice their letters. Even to Margaret's ample communications he rarely responded, and when he did, it was in vague and general terms, conveying little more than the necessity of executing justice and watching over the purity of the Faith.

The person selected for the unenviable mission to Madrid was Egmont, whose sentiments of loyalty, and of devotion to the Catholic faith, it was thought, would recommend him to the king; while his brilliant reputation, his rank, and his popular manners would find favor with the court and the people. Egmont himself was the less averse to the mission, that he had some private suits of his own to urge with the monarch.

This nomination was warmly supported by William, between whom and the count a perfectly good understanding seems to have subsisted, in spite of the efforts of the Cardinalists to revive their ancient feelings of jealousy. Yet these feelings still glowed in the bosoms of the wives of the two nobles, as was evident from the warmth with which they disputed the question of precedence with each other. Both were of the highest rank, and, as there was no umpire to settle the delicate question, it was finally arranged by the two ladies appearing in public always arm in arm,—an equality which the haughty dames were careful to maintain, in spite of the ridiculous embarrassments to which they were occasionally exposed by narrow passages and doorways. If the question of precedence had related to character, it would have been easily settled. The troubles from the misconduct of Anne of Saxony bore as heavily on the prince, her husband, at this very time, as the troubles of the state.

Before Egmont's departure, a meeting of the council of state was called, to furnish him with the proper instructions. The president, Viglius, gave it as his opinion, that the mission was superfluous; and that the great nobles had only to reform their own way of living to bring about the necessary reforms in the country. Egmont was instructed by the regent to represent to the king the deplorable condition of the land, the prostration of public credit, the decay of religion, and the symptoms of discontent and disloyalty in the people. As the most effectual remedy for these evils, he was to urge the king to come in person, and that speedily, to Flanders. "If his majesty does not approve of this," said Margaret, "impress upon him the necessity of making further remittances, and of giving me precise instructions as to the course I am to pursue."

The prince of Orange took part in the discussion with a warmth he had rarely shown. It was time, he said, that the king should be disabused of the errors under which he labored with respect to the Netherlands. The edicts must be mitigated. It was not possible, in the present state of feeling, either to execute the edicts or to maintain the Inquisition. The Council of Trent was almost equally odious; nor could they enforce its decrees in the Netherlands while the countries on the borders rejected them. The people would no longer endure the perversion of justice, and the miserable wrangling of the councils.—This last blow was aimed at the president.—The only remedy was to enlarge the council of state, and to strengthen its authority. For his own part, he concluded, he could not understand how any prince could claim the right of interfering with the consciences of his subjects in matters of religion.—The impassioned tone of his eloquence, so contrary to the usually calm manner of William the Silent, and the boldness with which he avowed his opinions, caused a great sensation in the assembly. That night was passed by Viglius, who gives his own account of the matter, in tossing on his bed, painfully ruminating on his forlorn position in the council, with scarcely one to support him in the contest which he was compelled to wage, not merely with the nobles, but with the regent herself. The next morning, while dressing, he was attacked by a fit of apoplexy, which partially deprived him of the use of both his speech and his limbs. It was some time before he could resume his place at the board. This new misfortune furnished him with a substantial argument for soliciting the king's permission to retire from office. In this he was warmly seconded by Margaret, who, while she urged the president's incapacity, nothing touched by his situation, eagerly pressed her brother to call him to account for his delinquencies, and especially his embezzlement of the church property.

Philip, who seems to have shunned any direct intercourse with his Flemish subjects, had been averse to have Egmont, or any other envoy, sent to Madrid. On learning that the mission was at length settled, he wrote to Margaret that he had made up his mind to receive the count graciously, and to show no discontent with the conduct of the lords. That the journey, however, was not without its perils, may be inferred from a singular document that has been preserved to us. It is signed by a number of Egmont's personal friends, each of whom traced his signature in his own blood. In this paper the parties pledge their faith, as true knights and gentlemen, that if any harm be done to Count Egmont during his absence, they will take ample vengeance on Cardinal Granvelle, or whoever might be the author of it. The cardinal seems to have been the personification of evil with the Flemings of every degree. This instrument, which was deposited with the Countess Egmont, was subscribed with the names of seven nobles, most of them afterwards conspicuous in the troubles of the country. One might imagine that such a document was more likely to alarm than to reassure the wife to whom it was addressed.

In the beginning of January, Egmont set out on his journey. He was accompanied for some distance by a party of his friends, who at Cambray gave him a splendid entertainment. Among those present was the archbishop of Cambray, a prelate who had made himself unpopular by the zeal he had shown in the persecution of the Reformers. As the wine-cup passed freely round, some of the younger guests amused themselves with frequently pledging the prelate, and endeavoring to draw him into a greater degree of conviviality than was altogether becoming his station. As he at length declined their pledges, they began openly to taunt him; and one of the revelers, irritated by the archbishop's reply, would have thrown a large silver dish at his head, had not his arm been arrested by Egmont. Another of the company, however, succeeded in knocking off the prelate's cap; and a scene of tumult ensued, from which the archbishop was extricated, not without difficulty, by the more sober and considerate part of the company. The whole affair—mortifying in the extreme to Egmont—is characteristic of the country at this period; when business of the greatest importance was settled at the banquet, as we often find in the earlier history of the revolution.

Egmont's reception at Madrid was of the most flattering kind. Philip's demeanor towards his great vassal was marked by unusual benignity; and the courtiers, readily taking their cue from their sovereign, vied with one another in attentions to the man whose prowess might be said to have won for Spain the great victories of Gravelines and St. Quentin. In fine, Egmont, whose brilliant exterior and noble bearing gave additional luster to his reputation, was the object of general admiration during his residence of several weeks at Madrid. It seemed as if the court of Castile was prepared to change its policy, from the flattering attentions it thus paid to the representative of the Netherlands.

During his stay, Egmont was admitted to several audiences, in which he exposed to the monarch the evils that beset the country, and the measures proposed for relieving them. As the two most effectual, he pressed him to mitigate the edicts, and to reorganize the council of state. Philip listened with much benignity to these suggestions of the Flemish noble; and if he did not acquiesce, he gave no intimation to the contrary, except by assuring the count of his determination to maintain the integrity of the Catholic faith. To Egmont personally he showed the greatest indulgence, and the count's private suits sped as favorably as he could have expected. But a remarkable anecdote proves that Philip, at this very time, with all this gracious demeanor, had not receded one step from the ground he had always occupied.

Not long after Egmont's arrival, Philip privately called a meeting of the most eminent theologians in the capital. To this conclave he communicated briefly the state of the Low Countries, and their demand to enjoy freedom of conscience in matters of religion. He concluded by inquiring the opinion of his auditors on the subject. The reverend body, doubtless supposing that the king only wanted their sanction to extricate himself from the difficulties of his position, made answer, "that, considering the critical situation of Flanders, and the imminent danger, if thwarted, of its disloyalty to the crown and total defection from the Church, he might be justified in allowing the people freedom of worshipping in their own way." To this Philip sternly replied, "He had not called them to learn whether he might grant this to the Flemings, but whether he must do so." The flexible conclave, finding they had mistaken their cue, promptly answered in the negative; on which Philip, prostrating himself on the ground before a crucifix, exclaimed, "I implore thy divine majesty, Ruler of all things, that thou keep me in the mind that I am in, never to allow myself either to become or to be called the lord of those who reject thee for their Lord."—The story was told to the historian who records it by a member of the assembly, filled with admiration at the pious zeal of the monarch! From that moment the doom of the Netherlands was sealed.

Yet Egmont had so little knowledge of the true state of things, that he indulged in the most cheerful prognostications for the future. His frank and cordial nature readily responded to the friendly demonstrations he received, and his vanity was gratified by the homage universally paid to him. On leaving the country, he made a visit to the royal residences of Segovia and of the Escorial,—the magnificent pile already begun by Philip, and which continued to occupy more or less of his time during the remainder of his reign. Egmont, in a letter addressed to the king, declares himself highly delighted with what he has seen at both these places, and assures his sovereign that he returns to Flanders the most contented man in the world.

When arrived there, early in April, 1565, the count was loud in his profession of the amiable dispositions of the Castilian court towards the Netherlands. Egmont's countrymen—William of Orange and a few persons of cooler judgment alone excepted—readily indulged in the same dream of sanguine expectation, flattering themselves with the belief that a new policy was to prevail at Madrid, and that their country was henceforth to thrive under the blessings of religious toleration.—It was a pleasing illusion, destined to be of no long duration.

CHAPTER XVIII.

PHILIP'S INFLEXIBILITY. 1565, 1566.

Shortly after Egmont's return to Brussels, Margaret called a meeting of the council of state, at which the sealed instructions brought by the envoy from Madrid were opened and read. They began by noticing the count's demeanor in terms so flattering as showed the mission had proved acceptable to the king. Then followed a declaration, strongly expressed and sufficiently startling. "I would rather lose a hundred thousand lives, if I had so many," said the monarch, "than allow a single change in matters of religion." He, however, recommended that a commission be appointed, consisting of three bishops with a number of jurists, who should advise with the members of the council as to the best mode of instructing the people, especially in their spiritual concerns. It might be well, moreover, to substitute some secret methods for the public forms of execution, which now enabled the heretic to assume to himself the glory of martyrdom, and thereby produce a mischievous impression on the people. No other allusion was made to the pressing grievances of the nation, though, in a letter addressed at the same time to the duchess, Philip said that he had come to no decision as to the council of state, where the proposed change seemed likely to be attended with inconvenience.

This, then, was the result of Egmont's mission to Madrid! This the change so much vaunted in the policy of Philip! "The count has been the dupe of Spanish cunning," exclaimed the prince of Orange. It was too true; and Egmont felt it keenly, as he perceived the ridicule to which he was exposed by the confident tone in which he had talked of the amiable dispositions of the Castilian court, and by the credit he had taken to himself for promoting them.

A greater sensation was produced among the people; for their expectations had been far more sanguine than those entertained by William, and the few who, like him, understood the character of Philip too well to place great confidence in the promises of Egmont. They loudly declaimed against the king's insincerity, and accused their envoy of having shown more concern for his private interests than for those of the public. This taunt touched the honor of that nobleman, who bitterly complained that it was an artifice of Philip to destroy his credit with his countrymen; and the better to prove his good faith, he avowed his purpose of throwing up at once all the offices he held under government.

The spirit of persecution, after a temporary lull, now again awakened. But everywhere the inquisitors were exposed to insult, and met with the same resistance as before; while their victims were cheered with expressions of sympathy from those who saw them led to execution. To avoid the contagion of example, the executions were now conducted secretly in the prisons. But the mystery thus thrown around the fate of the unhappy sufferer only invested it with an additional horror. Complaints were made every day to the government by the states, the magistrates, and the people, denouncing the persecutions to which they were exposed. Spies, they said, were in every house, watching looks, words, gestures. No man was secure, either in person or property. The public groaned under an intolerable slavery. Meanwhile, the Huguenot emissaries were busy as ever in propagating their doctrines; and with the work of reform was mingled the seed of revolution.

The regent felt the danger of this state of things, and her impotence to relieve it. She did all she could in freely exposing it to Philip, informing him at the same time of Egmont's disgust, and the general discontent of the nation, at the instructions from Spain. She ended, as usual, by beseeching her brother to come himself, if he would preserve his authority in the Netherlands. To these communications the royal answers came but rarely; and, when they did come, were for the most part vague and unsatisfactory.

"Everything goes on with Philip," writes Chantonnay, formerly minister to France, to his brother Granvelle,—"Everything goes on from tomorrow to tomorrow; the only resolution is, to remain irresolute. The king will allow matters to become so entangled in the Low Countries, that, if he ever should visit them, he will find it easier to conform to the state of things than to mend it. The lords there are more of kings than the king himself. They have all the smaller nobles in leading-strings. It is impossible that Philip should conduct himself like a man. His only object is to cajole the Flemish nobles, so that he may be spared the necessity of coming to Flanders."

"It is a pity," writes the secretary, Perez, "that the king will manage affairs as he does, now taking counsel of this man, and now of that; concealing some matters from those he consults, and trusting them with others, showing full confidence in no one. With this way of proceeding, it is no wonder that dispatches should be contradictory in their tenor."

It is doubtless true, that procrastination and distrust were the besetting sins of Philip, and were followed by their natural consequences. He had, moreover, as we have seen, a sluggishness of nature, which kept him in Madrid when he should have been in Brussels,—where his father, in similar circumstances, would long since have been, seeing with his own eyes what Philip saw only with the eyes of others. But still his policy, in the present instance, may be referred quite as much to deliberate calculation as to his natural temper. He had early settled it as a fixed principle never to concede religious toleration to his subjects. He had intimated this pretty clearly in his different communications to the government of Flanders. That he did not announce it in a more absolute and unequivocal form may well have arisen from the apprehension, that, in the present irritable state of the people, this might rouse their passions into a flame. At least, it might be reserved for a last resort. Meanwhile, he hoped to weary them out by maintaining an attitude of cold reserve; until, convinced of the hopelessness of resistance, they would cease altogether to resist. In short, he seemed to deal with the Netherlands like a patient angler, who allows the trout to exhaust himself by his own efforts, rather than by a violent movement risk the loss of him altogether. It is clear Philip did not understand the character of the Netherlander,—as dogged and determined as his own.

Considering the natural bent of the king's disposition, there seems no reason to charge Granvelle, as was commonly done in the Low Countries, with having given a direction to his policy. It is, however, certain, that, on all great questions, the minister's judgment seems to have perfectly coincided with that of his master. "If your majesty mitigates the edicts," writes the cardinal, "affairs will become worse in Flanders than they are in France." No change should be allowed in the council of state. A meeting of the states-general would inflict an injury which the king would feel for thirty years to come! Granvelle maintained a busy correspondence with his partisans in the Low Countries, and sent the results of it—frequently the original letters themselves—to Madrid. Thus Philip, by means of the reports of the great nobles on the one hand, and of the Cardinalists on the other, was enabled to observe the movements in Flanders from the most opposite points of view.

The king's replies to the letters of the minister were somewhat scanty, to judge from the complaints which Granvelle made of his neglect. With all this, the cardinal professes to be well pleased that he is rid of so burdensome an office as that of governing the Netherlands. "Here," he writes to his friend Viglius, "I make good cheer, busying myself with my own affairs, and preparing my dispatches in quiet, seldom leaving the house, except to take a walk, to attend church, or to visit my mother." In this simple way of life, the philosophic statesman seems to have passed his time to his own satisfaction, though it is evident, notwithstanding his professions, that he cast many a longing look back to the Netherlands, the seat of his brief authority. "The hatred the people of Flanders bear me," he writes to Philip, "afflicts me sorely; but I console myself that it is for the service of God and my king."[668] The cardinal, amid his complaints of the king's neglect, affected the most entire submission to his will. "I would go anywhere," he writes,—"to the Indies, anywhere in the world,—would even throw myself into the fire, did you desire it." Philip, not long after, put these professions to the test. In October, 1565, he yielded to the regent's importunities, and commanded Granvelle to transfer his residence to Rome. The cardinal would not move. "Anywhere," he wrote to his master, "but to Rome. That is a place of ceremonies and empty show, for which I am nowise qualified. Besides, it would look too much like a submission on your part. My diocese of Mechlin has need of me; now, if I should go to Spain, it would look as if I went to procure the aid which it so much requires." But the cabinet of Madrid were far from desiring the presence of so cunning a statesman to direct the royal counsels. The orders were reiterated, to go to Rome. To Rome, accordingly, the reluctant minister went; and we have a letter from him to the king, dated from that capital, the first of February, 1566, in which he counsels his master by no means to think of introducing the Spanish Inquisition into the Netherlands. It might seem as if, contrary to the proverb, change of climate had wrought some change in the disposition of the cardinal.—From this period, Granvelle, so long the terror of the Low Countries, disappears from the management of their affairs. He does not, however, disappear from the political theatre. We shall again meet with the able and ambitious prelate, first as viceroy of Naples, and afterwards at Madrid occupying the highest station in the councils of his sovereign.

Early in July, 1565, the commission of reform appointed by Philip transmitted its report to Spain. It recommended no change in the present laws, except so far as to authorize the judges to take into consideration the age and sex of the accused, and in case of penitence to commute the capital punishment of the convicted heretic for banishment. Philip approved of the report in all particulars,—except the only particular that involved a change, that of mercy to the penitent heretic.

At length, the king resolved on such an absolute declaration of his will as should put all doubts on the matter at rest, and relieve him from further importunity. On the seventeenth of October, 1565, he addressed that memorable letter to his sister, from the Wood of Segovia, which may be said to have determined the fate of the Netherlands. Philip, in this, intimates his surprise that his letters should appear to Egmont inconsistent with what he had heard from his lips at Madrid. His desire was not for novelty in anything. He would have the Inquisition conducted by the inquisitors, as it had hitherto been, and as by right, divine and human, belonged to them. For the edicts, it was no time in the present state of religion to make any change; both his own and those of his father must be executed. The Anabaptists—a sect for which, as the especial butt of persecution, much intercession had been made—must be dealt with according to the rigor of the law. Philip concluded by conjuring the regent and the lords in the council faithfully to obey his commands, as in so doing they would render the greatest service to the cause of religion and of their country,—which last, he adds, without the execution of these ordinances, would be of little worth.

In a private letter to the regent of nearly the same date with these public dispatches, Philip speaks of the proposed changes in the council of state as a subject on which he had not made up his mind. He notices also the proposed convocation of the states-general as a thing, in the present disorders of the country, altogether inexpedient.—Thus the king's dispatches covered nearly all the debatable ground on which the contest had been so long going on between the crown and the country. There could be no longer any complaint of ambiguity or reserve in the expression of the royal will. "God knows," writes Viglius, "what wry faces were made in the council on learning the absolute will of his majesty!" There was not one of its members, not even the president or Barlaimont, who did not feel the necessity of bending to the tempest so far as to suspend, if not to mitigate, the rigor of the law. They looked to the future with gloomy apprehension. Viglius strongly urged, that the dispatches should not be made public till some further communication should be had with Philip to warn him of the consequences. In this he was opposed by the prince of Orange. "It was too late," he said, "to talk of what was expedient to be done. Since the will of his majesty was so unequivocally expressed, all that remained for the government was to execute it." In vain did Viglius offer to take the whole responsibility of the delay on himself. William's opinion, supported by Egmont and Hoorne, prevailed with the regent, too timid, by such an act of disobedience, to hazard the displeasure of her brother. As, late in the evening, the council broke up, William was heard to exclaim, "Now we shall see the beginning of a fine tragedy!"

In the month of December, the regent caused copies of the dispatches, with extracts from the letters to herself, to be sent to the governors and the councils of the several provinces, with orders that they should see to their faithful execution. Officers, moreover, were to be appointed, whose duty it was to ascertain the manner in which these orders were fulfilled, and to report thereon to the government.

The result was what had been foreseen. The publication of the dispatches—to borrow the words of a Flemish writer—created a sensation throughout the country little short of what would have been caused by a declaration of war. Under every discouragement, men had flattered themselves, up to this period, with the expectation of some change for the better. The constantly increasing number of the Reformers, the persevering resistance to the Inquisition, the reiterated remonstrances to the government, the general persuasion that the great nobles, even the regent, were on their side, had all combined to foster the hope that toleration, to some extent, would eventually be conceded by Philip. This hope was now crushed. Whatever doubts had been entertained were dispelled by these last dispatches, which came like a hurricane, sweeping away the mists that had so long blinded the eyes of men, and laying open the policy of the crown, clear as day, to the dullest apprehension. The people passed to the extremity of despair. The Spanish Inquisition, with its train of horrors, seemed to be already in the midst of them. They called to mind all the tales of woe they had heard of it. They recounted the atrocities perpetrated by the Spaniards in the New World, which, however erroneously, they charged on the Holy Office. "Do they expect," they cried, "that we shall tamely wait here, like the wretched Indians, to be slaughtered by millions?" Men were seen gathering into knots, in the streets and public squares, discussing the conduct of the government, and gloomily talking of secret associations and foreign alliances. Meetings were stealthily held in the woods, and in the suburbs of the great towns, where the audience listened to fanatical preachers, who, while discussing the doctrines of religious reform, darkly hinted at resistance. Tracts were printed, and widely circulated, in which the reciprocal obligations of lord and vassal were treated, and the right of resistance was maintained; and, in some instances, these difficult questions were handled with decided ability. A more common form was that of satire and scurrilous lampoon,—a favorite weapon with the early Reformers. Their satirical sallies were levelled indifferently at the throne and the Church. The bishops were an obvious mark. No one was spared. Comedies were written to ridicule the clergy. Never since the discovery of the art of printing—more than a century before—had the press been turned into an engine of such political importance as in the earlier stages of the revolution in the Netherlands. Thousands of the seditious pamphlets thus thrown off were rapidly circulated among a people, the humblest of whom possessed what many a noble in other lands, at that day, was little skilled in,—the art of reading. Placards were nailed to the doors of the magistrates, in some of the cities, proclaiming that Rome stood in need of her Brutus. Others were attached to the gates of Orange and Egmont, calling on them to come forth and save their country.

Margaret was filled with alarm at these signs of disaffection throughout the land. She felt the ground trembling beneath her. She wrote again and again to Philip, giving full particulars of the state of the public sentiment, and the seditious spirit which seemed on the verge of insurrection. She intimated her wish to resign the government. She besought him to allow the states-general to be summoned, and, at all events, to come in person and take the reins from her hands, too weak to hold them.—Philip coolly replied, that "he was sorry the dispatches from Segovia had given such offence. They had been designed only for the service of God and the good of the country."

In this general fermentation, a new class of men came on the stage, important by their numbers, though they had taken no part as yet in political affairs. These were the lower nobility of the country; men of honorable descent, and many of them allied by blood or marriage with the highest nobles of the land. They were too often men of dilapidated fortunes, fallen into decay through their own prodigality, or that of their progenitors. Many had received their education abroad, some in Geneva, the home of Calvin, where they naturally imbibed the doctrines of the great Reformer. In needy circumstances, with no better possession than the inheritance of honorable traditions, or the memory of better days, they were urged by a craving, impatient spirit, which naturally made them prefer any change to the existing order of things. They were, for the most part, bred to arms; and, in the days of Charles the Fifth, had found an ample career opened to their ambition under the imperial banners. But Philip, with less policy than his father, had neglected to court this class of his subjects, who, without fixed principles or settled motives of action, seemed to float on the surface of events, prepared to throw their weight, at any moment, into the scale of revolution.

Some twenty of these cavaliers, for the most part young men, met together in the month of November, in Brussels, at the house of Count Culemborg, a nobleman attached to the Protestant opinions. Their avowed purpose was to listen to the teachings of a Flemish divine, named Junius, a man of parts and learning, who had been educated in the school of Calvin, and who, having returned to the Netherlands, exercised, under the very eye of the regent, the dangerous calling of the missionary. At this meeting of the discontented nobles, the talk naturally turned on the evils of the land, and the best means of remedying them. The result of the conferences was the formation of a league, the principal objects of which are elaborately set forth in a paper known as the "Compromise."

This celebrated document declares that the king had been induced by evil counsellors,—for the most part foreigners,—in violation of his oath, to establish the Inquisition in the country; a tribunal opposed to all law, divine and human, surpassing in barbarity anything ever yet practiced by tyrants, tending to bring the land to utter ruin, and the inhabitants to a state of miserable bondage. The confederates, therefore, in order not to become the prey of those who, under the name of religion, seek only to enrich themselves at the expense of life and property, bind themselves by a solemn oath to resist the establishment of the Inquisition, under whatever form it may be introduced, and to protect each other against it with their lives and fortunes. In doing this, they protest that, so far from intending anything to the dishonor of the king, their only intent is to maintain the king in his estate, and to preserve the tranquility of the realm. They conclude with solemnly invoking the blessing of the Almighty on this their lawful and holy confederation.

Such are some of the principal points urged in this remarkable instrument, in which little mention is made of the edicts, every other grievance being swallowed up in that of the detested Inquisition. Indeed, the translations of the "Compromise," which soon appeared, in various languages, usually bore the title of "League of the Nobles of Flanders against the Spanish Inquisition."

It will hardly be denied that those who signed this instrument had already made a decided move in the game of rebellion. They openly arrayed themselves against the execution of the law and the authority of the crown. They charged the king with having violated his oath, and they accused him of abetting a persecution which, under the pretext of religion, had no other object than the spoil of its victims. It was of little moment that all this was done under professions of loyalty. Such professions are the decent cover with which the first approaches are always made in a revolution.—The copies of the instrument differ somewhat from each other. One of these, before me, as if to give the edge of personal insult to their remonstrance, classes in the same category "the vagabond, the priest, and the Spaniard."

Among the small company who first subscribed the document, we find names that rose to eminence in the stormy scenes of the revolution. There was Count Louis of Nassau, a younger brother of the prince of Orange, the "bon chevalier," as William used to call him,—a title well earned by his generous spirit and many noble and humane qualities. Louis was bred a Lutheran, and was zealously devoted to the cause of reform, when his brother took but a comparatively languid interest in it. His ardent, precipitate temper was often kept in check, and more wisely directed, by the prudent counsels of William; while he amply repaid his brother by his devoted attachment, and by the zeal and intrepidity with which he carried out his plans. Louis, indeed, might be called the right hand of William.

Another of the party was Philip de Marnix, lord of St. Aldegonde. He was the intimate friend of William of Orange. In the words of a Belgian writer, he was one of the beautiful characters of the time; distinguished alike as a soldier, a statesman, and a scholar. It is to his pen that the composition of the "Compromise" has generally been assigned. Some critics have found its tone inconsistent with the sedate and tranquil character of his mind. Yet St. Aldegonde's device, "Repos ailleurs," would seem to indicate a fervid imagination and an impatient spirit of activity.

But the man who seems to have entered most heartily into these first movements of the revolution was Henry, viscount of Brederode. He sprung from an ancient line, boasting his descent from the counts of Holland. The only possession that remained to him, the lordship of Viana, he still claimed to hold as independent of the king of Spain, or any other potentate. His patrimony had been wasted in a course of careless indulgence, and little else was left than barren titles and pretensions,—which, it must be owned, he was not diffident in vaunting. He was fond of convivial pleasures, and had a free, reckless humor, that took with the people, to whom he was still more endeared by his sturdy hatred of oppression. Brederode was, in short, one of those busy, vaporing characters, who make themselves felt at the outset of a revolution, but are soon lost in the course of it; like those ominous birds which with their cries and screams herald in the tempest that soon sweeps them out of sight for ever.

Copies of the "Compromise," with the names attached to it, were soon distributed through all parts of the country, and eagerly signed by great numbers, not merely of the petty nobility and gentry, but of substantial burghers and wealthy merchants, men who had large interests at stake in the community. Hames, king-at-arms of the Golden Fleece, who was a zealous confederate, boasted that the names of two thousand such persons were on his paper. Among them were many Roman Catholics; and we are again called to notice, that in the outset this Protestant revolution received important support from the Catholics themselves, who forgot all religious differences in a common hatred of arbitrary power.

Few, if any, of the great nobles seem to have been among the number of those who signed the "Compromise,"—certainly none of the council of state. It would hardly have done to invite one of the royal councilors—in other words, one of the government—to join the confederacy, when they would have been bound by the obligations of their office to disclose it to the regent.

But if the great lords did not become actual parties to the league, they showed their sympathy with the object of it, by declining to enforce the execution of the laws against which it was directed. On the twenty-fourth of January, 1566, the prince of Orange addressed, from Breda, a letter to the regent, on the occasion of her sending him the dispatches from Segovia, for the rule of his government in the provinces. In this remarkable letter, William exposes, with greater freedom than he was wont, his reasons for refusing to comply with the royal orders. "I express myself freely and frankly," he says, "on a topic on which I have not been consulted; but I do so, lest by my silence I may incur the responsibility of the mischief that must ensue." He then briefly, and in a decided tone, touches on the evils of the Inquisition,—introduced, as he says, contrary to the repeated pledges of the king,—and on the edicts. Great indulgence had been of late shown in the interpretation of these latter; and to revive them on a sudden, so as to execute them with their ancient rigor, would be most disastrous. There could not be a worse time than the present, when the people were sorely pressed by scarcity of food, and in a critical state from the religious agitations on their borders. It might cost the king his empire in the Netherlands, and throw it into the hands of his neighbors.

"For my own part," he concludes, "if his majesty insists on the execution of these measures, rather than incur the stain which must rest on me and my house by attempting it, I will resign my office into the hands of some one better acquainted with the humors of the people, and who will be better able to maintain order in the country."

In the same tone several of the other provincial governors replied to Margaret, declaring that they could never coolly stand by and see fifty or sixty thousand of their countrymen burned to death for errors of religion. The regent was sorely perplexed by this desertion of the men on whom she most relied. She wrote to them in a strain of expostulation, and besought the prince, in particular, not to add to the troubles of the time, by abandoning his post, where the attachment of the people gave him such unbounded influence.

The agitations of the country, in the mean time, continued to increase. There was a scarcity of bread,—so often the forerunner of revolution,—and this article had risen to an enormous price. The people were menaced with famine, which might have led to serious consequences, but for a temporary relief from Spain.

Rumors now began to be widely circulated of the speedy coming of Philip, with a large army, to chastise his vassals; and the rumors gained easy credit with those who felt they were already within the pale of rebellion. Duke Eric of Brunswick was making numerous levies on the German borders, and it was generally believed that their destination was Flanders. It was in vain that Margaret, who ascertained the falsehood of the report, endeavored to undeceive the people.

A short time previously, in the month of June, an interview had taken place, at Bayonne, between the queen-mother, Catherine de Medicis, and her daughter, Isabella of Spain. Instead of her husband, Isabella was accompanied at this interview by the counsellor in whom he most trusted, the duke of Alva. The two queens were each attended by a splendid retinue of nobles. The meeting was prolonged for several days, amidst a succession of balls, tourneys, and magnificent banquets, at which the costly dress and equipage of the French nobility contrasted strangely enough with the no less ostentatious simplicity of the Spaniards. This simplicity, so contrary to the usual pomp of the Castilian, was in obedience to the orders of Philip, who, foreseeing the national emulation, forbade the indulgence of it at a foolish cost, which in the end was severely felt by the shattered finances of France.

Amid the brilliant pageants which occupied the public eye, secret conferences were daily carried on between Catherine and the duke of Alva. The results were never published, but enough found its way into the light to show that the principal object was the extermination of heresy in France and the Netherlands. The queen-mother was for milder measures,—though slower not less sure. But the iron-hearted duke insisted that to grant liberty of conscience was to grant unbounded license. The only way to exterminate the evil was by fire and sword! It was on this occasion that, when Catherine suggested that it was easier to deal with the refractory commons than with the nobles, Alva replied, "True, but ten thousand frogs are not worth the head of a single salmon."—an ominous simile, which was afterwards remembered against its author, when he ruled over the Netherlands.

The report of these dark conferences had reached the Low Countries, where it was universally believed that the object of them was to secure the cooperation of France in crushing the liberties of Flanders.

In the panic thus spread throughout the country, the more timid or prudent, especially of those who dwelt in the seaports, began to take measures for avoiding these evils by emigration. They sought refuge in Protestant states, and especially in England, where no less than thirty thousand, we are told by a contemporary, took shelter under the scepter of Elizabeth. They swarmed in the cities of London and Sandwich, and the politic queen assigned them also the seaport of Norwich as their residence. Thus Flemish industry was transferred to English soil. The course of trade between the two nations now underwent a change. The silk and woolen stuffs, which had formerly been sent from Flanders to England, became the staple of a large export-trade from England to Flanders. "The Low Countries," writes the correspondent of Granvelle, "are the Indies of the English, who make war on our purses, as the French, some years since, made war on our towns."

Some of the Flemish provinces, instead of giving way to despondency, appealed sturdily to their charters, to rescue them from the arbitrary measures of the crown. The principal towns of Brabant, with Antwerp at their head, intrenched themselves behind their Joyeuse Entrée. The question was brought before the council; a decree was given in favor of the applicants, and ratified by the regent; and the free soil of Brabant was no longer polluted by the presence of the Inquisition.

The gloom now became deeper round the throne of the regent. Of all in the Netherlands, the person least to be envied was the one who ruled over them. Weaned from her attachment to Granvelle by the influence of the lords, Margaret now found herself compelled to resume the arbitrary policy which she disapproved, and to forfeit the support of the very party to which of late she had given all her confidence. The lords in the council withdrew from her, the magistrates in the provinces thwarted her, and large masses of the population were arrayed in actual resistance against the government. It may seem strange that it was not till the spring of 1566 that she received positive tidings of the existence of the league, when she was informed of it by Egmont, and some others of the council of state. As usual, the rumor went beyond the truth. Twenty or thirty thousand men were said to be in arms, and half that number to be prepared to march on Brussels, and seize the person of the regent, unless she complied with their demands.

For a moment Margaret thought of taking refuge in the citadel. But she soon rallied, and showed the spirit to have been expected in the daughter of Charles the Fifth. She ordered the garrisons to be strengthened in the fortresses throughout the country. She summoned the companies of ordonnance to the capital, and caused them to renew their oaths of fidelity to the king. She wrote to the Spanish ministers at the neighboring courts, informed them of the league, and warned them to allow no aid to be sent to it from the countries where they resided. Finally, she called a meeting of the knights of the Golden Fleece and the council of state, for the twenty-seventh of March, to deliberate on the perilous situation of the country. Having completed these arrangements, the duchess wrote to her brother, informing him exactly of the condition of things, and suggesting what seemed to her counsellors the most effectual remedy. She wrote the more freely, as her love of power had yielded to a sincere desire to extricate herself from the trials and troubles which attended it.

There were but two courses, she said, force or concession. The former, to say nothing of the ruin it would bring on the land, was rendered difficult by want of money to pay the troops, and by the want of trustworthy officers, to command them. Concessions must consist in abolishing the Inquisition,—a useless tribunal where sectaries swarmed openly in the cities,—in modifying the edicts, and in granting a free pardon to all who had signed the Compromise, provided they would return to their duty. On these terms, the lords of the council were willing to guaranty the obedience of the people. At all events, they promised Margaret their support in enforcing it. She would not express her own preference for either of the alternatives presented to Philip; but would faithfully execute his commands, whatever they might be, to the best of her ability.—Without directly expressing her preference, it was pretty clear on which side it lay. Margaret concluded by earnestly beseeching her brother to return an immediate answer to her dispatches by the courier who bore them.

The person who seems to have enjoyed the largest share of Margaret's confidence, at this time, was Egmont. He remained at Brussels, and still kept his seat in council after William had withdrawn to his estates in Breda. Yet the prince, although he had left Brussels in disgust, had not taken part with the confederates; much less—as was falsely rumored, and to his great annoyance—put himself at their head. His brother, it is true, and some of his particular friends, had joined the league. But Louis declares that he did so without the knowledge of William. When the latter, a fortnight afterwards, learned the existence of the league, he expressed his entire disapprobation of it. He even used his authority, we are told, to prevent the confederates from resorting to some violent measures, among others the seizure of Antwerp, promising that he would aid them to accomplish their ends in a more orderly way. What he desired was, to have the states-general called together by the king. But he would not assume a hostile attitude, like that of the confederates, to force him into this unpalatable measure. When convened, he would have had the legislature, without transcending its constitutional limits, remonstrate, and lay the grievances of the nation before the throne.

This temperate mode of proceeding did not suit the hot blood of the younger confederates. "Your brother," writes Hames to Louis, "is too slow and lukewarm. He would have us employ only remonstrance against these hungry wolves; against enemies who do nothing in return but behead, and banish, and burn us. We are to do the talking, and they the acting. We must fight with the pen, while they fight with the sword."

The truth was, that William was not possessed of the fiery zeal which animated most of the Reformers. In his early years, as we have seen, he had been subjected to the influence of the Protestant religion at one period, and of the Roman Catholic at another. If the result of this had been to beget in him something like a philosophical indifference to the great questions in dispute, it had proved eminently favorable to a spirit of toleration. He shrunk from that system of persecution which proscribed men for their religious opinions. Soon after the arrival of the dispatches from Segovia, William wrote to a friend: "The king orders, not only obstinate heretics, but even the penitent, to be put to death. I know not how I can endure this. It does not seem to me that such measures are either Christian-like or practicable." In another letter he says: "I greatly fear these dispatches will drive men into rebellion. I should be glad, if I could, to save my country from ruin, and so many innocent persons from slaughter. But when I say anything in the council, I am sure to be misinterpreted. So I am greatly perplexed; since speech and silence are equally bad."

Acting with his habitual caution, therefore, he spoke little, and seldom expressed his sentiments in writing. "The less one puts in writing," he said to his less prudent brother, "the better." Yet when the occasion demanded it, he did not shrink from a plain avowal of his sentiments, both in speaking and writing. Such was the speech he delivered in council before Egmont's journey to Spain; and in the same key was the letter which he addressed to the regent on receiving the dispatches from Segovia. But, whatever might be his reserve, his real opinions were not misunderstood. He showed them too plainly by his actions. When Philip's final instructions were made known to him by Margaret, the prince, as he had before done under Granvelle, ceased to attend the meetings of the council, and withdrew from Brussels. He met in Breda, and afterwards in Hoogstraten, in the spring of 1566, a number of the principal nobles, under cover, as usual, of a banquet. Discussions took place on the state of the country, and some of the confederates who were present at the former place were for more violent measures than William approved. As he could not bring them over to his own temperate policy, he acquiesced in the draft of a petition, which, as we shall see in the ensuing chapter, was presented to the regent. On the whole, up to the period at which we are arrived, the conduct of the prince of Orange must be allowed to have been wise and consistent. In some respects it forms a contrast to that of his more brilliant rival, Count Egmont.

This nobleman was sincerely devoted to the Roman Catholic faith. He was stanch in his loyalty to the king. At the same time he was ardently attached to his country, and felt a generous indignation at the wrongs she suffered from her rulers. Thus Egmont was acted on by opposite feelings; and, as he was a man of impulse, his conduct, as he yielded sometimes to the one and sometimes to the other of these influences, might be charged with inconsistency. None charged him with insincerity.

There was that in Egmont's character which early led the penetrating Granvelle to point him out to Philip as a man who by politic treatment might be secured to the royal cause. Philip and his sister, the regent, both acted on this hint. They would hardly have attempted as much with William. Egmont's personal vanity made him more accessible to their approaches. It was this, perhaps, quite as much as any feeling of loyalty, which, notwithstanding the affront put on him, as he conceived, by the king, induced him to remain at Brussels, and supply the place in the councils of the regent which William had left vacant. Yet we find one of Granvelle's correspondents speaking of Egmont as too closely united with the lords to be detached from them. "To say truth," says the writer, "he even falters in his religion; and whatever he may say today on this point, he will be sure to say the contrary tomorrow." Such a man, who could not be true to himself, could hardly become the leader of others.

"They put Egmont forward," writes the regent's secretary, "as the boldest, to say what other men dare not say." This was after the dispatches had been received. "He complains bitterly," continues the writer, "of the king's insincerity. The prince has more finesse. He has also more credit with the nation. If you could gain him, you will secure all." Yet Philip did not try to gain him. With all his wealth, he was not rich enough to do it. He knew this, and he hated William with the hatred which a despotic monarch naturally bears to a vassal of such a temper. He perfectly understood the character of William. The nation understood it too; and, with all their admiration for the generous qualities of Egmont, it was to his greater rival that they looked to guide them in the coming struggle of the revolution.

CHAPTER XIX.

THE CONFEDERATES.

1566.

The party of the malcontents in the Netherlands comprehended persons of very different opinions, who were by no means uniformly satisfied with the reasonable objects proposed by the compromise. Some demanded entire liberty of conscience. Others would not have stopped short of a revolution that would enable the country to shake off the Spanish yoke. And another class of men without principle of any kind such as are too often thrown up in strong political fermentations looked to these intestine troubles as offering the means of repairing their own fortunes out of the wreck of their country. Yet, with the exception of the last, there were few who would not have been content to accept the compromise as the basis of their demands.

The winter had passed away, however, and the confederacy had wrought no change in the conduct of the government. Indeed, the existence of the confederacy would not appear to have been known to the regent till the latter part of February, 1566. It was not till the close of the following month that it was formally disclosed to her by some of the great lords. If it was known to her before, Margaret must have thought it prudent to affect ignorance, till some overt action on the part of the league called for her notice.

It became, then, a question with the members of the league what was next to be done. It was finally resolved to present a petition, in the name of the whole body, to the regent, a measure which, as already intimated, received the assent, if not the approbation, of the prince of Orange. The paper was prepared, as it would seem, in William’s own house at Brussels, by his brother Louis; and was submitted, we are told, to the revision of the prince, who thus had it in his power to mitigate, in more than one instance the vehemence, or rather violence, of the expressions.

To give greater effect to the petition, it was determined that a large deputation from the league should accompany its presentation to the regent. Notice was given to four hundred of the confederates to assemble at the beginning of April. They were to come well-mounted and armed, prepared at once to proceed to Brussels. Among the number thus enrolled, we find three gentlemen of Margaret's own household, as well as some members of the companies of ordonnance commanded by the prince, and by the Counts Egmont, Hoorne, and other great lords.

The duchess, informed of these proceedings, called a meeting of the council of state and the knights of the Golden Fleece, to determine on the course to be pursued. The discussion was animated, as there was much difference of opinion. Some agreed with Count Barlaimont in regarding the measure in the light of a menace. Such a military array could have no other object than to overawe the government, and was an insult to the regent. In the present excited state of the people, it would be attended with the greatest danger to allow their entrance into the capital.

The prince of Orange, who had yielded to Margaret’s earnest entreaties that he would attend this meeting, took a different view of the matter. The number of the delegates, he said, only proved the interest taken in the petition. They were men of rank, some of them kinsmen or personal friends of those present. Their characters and position in the country were sufficient sureties that they meditated no violence to the state. They were the representatives of an ancient order of nobility; and it would be strange indeed, if they were to be excluded from the right of petition, enjoyed by the humblest individual. In the course of the debate, William made some personal allusions to his own situation, delivering himself with great warmth. His enemies, he said, had the royal ear, and would persuade the king to kill him and confiscate his property. He was even looked upon as the head of the confederacy. It was of no use for him to give his opinion in the council, where it was sure to be misinterpreted. All that remained for him was to ask leave to resign his offices, and withdraw to his estates. Count Hoorne followed in much the same key, inveighing bitterly against the ingratitude of Philip. The two nobles yielded, at length, so far to Margaret's remonstrances, as to give their opinions on the course to be pursued. But when she endeavored to recall them to their duty by reminding them of their oaths to the king, they boldly replied, they would willingly lay down their lives for their country, but would never draw sword for the edicts or the Inquisition. —William’s views in regard to the admission of the confederates into Brussels were supported by much the greater part of the assembly, and finally prevailed with the regent.

On the third of April, 1566, two hundred of the confederates entered the gates of Brussels. They were on horseback, and each man was furnished with a brace of pistols in his holsters, wearing in other respects only the usual arms of a private gentleman. The Viscount Brederode and Louis of Nassau rode at their head. They prudently conformed to William’s advice, not to bring any foreigners in their train, and to enter the city quietly, without attempting to stir the populace by any military display, or the report of fire-arms. Their coming was welcomed with general joy by the inhabitants, who greeted them as a band of patriots ready to do battle for the liberties of the country. They easily found quarters in the houses of the principal citizens; and Louis and Brederode were lodged in the mansion of the prince of Orange.

On the following day a meeting of the confederates was held at the hotel of Count Culemborg, where they listened to a letter which Brederode had just received from Spain, informing him of the death of Morone, a Flemish nobleman well known to them all, who had perished in the flames of the Inquisition. With feelings exasperated by this gloomy recital, they renewed, in the most solemn manner, their oaths of fidelity to the league. An application was then made to Margaret for leave to lay their petition before her. The day following was assigned for the act; and at noon, on the fifth of April, the whole company walked in solemn procession through the streets of Brussels to the palace of the regent. She received them, surrounded by the lords, in the great hall adjoining the council-chamber. As they defiled before her, the confederates ranged themselves along the sides of the apartment. Margaret seems to have been somewhat disconcerted by the presence of so martial an array within the walls of her palace. But she soon recovered herself, and received them graciously.

Brederode was selected to present the petition, and he prefaced it by a short address. They had come in such numbers, he said, the better to show their respect to the regent, and the deep interest they took in the cause. They had been accused of opening a correspondence with foreign princes, which he affirmed to be a malicious slander, and boldly demanded to be confronted with the authors of it. —Notwithstanding this stout denial, it is very possible the audience did not place implicit confidence in the assertions of the speaker. He then presented the petition to the regent, expressing the hope that she would approve of it, as dictated only by their desire to promote the glory of the king and the good of the country. If this was its object, Margaret replied, she doubted not she should be content with it. The following day was named for them again to wait on her, and receive her answer.

The instrument began with a general statement of the distresses of the land, much like that in the Compromise, but couched in more respectful language. The petitioners had hoped that the action of the great lords, or of the states-general, would have led to some reform. But finding these had not moved in the matter, while the evil went on increasing from day to day, until ruin was at the gate, they had come to beseech her highness to lay the subject herself before the king, and implore his majesty to save the country from perdition by the instant abolition of both the Inquisition and the edicts. Far from wishing to dictate laws to their sovereign, they humbly besought her to urge on him the necessity of convoking the states-general, and devising with them some effectual remedy for the existing evils. Meanwhile they begged of her to suspend the further execution of the laws in regard to religion until his majesty's pleasure could be known. If their prayer were not granted, they at least were absolved from all responsibility as to the consequences, now that they had done their duty as true and loyal subjects. —The business-like character of this document forms a contrast to the declamatory style of the Compromise; and in its temperate tone, particularly, we may fancy we recognize the touches of the more prudent hand of the prince of Orange.

On the sixth, the confederates again assembled in the palace of the regent, to receive her answer. They were in greater force than before, having been joined by a hundred and fifty of their brethren, who had entered the city the night previous, under the command of Counts Culemborg and Berg. They were received by Margaret in the same courteous manner as on the preceding day, and her answer was made to them in writing, being endorsed on their own petition.

She announced in it her purpose of using all her influence with her royal brother to persuade him to accede to their wishes. They might rely on his doing all that was conformable to his natural and accustomed benignity. She had herself, with the advice of her council and the knights of the Golden Fleece, prepared a scheme for moderating the edicts, to be laid before his majesty, which she trusted would satisfy the nation. They must however, be aware, that she herself had no power to suspend the execution of the laws. But she would send instructions to the inquisitors to proceed with all discretion in the exercise of their functions, until they should learn the king's pleasure. She trusted that the confederates would so demean themselves as not to make it necessary to give different orders. All this she had done with the greater readiness, from her conviction that they had no design to make any innovation in the established religion of the country, but desired rather to uphold it in all its vigor.

To this reply, as gracious in its expressions, and as favorable in its import, as the league could possibly have expected, they made a formal answer in writing, which they presented in a body to the duchess, on the eighth of the month. They humbly thanked her for the prompt attention she had given to their petition, but would have been still more contented if her answer had been more full and explicit. They knew the embarrassments under which she labored, and they thanked her for the assurance she had given, which, it may be remarked, she never did give,—that all proceedings connected with the Inquisition and the edicts should be stayed until his majesty’s pleasure should be ascertained. They were most anxious to conform to whatever the king, with the advice and consent of the states-general, duly assembled, should determine in matters of religion, and they would show their obedience by taking such order for their own conduct as should give entire satisfaction to her highness.

To this the duchess briefly replied, that, if there were any cause for offence hereafter, it would be chargeable, not on her, but on them. She prayed the confederates henceforth to desist from their secret practices, and to invite no new member to join their body.

This brief and admonitory reply seems not to have been to the taste of the petitioners, who would willingly have drawn from Margaret some expression that might be construed into a sanction of their proceedings. After a short deliberation among themselves, they again addressed her by the mouth of one of their own number, the lord of Kerdes. The speaker, after again humbly thanking the regent for her favorable answer, said that it would have given still greater satisfaction to his associates, if she would but have declared, in the presence of the great lords assembled, that she took the union of the confederates in good part and for the service of the king; and he concluded with promising that they would henceforth do all in their power to give contentment to her highness.

To all this the duchess simply replied, she had no doubt of it. When again pressed by the persevering deputy to express her opinion of this assembly, she bluntly answered, she could form no judgment in the matter. —She gave pretty clear evidence, however, of her real opinion, soon after, by dismissing the three gentlemen of her household whom we have mentioned as having joined the league.

As Margaret found that the confederates were not altogether satisfied with her response to their petition, she allowed Count Hoogstraten, one of her councilors, to inform some of them, privately, that she had already written to the provinces to have all processes in affairs of religion stayed until Philip's decision should be known. To leave no room for distrust, the count was allowed to show them copies of the letters.

The week spent by the league in Brussels was a season of general jubilee. At one of the banquets given at Culemborg House, where three hundred confederates were present, Brederode presided. During the repast he related to some of the company, who had arrived on the day after the petition was delivered, the manner in which it had been received by the duchess. She seemed at first disconcerted, he said, by the number of the confederates, but was reassured by Barlaimont, who told her “they were nothing but a crowd of beggars”. This greatly incensed some of the company, with whom, probably, it was too true for a jest. But Brederode, taking it more good-humoredly, said that he and his friends had no objection to the name, since they were ready at any time to become beggars for the service of their king and country. This sally was received with great applause by the guests, who, as they drank to one another, shouted forth, “Vivent les Gueux!”—“Long live the beggars!"

Brederode, finding the jest took so well, an event, indeed, for which he seems to have been prepared, left the room, and soon returned with a beggar’s wallet, and a wooden bowl, such as was used by the mendicant fraternity in the Netherlands. Then, pledging the company in a bumper, he swore to devote his life and fortune to the cause. The wallet and the bowl went round the table; and, as each of the merry guests drank in turn to his confederates, the shout arose of “Vivent les Gueux!” until the hall rang with the mirth of the revelers.

It happened that at the time the prince of Orange and the Counts Egmont and Hoorne were passing by on their way to the council. Their attention was attracted by the noise, and they paused a moment, when William, who knew well the temper of the jovial company, proposed that they should go in, and endeavor to break up their revels. “We may have some business of the council to transact with these men this evening”, he said, “and at this rate they will hardly be in a condition for it”. The appearance of the three nobles gave a fresh impulse to the boisterous merriment of the company; and as the new-comers pledged their friends in the wine-cup, it was received with the same thundering acclamations of “Vivent les Gueux!” This incident, of so little importance in itself, was afterwards made of consequence by the turn that was given to it in the prosecution of the two unfortunate noblemen who accompanied the prince of Orange.

Everyone knows the importance of a popular name to a faction,—a nom de guerre, under which its members may rally and make head together as an independent party. Such the name of “Gueux” now became to the confederates. It soon was understood to signify those who were opposed to the government, and, in a wiser sense, to the Roman Catholic religion. In every language in which the history of these acts has been recorded, the Latin, German, Spanish, or English, the French term Gueux is ever employed to designate this party of malcontents in the Netherlands.

It now became common to follow out the original idea by imitations of the different articles used by mendicants. Staffs were procured, after the fashion of those in the hands of the pilgrims, but more elaborately carved. Wooden bowls, spoons, and knives became in great request, though richly inlaid with silver, according to the fancy or wealth of the possessor. Medals resembling those stuck by the beggars in their bonnets were worn as a badge; and the “Gueux penny”, as it was called,—a gold or silver coin,—was hung from the neck, bearing on one side the effigy of Philip, with the inscription, “Fidèles au roi”; and on the other, two hands grasping a beggar’s wallet, with the further legend, “jusques à porter la besace”;—Faithful to the king, even to carrying the wallet. Even the garments of the mendicant were affected by the confederates, who used them as a substitute for their family liveries; and troops of their retainers, clad in the ash-gray habiliments of the begging friars, might be seen in the streets of Brussels and the other cities of the Netherlands.

On the tenth of April, the confederates quitted Brussels, in the orderly manner in which they had entered it; except that, on issuing from the gate, they announced their departure by firing a salute in honor of the city which had given them so hospitable a welcome. Their visit to Brussels had not only created a great sensation in the capital itself, but throughout the country. Hitherto the league had worked in darkness, as it were, like a band of secret conspirators. But they had now come forward into the light of day, boldly presenting themselves before the regent, and demanding redress of the wrongs under which the nation was groaning. The people took heart, as they saw this broad aegis extended over them to ward off the assaults of arbitrary power. Their hopes grew stronger, as they became assured of the interposition of the regent and the great lords in their favor; and they could hardly doubt that the voice of the country, backed as it was by that of the government, would make itself heard at Madrid, and that Philip would at length be compelled to abandon a policy which menaced him with the loss of the fairest of his provinces. They had yet to learn the character of their sovereign.

CHAPTER XX.

FREEDOM OF WORSHIP.

1566.

On quitting Brussels, the confederates left there four of their number as a sort of committee to watch over the interests of the league. The greater part of the remainder, with Brederode at their head, took the road to Antwerp. They were hardly established in their quarters in that city, when the building was surrounded by thousands of the inhabitants, eager to give their visitors a tumultuous welcome. Brederode came out on the balcony, and, addressing the crowd, told them that he had come there, at the hazard of his life, to rescue them from the miseries of the Inquisition. He called on his audience to take him as their leader in this glorious work; and as the doughty champion pledged them in a goblet of wine which he had brought with him from the table, the mob answered by such a general shout as was heard in the furthest corners of the city. Thus a relation was openly established between the confederates and the people, who were to move forward together in the great march of the revolution.

Soon after the departure of the confederates from Brussels, the regent dispatched an embassy to Madrid to acquaint the king with the recent proceedings, and to urge his acquiescence in the reforms solicited by the league. The envoys chosen were the baron de Montigny—who had taken charge, it may be remembered, of a similar mission before and the marquis of Bergen, a nobleman of liberal principles, but who stood high in the regard of the regent. Neither of the parties showed any alacrity to undertake a commission which was to bring them so closely in contact with the dread monarch in his capital. Bergen found an apology for some time in a wound from a tennis-ball, which disabled his leg; an ominous accident, interpreted by the chroniclers of the time into an intimation from Heaven of the disastrous issue of the mission. Montigny reached Madrid some time before his companion, on the seventeenth of June, and met with a gracious reception from Philip, who listened with a benignant air to the recital of the measures suggested for the relief of the country, terminating, as usual, with an application for a summons of the states-general, as the most effectual remedy for the disorders. But although the envoy was admitted to more than one audience, he obtained no more comfortable assurance, than that the subject should receive the most serious consideration of his majesty.

Meanwhile the regent was busy in digesting the plan of compromise to which she had alluded in her reply to the confederates. When concluded, it was sent to the governors of the several provinces, to be laid before their respective legislatures. Their sanction, it was hoped, would recommend its adoption to the people at large. It was first submitted to some of the smaller states, as Artois, Namur, and Luxemburg, as most likely to prove subservient to the wishes of the government. It was then laid before several of the larger states, as Brabant and Flanders, whose determination might be influenced by the example of the others. Holland, Zealand, Utrecht, and one or two other provinces, where the spirit of independence was highest, were not consulted at all. Yet this politic management did not entirely succeed; and although some few gave an unconditional assent, most of the provinces coupled their acquiescence with limitations that rendered it of little worth.

This was not extraordinary. The scheme was one which, however large the concessions it involved on the part of the government, fell far short of those demanded by the people. It denounced the penalty of death on all ministers and teachers of the reformed religion, and all who harbored them; and while it greatly mitigated the punishment of other offenders, its few sanguinary features led the people sneeringly to call it, instead of “moderation”, the act of “murderation”. It fared, indeed, with this compromise of the regent, as with most other half-way measures. It satisfied neither of the parties concerned in it. The king thought it as much too lenient as the people thought it too severe. It never received the royal sanction, and of course never became a law. It would therefore hardly have deserved the time I have bestowed on it, except as evidence of the conciliatory spirit of the regent's administration.

In the same spirit Margaret was careful to urge the royal officers to give a liberal interpretation to the existing edicts, and to show the utmost discretion in their execution. These functionaries were not slow in obeying commands, which released them from so much of the odium that attached to their ungrateful office. The amiable temper of the government received support from a singular fraud which took place at this time. An instrument was prepared, purporting to have come from the knights of the Golden Fleece, in which this body guaranteed to the confederates that no one in the Low Countries should be molested on account of his religion until otherwise determined by the king and the states-general. This document, which carried its spurious origin on its face, was nevertheless eagerly caught up and circulated among the people, ready to believe what they most desired. In vain the regent, as soon as she heard of it, endeavored to expose the fraud. It was too late; and the influence of this imposture combined with the tolerant measures of the government to inspire a confidence in the community which was soon visible in its results. Some who had gone into exile returned to their country. Many, who had cherished the new doctrines in secret, openly avowed them; while others who were wavering, now that they were relieved from all fear of consequences, became fixed in their opinions. In short, the Reformation, in some form or other, was making rapid advances over the country.

Of the three great sects who embraced it, the Lutherans, the least numerous, were the most eminent for their rank. The Anabaptists, far exceeding them in number, were drawn almost wholly from the humbler classes of the people. It is singular that this sect, the most quiet and inoffensive of all, should have been uniformly dealt with by the law with peculiar rigor. It may, perhaps, be attributed to the bad name which attached to them from the excesses committed by their brethren, the famous Anabaptists of Münster. The third denomination, the Calvinists, far out-numbered both of the other two. They were also the most active in the spirit of proselytism. They were stimulated by missionaries trained in the schools of Geneva; and as their doctrines spread silently over the land, not only men of piety and learning, but persons of the highest social position, were occasionally drawn within the folds of the sect.

The head-quarters of the Calvinists were in Flanders, Hainault, Artois, and the provinces contiguous to France. The border land became the residence of French Huguenots, and of banished Flemings, who on this outpost diligently labored in the cause of the Reformation. The press teemed with publications,—vindications of the faith, polemical tracts, treatises, and satires against the Church of Rome and its errors,—those spiritual missiles, in short, which form the usual magazine for controversial warfare. These were distributed by means of peddlers and travelling tinkers, who carried them, in their distant wanderings, to the humblest firesides throughout the country. There they were left to do their work; and the ground was thus prepared for the laborers whose advent forms an epoch in the history of the Reformation.

These were the ministers or missionaries, whose public preaching soon caused a great sensation throughout the land. They first made their appearance in Western Flanders, before small audiences gathered together stealthily in the gloom of the forest and in the silence of night. They gradually emerged into the open plains, thence proceeding to the villages, until, growing bolder with impunity, they showed themselves in the suburbs of the great towns and cities. On these occasions, thousands of the inhabitants, men, women, and children, in too great force for the magistrates to resist them, poured out of the gates to hear the preacher. In the center of the ground a rude staging was erected, with an awning to protect him from the weather. Immediately round the rude pulpit was gathered the more helpless part of the congregation, the women and children. Behind them stood the men,—those in the outer circle usually furnished with arms,—swords, pikes, muskets,—any weapon they could pick up for the occasion. A patrol of horse occupied the ground beyond, to protect the assembly and prevent interruption. A barricade of wagons and other vehicles was thrown across the avenues that led to the place, to defend it against the assaults of the magistrates or the military. Persons stationed along the high roads distributed religious tracts, and invited the passengers to take part in the services.

The preacher was frequently some converted priest or friar, accustomed to speak in public, who, having passed the greater part of his life in battling for the Church, now showed equal zeal in overturning it. It might be, however, that the orator was a layman; some peasant or artisan, who, gifted with more wit, or possibly more effrontery, than his neighbors, felt himself called on to assume the perilous vocation of a preacher. The discourse was in French or Flemish, whichever might be the language spoken in the neighborhood. It was generally of the homely texture suited both to the speaker and his audience. Yet sometimes he descanted on the woes of the land with a pathos which drew tears from every eye; and at others gave vent to a torrent of fiery eloquence, that kindled the spirit of the ancient martyr in the bosoms of his hearers.

These lofty flights were too often degraded by coarse and scurrilous invectives against the pope, the clergy, and the Inquisition,—themes, peculiarly grateful to his audience, who testified their applause by as noisy demonstrations as if they had been spectators in a theatre. The service was followed by singing some portion of the Psalms in the French version of Marot, or in a Dutch translation which had recently appeared in Holland, and which, although sufficiently rude, passed with the simple people for a wonderful composition. After this, it was common for those who attended to present their infants for baptism; and many couples profited by the occasion to have the marriage ceremony performed with the Calvinistic rites. The exercises were concluded by a collection for the poor of their own denomination. In fine, these meetings, notwithstanding the occasional license of the preacher, seem to have been conducted with a seriousness and decorum which hardly merit the obloquy thrown on them by some of the Catholic writers.

The congregation, it is true, was made up of rather motley materials. Some went out merely to learn what manner of doctrine it was that was taught; others, to hear the singing, where thousands of voices blended together in rude harmony under the canopy of heaven; others, again, with no better motive than amusement, to laugh at the oddity—perhaps the buffoonery—of the preacher. But far the larger portion of the audience went with the purpose of joining in the religious exercises, and worshipping God in their own way. We may imagine what an influence must have been exercised by these meetings, where so many were gathered together, under a sense of common danger, to listen to the words of the teacher, who taught them to hold all human law as light in comparison with the higher law of conscience seated in their own bosoms. Even of those who came to scoff, few there were, probably, who did not go away with some food for meditation, or, it may be, the seeds of future conversion implanted in their breasts.

The first of these public preachings which began as early as May took place in the neighborhood of Ghent. Between six and seven thousand persons were assembled. A magistrate of the city, with more valor than discretion, mounted his horse, and, armed with sword and pistol, rode in among the multitude, and undertook to arrest the minister. But the people hastened to his rescue, and dealt so roughly with the unfortunate officer, that he barely escaped with life from their hands.

From Ghent the preachings extended to Ypres, Bruges, and other great towns of Flanders,—always in the suburbs,—to Valenciennes, and to Tournay, in the province of Hainault, where the Reformers were strong enough to demand a place of worship within the walls. Holland was ready for the Word. Ministers of the new religion, as it was called, were sent both to that quarter and to Zealand. Gatherings of great multitudes were held in the environs of Amsterdam, the Hague, Haarlem, and other large towns, at which the magistrates were sometimes to be found mingled with the rest of the burghers.

But the place where these meetings were conducted on the greatest scale was Antwerp, a city containing then more than a hundred thousand inhabitants, and the most important mart for commerce in the Netherlands. It was the great resort of foreigners. Many of these were Huguenots, who, under the pretext of trade, were much more busy with the concerns of their religion. At the meetings without the walls, it was not uncommon for thirteen or fourteen thousand persons to assemble. Resistance on the part of the magistrates was ineffectual. The mob got possession of the keys of the city; and, as most of the Calvinists were armed, they constituted a formidable force. Conscious of their strength, they openly escorted their ministers back to town, and loudly demanded that some place of worship should be appropriated to them within the walls of Antwerp. The quiet burghers became alarmed. As it was known that in the camp of the Reformers were many reckless and disorderly persons, they feared the town might be given over to pillage. All trade ceased. Many of the merchants secreted their effects, and some prepared to make their escape as speedily as possible.

The magistrates, in great confusion, applied to the regent, and besought her to transfer her residence to Antwerp, where her presence might overawe the spirit of sedition. But Margaret’s council objected to her placing herself in the hands of so factious a population; and she answered the magistrates by inquiring what guaranty they could give her for her personal safety. They then requested that the prince of Orange, who held the office of burgrave of Antwerp, and whose influence with the people was unbounded, might be sent to them. Margaret hesitated as to this; for she had now learned to regard William with distrust, as assuming more and more an unfriendly attitude towards her brother. But she had no alternative, and she requested him to transfer his residence to the disorderly capital, and endeavor to restore it to tranquility. The prince, on the other hand, disgusted with the course of public affairs, had long wished to withdraw from any share in their management. It was with reluctance he accepted the commission.

As he drew near to Antwerp the people flocked out by thousands to welcome him. It would seem as if they hailed him as their deliverer; and every window, verandah, and roof was crowded with spectators as he rode through the gates of the capital. The people ran up and down the streets, singing psalms, or shouting, “Vivent les Gueux!” while they thronged round the prince’s horse in so dense a mass that it was scarcely possible for him to force a passage. Yet these demonstrations of his popularity were not altogether satisfactory; and he felt no pleasure at being thus welcomed as a chief of the league, which, as we have seen, he was far from regarding with approbation. Waving his hand repeatedly to those around him, he called on them to disperse, impatiently exclaiming, “Take heed what you do, or, by Heaven, you will have reason to rue it”. He rode straight to the hall where the magistrates were sitting, and took counsel with them as to the best means of allaying the popular excitement, and of preventing the wealthy burghers from quitting the city. During the few weeks he remained there, the prince conducted affairs so discreetly, as to bring about a better understanding between the authorities and the citizens. He even prevailed on the Calvinists to lay aside their arms. He found more difficulty in persuading them to relinquish the design of appropriating to themselves some place of worship within the walls. It was not till William called in the aid of the military to support him, that he compelled them to yield.

Thus the spirit of reform was rapidly advancing in every part of the country,—even in presence of the court, under the very eye of the regent. In Brussels the people went through the streets by night, singing psalms, and shouting the war-cry of Vivent les Gueux! The merchants and wealthy burghers were to be seen with the insignia of the confederates on their dress. Preparations were made for a public preaching without the walls; but the duchess at once declared, that in that event she would make one of the company at the head of her guard, seize the preacher, and hang him up at the gates of the city! This menace had the desired effect.

During these troublous times, Margaret, however little she may have accomplished, could not be accused of sleeping on her post. She caused fasts to be observed, and prayers to be offered in all the churches, to avert the wrath of Heaven from the land. She did not confine herself to these spiritual weapons, but called on the magistrates of the towns to do their duty, and on all good citizens to support them. She commanded foreigners to leave Antwerp, except those only who were there for traffic. She caused placards to be everywhere posted up, reciting the terrible penalties of the law against heretical teachers and those who abetted them; and she offered a reward of six hundred florins to whoever should bring any such offender to punishment. She strengthened the garrisoned towns, and would have levied a force to overawe the refractory; but she had not the funds to pay for it. She endeavored to provide these by means of loans from the great clergy and the principal towns; but with indifferent success. Most of them were already creditors of the government, and they liked the security too little to make further advances. In her extremity, Margaret had no resource but the one so often tried, that of invoking the aid of her brother. “I have no refuge”, she wrote, “but in God and your majesty. It is with anguish and dismay I must admit that my efforts have wholly failed to prevent the public preaching, which has spread over every quarter of the country”. She bitterly complains, in another letter, that, after “so many pressing applications, she should be thus left, without aid and without instructions, to grope her way at random”. She again beseeches Philip to make the concessions demanded, in which event the great lords assure her of their support in restoring order.

It was the policy of the cabinet of Madrid not to commit itself. The royal answers were brief, vague, never indicating a new measure, generally intimating satisfaction with the conduct of the regent, and throwing as far as possible all responsibility on her shoulders.

But besides his sister's letters, the king was careful to provide himself with other sources of information respecting the state of the Netherlands. From some of these the accounts he received of the conduct of the great lords were even less favorable than hers. A letter from the secretary, Armenteros, speaks of the difficulty he finds in fathoming the designs of the prince of Orange,—a circumstance which he attributes to his probable change of religion. “He relies much”, says the writer, “on the support he receives in Germany, on his numerous friends at home, and on the general distrust entertained of the king. The prince is making preparations in good season”, he concludes, “for defending himself against your majesty”.

Yet Philip did not betray any consciousness of this unfriendly temper in the nobles. To the prince of Orange, in particular, he wrote: “You err in imagining that I have not entire confidence in you. Should any one seek to do you an ill office with me, I should not be so light as to give ear to him, having had so large experience of your loyalty and your services”. “This is not the time”, he adds, “for men like you to withdraw from public affairs”. But William was the last man to be duped by these fair words. When others inveighed against the conduct of the regent, William excused her by throwing the blame on Philip. “Resolved to deceive all”, he said, “he begins by deceiving his sister”.

It was about the middle of July that an event occurred which caused still greater confusion in the affairs of the Netherlands. This was a meeting of the confederates at St. Trond, in the neighborhood of Liege. They assembled, two thousand in number, with Count Louis and Brederode at their head. Their great object was to devise some means for their personal security. They were aware that they were held responsible, to some extent, for the late religious movements among the people. They were discontented with the prolonged silence of the king, and they were alarmed by rumors of military preparations, said to be designed against them. The discussions of the assembly, long and animated, showed some difference of opinion. All agreed to demand some guaranty from the government for their security. But the greater part of the body, no longer halting at the original limits of their petition, were now for demanding absolute toleration in matters of religion. Some few of the number, stanch Catholics at heart, who for the first time seem to have had their eyes opened to the results to which they were inevitably tending, now, greatly disgusted, withdrew from the league. Among these was the younger Count Mansfeldt,—a name destined to become famous in the annals of the revolution.

Margaret, much alarmed by these new demonstrations, sent Orange and Egmont to confer with the confederates, and demand why they were thus met in an unfriendly attitude towards the government which they had so lately pledged themselves to support in maintaining order. The confederates replied by sending a deputation of their body to submit their grievances anew to the regent.

The deputies, twelve in number, and profanely nicknamed at Brussels “the twelve apostles”, presented themselves, with Count Louis at their head, on the twenty-eighth of July, at the capital. Margaret, who with difficulty consented to receive them in person, gave unequivocal signs of her displeasure. In the plain language of Louis, “the regent was ready to burst with anger”. The memorial, or rather remonstrance, presented to her was not calculated to allay it.

Without going into details, it is only necessary to say, that the confederates, after stating their grounds for apprehension, requested that an assurance should be given by the government that no harm was intended them. As to pardon for the past, they disclaimed all desire for it. What they had done called for applause, not condemnation. They only trusted that his majesty would be pleased to grant a convocation of the states-general, to settle the affairs of the country. In the meantime, they besought him to allow the concerns of the confederates to be placed in the hands of the prince of Orange, and the Counts Egmont and Hoorne, to act as their mediators with the crown, promising in all things to be guided by their counsel. Thus would tranquility be restored. But without some guaranty for their safety, they should be obliged to protect themselves by foreign aid.

The haughty tone of this memorial forms a striking contrast with that of the petition presented by the same body not four months before, and shows with what rapid strides the revolution had advanced. The religious agitations had revealed the amount of discontent in the country, and to what extent, therefore, the confederates might rely on the sympathy of the people. This was most unequivocally proved during the meeting of St. Trond, where memorials were presented by the merchants, and by persons of the Reformed religion, praying the protection of the league to secure them freedom of worship, till otherwise determined by the states-general. This extraordinary request was granted. Thus the two great parties leaned on each other for support, and gave mutual confidence to their respective movements. The confederates, discarding the idea of grace, which they had once solicited, now darkly intimated a possible appeal to arms. The Reformers, on their side, instead of the mitigation of penalties, now talked of nothing less than absolute toleration. Thus political Revolution and religious Reform went hand in hand together. The nobles and the commons, the two most opposite elements of the body politic, were united closely by a common interest; and a formidable opposition was organized to the designs of the monarch, which might have made any monarch tremble on his throne.

An important fact shows that the confederates coolly looked forward, even at this time, to a conflict with Spain. Louis of Nassau had a large correspondence with the leaders of the Huguenots in France, and of the Lutherans in Germany. By the former he had been offered substantial aid in the way of troops. But the national jealousy entertained of the French would have made it impolitic to accept it. He turned therefore to Germany, where he had numerous connections, and where he subsidized a force consisting of four thousand horse and forty companies of foot, to be at the disposal of the league. This negotiation was conducted under the eye, and, as it seems, partly through the agency, of his brother William. From this moment, therefore, if not before, the prince of Orange may be identified with the party who were prepared to maintain their rights by an appeal to arms.

These movements of the league could not be kept so close but that they came to the knowledge of Margaret. Indeed, she had her secret agents at St. Trond, who put her in possession of whatever was done, or even designed, by the confederates. This was fully exhibited in her correspondence with Philip, while she again called his attention to the forlorn condition of the government, without men, or money, or the means to raise it. “The sectaries go armed”, she writes, “and are organizing their forces. The league is with them. There remains nothing but that they should band together, and sack the towns, villages, and churches, of which I am in marvelous great fear”. —Her fears had gifted her with the spirit of prophecy. She implores her brother, if he will not come himself to Flanders, to convoke the states-general, quoting the words of Egmont, that, unless summoned by the king they would assemble of themselves, to devise some remedy for the miseries of the land, and prevent its otherwise inevitable ruin. At length came back the royal answer to Margaret's reiterated appeals. It had at least one merit, that of being perfectly explicit.

Montigny, on reaching Madrid, as we have seen, had ready access to Philip. Both he and his companion, the marquis of Bergen, were allowed to witness, it would seem, the deliberations of the council of state, when the subject of their mission was discussed. Among the members of that body, at this time, may be noticed the duke of Alva; Ruy Gomez de Silva, prince of Eboli, who divided with Alva the royal favor; Figueroa, count of Feria, a man of an acute and penetrating intellect, formerly ambassador to England, in Queen Mary's time; and Luis de Quixada, the major-domo of Charles the fifth. Besides these there were two or three councilors from the Netherlands, among whose names we meet with that of Hopper, the near friend and associate of Viglius. There was great unanimity in the opinions of this loyal body, where none, it will be readily believed, was disposed to lift his voice in favor of reform. The course of events in the Netherlands, they agreed, plainly showed a deliberate and well-concerted scheme of the great nobles to secure to themselves the whole power of the country. The first step was the removal of Granvelle, a formidable obstacle in their path. Then came the attempt to concentrate the management of affairs in the hands of the council of state. This was followed by assaults on the Inquisition and the edicts, as the things most obnoxious to the people; by the cry in favor of the states-general; by the league, the Compromise, the petitions, the religious assemblies; and, finally, by the present mission to Spain. All was devised by the great nobles, as part of a regular system of hostility to the crown, the real object of which was to overturn existing institutions, and to build up their own authority on the ruins. While the council regarded these proceedings with the deepest indignation, they admitted the necessity of bending to the storm, and under present circumstances judged it prudent for the monarch to make certain specified concessions to the people of the Netherlands. Above all, they earnestly besought Philip, if he would still remain master of this portion of his empire, to defer no longer his visit to the country.

The discussions occupied many and long-protracted sittings of the council; and Philip deeply pondered, in his own closet, on the results, after the discussions were concluded. Even those most familiar with his habits were amazed at the long delay of his decision in the present critical circumstances. The haughty mind of the monarch found it difficult to bend to the required concessions. At length his answer came.

The letter containing it was addressed to his sister, and was dated on the thirty-first of July, 1566, at the Wood of Segovia,—the same place from which he had dictated his memorable dispatches the year preceding. Philip began, as usual, with expressing his surprise at the continued troubles of the country. He was not aware that any rigorous procedure could be charged on the tribunals, or that any change had been made in the laws since the days of Charles the Fifth. Still, as it was much more agreeable to his nature to proceed with clemency and love than with severity, he would conform as far as possible to the desires of his vassals.

He was content that the Inquisition should be abolished in the Netherlands, and in its place be substituted the inquisitorial powers vested in the bishops. As to the edicts, he was not pleased with the plan of Moderation devised by Margaret; nor did he believe that any plan would satisfy the people short of perfect toleration. Still, he would have his sister prepare another scheme, having due reference to the maintenance of the Catholic faith and his own authority. This must be submitted to him, and he would do all that he possibly could in the matter. Lastly, in respect to a general pardon, as he abhorred rigor where any other course would answer the end, he was content that it should be extended to whomever Margaret thought deserving of it, always excepting those already condemned, and under a solemn pledge, moreover, that the nobles would abandon the league, and henceforth give their hearty support to the government.

Four days after the date of these dispatches, on the second of August, Philip again wrote to his sister, touching the summoning of the states-general, which she had so much pressed. He had given the subject, he said, a most patient consideration, and was satisfied that she had done right in refusing to call them together. She must not consent to it. He never would consent to it. He knew too well to what it must inevitably lead. Yet he would not have her report his decision in the absolute and peremptory terms in which he had given it to her, but as intended merely for the present occasion; so that the people might believe she was still looking for something of a different tenor, and cherish the hope of obtaining their object at some future day!

The king also wrote, that he should remit a sufficient sum to Margaret to enable her to take into her pay a body of ten thousand German foot and three thousand horse, on which she could rely in case of extremity. He further wrote letters with his own hand to the governors of the provinces and the principal cities, calling on them to support the regent in her efforts to enforce the laws and maintain order throughout the country.

Such were the concessions granted by Philip, at the eleventh hour, to his subjects of the Netherlands!—concessions wrung from him by hard necessity; doled out, as it were, like the scanty charity of the miser,—too scanty and too late to serve the object for which it is intended. But slight as these concessions were, and crippled by conditions which rendered them nearly nugatory, it will hardly be believed that he was not even sincere in making them! This is proved by a revelation lately made of a curious document in the Archives of Simancas.

While the ink was scarcely dry on the dispatches to Margaret, Philip summoned a notary into his presence, and before the duke of Alva and two other persons, jurists, solemnly protested that the authority he had given to the regent in respect to a general pardon was not of his own free will. "He therefore did not feel bound by it, but reserved to himself the right to punish the guilty, and especially the authors and abettors of sedition in the Low Countries". We feel ourselves at once transported into the depths of the Middle Ages. This feeling will not be changed when we learn the rest of the story of this admirable piece of kingcraft.

The chair of St. Peter, at this time, was occupied by Pius the Fifth, a pope who had assumed the same name as his predecessor, and who displayed a spirit of fierce, indeed frantic intolerance, surpassing even that of Paul the Fourth. At the accession of the new pope there were three Italian scholars, inhabitants of Milan, Venice, and Tuscany, eminent for their piety, who had done great service to the cause of letters in Italy, but who were suspected of too liberal opinions in matters of faith. Pius the Fifth demanded that these scholars should all be delivered into his hands. The three states had the meanness to comply. The unfortunate men were delivered up to the Holy Office, condemned, and burned at the stake. This was one of the first acts of the new pontificate. It proclaimed to Christendom that Pius the Fifth was the uncompromising foe of heresy, the pope of the Inquisition. Every subsequent act of his reign served to confirm his claim to this distinction.

Yet, as far as the interests of Catholicism were concerned, a character like that of Pius the Fifth must be allowed to have suited the times. During the latter part of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the sixteenth, the throne had been filled by a succession of pontiffs notorious for their religious indifference, and their carelessness, too often profligacy, of life. This, as is well known, was one of the prominent causes of the Reformation. A reaction followed. It was necessary to save the Church. A race of men succeeded, of ascetic temper, remarkable for their austere virtues, but without a touch of sympathy for the joys or sorrows of their species, and wholly devoted to the great work of regenerating the fallen Church. As the influence of the former popes had opened a career to the Reformation, the influence of these latter popes tended materially to check it; and long before the close of the sixteenth century the boundary line was defined, which it has never since been allowed to pass.

Pius, as may be imagined, beheld with deep anxiety the spread of the new religion in the Low Countries. He wrote to the duchess of Parma, exhorting her to resist to the utmost, and professing his readiness to supply her, if need were, with both men and money. To Philip he also wrote, conjuring him not to falter in the good cause, and to allow no harm to the Catholic faith, but to march against his rebellious vassals at the head of his army, and wash out the stain of heresy in the blood of the heretic.

The king now felt it incumbent on him to explain to the holy father his late proceedings. This he did through Requesens, his ambassador at the papal court. The minister was to inform his holiness that Philip would not have moved in this matter without his advice, had there been time for it. But perhaps it was better as it was; for the abolition of the Inquisition in the Low Countries could not take effect, after all, unless sanctioned by the pope, by whose authority it had been established. This, however, was to be said in confidence. As to the edicts, Pius might be assured that his majesty would never approve of any scheme which favored the guilty by diminishing in any degree the penalties of their crimes. This also was to be considered as secret. Lastly, his holiness need not be scandalized by the grant of a general pardon, since it referred only to what concerned the king personally, where he had a right to grant it. In fine, the pope might rest assured that the king would consent to nothing that could prejudice the service of God or the interests of religion. He deprecated force, as that would involve the ruin of the country. Still, he would march in person, without regard to his own peril, and employ force, though it should cost the ruin of the provinces, but he would bring his vassals to submission. For he would sooner lose a hundred lives, and every rood of empire, than reign a lord over heretics.

Thus all the concessions of Philip, not merely his promises of grace, but those of abolishing the Inquisition and mitigating the edicts, were to go for nothing,—mere words, to amuse the people until some effectual means could be decided on. The king must be allowed, for once at least, to have spoken with candor. There are few persons who would not have shrunk from acknowledging to their own hearts that they were acting on so deliberate a system of perfidy as Philip thus confided in his correspondence with another. Indeed, he seems to have regarded the pope in the light of his confessor, to whom he was to unburden his bosom as frankly as if he had been in the confessional. The shrift was not likely to bring down a heavy penance from one who doubtless held to the orthodox maxim of "No faith to be kept with heretics."

The result of these royal concessions was what might have been expected. Crippled as they were by conditions, they were regarded in the Low Countries with distrust, not to say contempt. In fact, the point at which Philip had so slowly and painfully arrived had been long since passed in the onward march of the revolution. The men of the Netherlands now talked much more of recompense than of pardon. By a curious coincidence, the thirty-first of July, the day on which the king wrote his last dispatches from Segovia, was precisely the date of those which Margaret sent to him from Brussels, giving the particulars of the recent troubles, of the meeting at St. Trond, the demand for a guaranty, and for an immediate summons of the legislature.

But the fountain of royal grace had been completely drained by the late efforts. Philip's reply at this time was prompt and to the point. As to the guaranty, he said, that was superfluous when he had granted a general pardon. For the states-general, there was no need to alter his decision now, since he was so soon to be present in the country.

This visit of the king to the Low Countries, respecting which so much was said and so little was done, seems to have furnished some amusement to the wits of the court. The prince of Asturias, Don Carlos, scribbled one day on the cover of a blank book, as its title, “The Great and Admirable Voyages of King Philip”; and within, for the contents, he wrote, “From Madrid to the Pardo, from the Pardo to the Escorial, from the Escorial to Aranjuez”, &c., &c. This jest of the graceless son had an edge to it. We are not told how far it was relished by his royal father.

CHAPTER XXI.

THE ICONOCLASTS.

1566.

While Philip was thus tardily coming to concessions which even then were not sincere, an important crisis had arrived in the affairs of the Netherlands. In the earlier stages of the troubles, all orders, the nobles, the commons, even the regent, had united in the desire to obtain the removal of certain abuses, especially the Inquisition and the edicts. But this movement, in which the Catholic joined with the Protestant, had far less reference to the interests of religion than to the personal rights of the individual. Under the protection thus afforded, however, the Reformation struck deep root in the soil. It nourished still more under the favor shown to it by the confederates, who, as we have seen, did not scruple to guaranty security of religions worship to some of the sectaries who demanded it.

But the element which contributed most to the success of the new religion was the public preachings. These in the Netherlands were what the Jacobin clubs were in France, or the secret societies in Germany and Italy,—an obvious means for bringing together such as were pledged to a common hostility to existing institutions, and thus affording them an opportunity for consulting on their grievances, and for concerting the best means of redress. The direct object of these meetings, it is true, was to listen to the teachings of the minister. But that functionary, far from confining himself to spiritual exercises, usually wandered to more exciting themes, as the corruptions of the Church and the condition of the land. He rarely failed to descant on the forlorn circumstances of himself and his flock, condemned thus stealthily to herd together like a band of outlaws, with ropes, as it were, about their necks, and to seek out some solitary spot in which to glorify the Lord, while their enemies, in all the pride of a dominant religion, could offer up their devotions openly and without fear, in magnificent temples. The preacher inveighed bitterly against the richly benefited clergy of the rival Church, whose lives of pampered ease too often furnished an indifferent commentary on the doctrines they inculcated. His wrath was kindled by the pompous ceremonial of the Church of Rome, so dazzling and attractive to its votaries, but which the Reformer sourly contrasted with the naked simplicity of the Protestant service. Of all abominations, however, the greatest in his eyes was the worship of images, which he compared to the idolatry that in ancient times had so often brought down the vengeance of Jehovah on the nations of Palestine; and he called on his hearers, not merely to remove idolatry from their hearts, but the idols from their sight. It was not wonderful that, thus stimulated by their spiritual leaders, the people should be prepared for scenes similar to those enacted by the Reformers in France and in Scotland; or that Margaret, aware of the popular feeling, should have predicted such an outbreak. At length it came, and on a scale and with a degree of violence not surpassed either by the Huguenots or the disciples of Knox.

On the fourteenth of August, the day before the festival of the Assumption of the Virgin, a mob, some three hundred in number, armed with clubs, axes, and other implements of destruction, broke into the churches around St. Omer, in the province of Flanders, overturned the images, defaced the ornaments, and in a short time demolished whatever had any value or beauty in the buildings. Growing bolder from the impunity which attended their movements, they next proceeded to Ypres, and had the audacity to break into the cathedral, and deal with it in the same ruthless manner. Strengthened by the accession of other miscreants from the various towns, they proceeded along the banks of the Lys, and fell upon the churches of Menin, Comines, and other places on its borders. The excitement now spread over the country. Everywhere the populace was in arms. Churches, chapels, and convents were involved in indiscriminate ruin. The storm, after sweeping over Flanders, and desolating the flourishing cities of Valenciennes and Tournay, descended on Brabant. Antwerp, the great commercial capital of the country, was its first mark.

The usual population of the town happened to be swelled at this time by an influx of strangers from the neighboring country, who had come up to celebrate the great festival of the Assumption of the Virgin. Fortunately the prince of Orange was in the place, and by his presence prevented any molestation to the procession, except what arose from the occasional groans and hisses of the more zealous spectators among the Protestants. The priests, however, on their return, had the discretion to deposit the image in the chapel, instead of the conspicuous station usually assigned to it in the cathedral, to receive there during the coming week the adoration of the faithful.

On the following day, unluckily, the prince was recalled to Brussels. In the evening some boys, who had found their way into the church, called out to the Virgin, demanding “why little Mary had gone so early to her nest, and whether she were afraid to show her face in public”. This was followed by one of the party mounting into the pulpit, and there mimicking the tones and gestures of the Catholic preacher. An honest waterman who was present, a zealous son of the Church, scandalized by this insult to his religion, sprang into the pulpit, and endeavored to dislodge the usurper. The lad resisted. His comrades came to his rescue; and a struggle ensued, which ended in both the parties being expelled from the building by the officers. This scandalous proceeding, it may be thought, should have put the magistrates of the city on their guard, and warned them to take some measures of defense for the cathedral. But the admonition was not heeded.

On the following day a considerable number of the reformed party entered the building, and were allowed to continue there after vespers, when the rest of the congregation had withdrawn. Left in possession, their first act was to break forth into one of the Psalms of David. The sound of their own voices seemed to rouse them to fury. Before the chant had died away, they rushed forward as by a common impulse, broke open the doors of the chapel, and dragged forth the image of the Virgin. Some called on her to cry, “Vivent les Gueux!” while others tore off her embroidered robes, and rolled the dumb idol in the dust, amidst the shouts of the spectators.

This was the signal for havoc. The rioters dispersed in all directions on the work of destruction. Nothing escaped their rage. High above the great altar was an image of the Saviour, curiously carved in wood, and placed between the effigies of the two thieves crucified with him. The mob contrived to get a rope round the neck of the statue of Christ, and dragged it to the ground. They then fell upon it with hatchets and hammers, and it was soon broken into a hundred fragments. The two thieves, it was remarked, were spared, as if to preside over the work of rapine below.

Their fury now turned against the other statues, which were quickly overthrown from their pedestals. The paintings that lined the walls of the cathedral were cut into shreds. Many of these were the choicest specimens of Flemish art, even then, in its dawn, giving promise of the glorious day which was to shed a luster over the land.

But the pride of the cathedral, and of Antwerp, was the great organ, renowned throughout the Netherlands, not more for its dimensions than its perfect workmanship. With their ladders the rioters scaled the lofty fabric, and with their implements soon converted it, like all else they laid their hands on, into a heap of rubbish.

The ruin was now universal. Nothing beautiful, nothing holy, was spared. The altars—and there were no less than seventy in the vast edifice—were overthrown one after another; their richly embroidered coverings rudely rent away; their gold and silver vessels appropriated by the plunderers. The sacramental bread was trodden under foot; the wine was quaffed by the miscreants, in golden chalices, to the health of one another, or of the Gueux; and the holy oil was profanely used to anoint their shoes and sandals. The sculptured tracery on the walls, the costly offerings that enriched the shrines, the screens of gilded bronze, the delicately carved wood-work of the pulpit, the marble and alabaster ornaments, all went down under the fierce blows of the iconoclasts. The pavement was strewed with the ruined splendors of a church, which in size and magnificence was perhaps second only to St. Peter's among the churches of Christendom.

As the light of day faded, the assailants supplied its place with such light as they could obtain from the candles which they snatched from the altars. It was midnight before the work of destruction was completed. Thus toiling in darkness, feebly dispelled by tapers the rays of which could scarcely penetrate the vaulted distances of the cathedral, it is a curious circumstance—if true—than no one was injured by the heavy masses of timber, stone, and metal that were everywhere falling around them. The whole number engaged in this work is said not to have exceeded a hundred men, women, and boys,—women of the lowest description, dressed in men's attire.

When their task was completed, they sallied forth in a body from the doors of the cathedral, some singing the Psalms of David, others roaring out the fanatical war-cry of “Vivent les Gueux!”. Flushed with success, and joined on the way by stragglers like themselves, they burst open the doors of one church after another; and by the time morning broke, the principal temples in the city had been dealt with in the same ruthless manner as the cathedral.

No attempt all this time was made to stop these proceedings on the part of magistrates or citizens. As they beheld from their windows the bodies of armed men hurrying to and fro by the gleam of their torches, and listened to the sounds of violence in the distance, they seem to have been struck with a panic. The Catholics remained within doors, fearing a general rising of the Protestants. The Protestants feared to move abroad, lest they should be confounded with the rioters. Some imagined their own turn might come next, and appeared in arms at the entrances of their houses, prepared to defend them against the enemy.

When gorged with the plunder of the city, the insurgents poured out at the gates, and fell with the same violence on the churches, convents, and other religious edifices in the suburbs. For three days these dismal scenes continued, without resistance on the part of the inhabitants. Amidst the ruin in the cathedral, the mob had alone spared the royal arms and the escutcheons of the knights of the Golden Fleece, emblazoned on the walls. Calling this to mind, they now returned into the city to complete the work. But some of the knights, who were at Antwerp, collected a handful of their followers, and, with a few of the citizens, forced their way into the cathedral, arrested ten or twelve of the rioters, and easily dispersed the remainder; while a gallows erected on an eminence admonished the offenders of the fate that awaited them. The facility with which the disorders were repressed by a few resolute men naturally suggests the inference, that many of the citizens had too much sympathy with the authors of the outrages to care to check them, still less to bring the culprits to punishment. An orthodox chronicler of the time vents his indignation against a people who were so much more ready to stand by their hearths than by their altars.

The fate of Antwerp had its effect on the country. The flames of fanaticism, burning fiercer than ever, quickly spread over the northern, as they had done over the western provinces. In Holland, Utrecht, Friesland,—everywhere, in short, with a few exceptions on the southern borders,—mobs rose against the churches. In some places, as Rotterdam, Dort, Haarlem, the magistrates were wary enough to avert the storm by delivering up the images, or at least by removing them from the buildings. It was rare that any attempt was made at resistance. Yet on one or two occasions this so far succeeded that a handful of troops sufficed to rout the iconoclasts. At Anchyn, four hundred of the rabble were left dead on the field. But the soldiers had no relish for their duty, and on other occasions, when called on to perform it, refused to bear arms against their countrymen. The leaven of heresy was too widely spread among the people.

Thus the work of plunder and devastation went on vigorously throughout the land. Cathedral and chapel, monastery and nunnery, religious houses of every description, even hospitals, were delivered up to the tender mercies of the Reformers. The monks fled, leaving behind them treasures of manuscripts and well-stored cellars, which latter the invaders soon emptied of their contents, while they consigned the former to the flames. The terrified nuns, escaping half naked, at dead of night, from their convents, were too happy to find a retreat among their friends and kinsmen in the city. Neither monk nor nun ventured to go abroad in the conventual garb. Priests might be sometimes seen hurrying away with some relic or sacred treasure under their robes, which they were eager to save from the spoilers. In the general sack not even the abode of the dead was respected; and the sepulchers of the counts of Flanders were violated, and laid open to the public gaze!

The deeds of violence perpetrated by the iconoclasts were accompanied by such indignities as might express their contempt for the ancient faith. They snatched the wafer, says an eye-witness, from the altar, and put it into the mouth of a parrot. Some huddled the images of the saints together, and set them on fire, or covered them with bits of armor, and, shouting “Vivent les Gueux!” tilted rudely against them. Some put on the vestments stolen from the churches, and ran about the streets with them in mockery. Some basted the books with butter, that they might burn the more briskly. By the scholar, this last enormity will not be held light among their transgressions. It answered their purpose, to judge by the number of volumes that were consumed. Among the rest, the great library of Vicogne, one of the noblest collections in the Netherlands, perished in the flames kindled by these fanatics.

The amount of injury inflicted during this dismal period it is not possible to estimate. Four hundred churches were sacked by the insurgents in Flanders alone. The damage to the cathedral of Antwerp, including its precious contents, was said to amount to not less than four hundred thousand ducats! The loss occasioned by the plunder of gold and silver plate might be computed. The structures so cruelly defaced might be repaired by the skill of the architect. But who can estimate the irreparable loss occasioned by the destruction of manuscripts, statuary, and paintings? It is a melancholy fact, that the earliest efforts of the Reformers were everywhere directed against those monuments of genius which had been created and cherished by the generous patronage of Catholicism. But if the first step of the Reformation was on the ruins of art, it cannot be denied that a compensation has been found in the good which it has done by breaking the fetters of the intellect, and opening a free range in those domains of science to which all access had been hitherto denied.

The wide extent of the devastation was not more remarkable than the time in which it was accomplished. The whole work occupied less than a fortnight. It seemed as if the destroying angel had passed over the land, and at a blow had consigned its noblest edifices to ruin! The method and discipline, if I may so say, in the movements of the iconoclasts, were as extraordinary as their celerity. They would seem to have been directed by some other hands than those which met the vulgar eye. The quantity of gold and silver plate purloined from the churches and convents was immense. Though doubtless sometimes appropriated by individuals, it seems not unfrequently to have been gathered in a heap, and delivered to the minister, who, either of himself, or by direction of the consistory, caused it to be melted down, and distributed among the most needy of the sectaries. We may sympathize with the indignation of a Catholic writer of the time, who exclaims, that in this way the poor churchmen were made to pay for the scourges with which they had been beaten.

The tidings of the outbreak fell heavily on the ears of the court of Brussels, where the regent, notwithstanding her prediction of the event, was not any the better prepared for it. She at once called her counsellors together and demanded their aid in defending the religion of the country against its enemies. But the prince of Orange and his friends discouraged a resort to violent measures, as little likely to prevail in the present temper of the people. “First”, said Egmont, “let us provide for the security of the state. It will be time enough then to think of religion”. “No”, said Margaret, warmly; “the service of God demands our first care; for the ruin of religion would be a greater evil than the loss of the country”. “Those who have anything to lose in it”, replied the count, somewhat coolly, “will probably be of a different opinion”,—an answer that greatly displeased the duchess.

Rumors now came thick on one another of the outrages committed by the image-breakers. Fears were entertained that their next move would be on the capital itself. Hitherto the presence of the regent had preserved Brussels, notwithstanding some transient demonstrations among the people, from the spirit of reform which had convulsed the rest of the country. No public meetings had been held either in the city or the suburbs; for Margaret had declared she would hang up, not only the preacher, but all those who attended him. The menace had its effect. Thus keeping aloof from the general movement of the time, the capital was looked on with an evil eye by the surrounding country; and reports were rife, that the iconoclasts were preparing to march in such force on the place, as should enable them to deal with it as they had done with Antwerp and the other cities of Brabant.

The question now arose as to the course to be pursued in the present exigency. The prince of Orange and his friends earnestly advised that Margaret should secure the aid of the confederates by the concessions they had so strenuously demanded; in the next place, that she should conciliate the Protestants by consenting to their religious meetings. To the former she made no objection. But the latter she peremptorily refused. “It would be the ruin of our holy religion”, she said. It was in vain they urged, that two hundred thousand sectaries were in arms; that they were already in possession of the churches; that, if she persisted in her refusal, they would soon be in Brussels, and massacre every priest and Roman Catholic before her eyes! Notwithstanding this glowing picture of the horrors in store for her, Margaret remained inflexible. But her agitation was excessive: she felt herself alone in her extremity. The party of Granvelle she had long since abandoned. The party of Orange seemed now ready to abandon her. “I am pressed by enemies within and without”, she wrote to Philip; “there is no one on whom I can rely for counsel or for aid”. Distrust and anxiety brought on a fever, and for several days and nights she lay tossing about, suffering equally from distress of body and anguish of spirit.

Thus sorely perplexed, Margaret felt also the most serious apprehensions for her personal safety. With the slight means of defence at her command, Brussels seemed no longer a safe residence, and she finally came to the resolution to extricate herself from the danger and difficulties of her situation by a precipitate flight. After a brief consultation with Barlaimont, Arschot, and others of the party opposed to the prince of Orange, and hitherto little in her confidence, she determined to abandon the capital, and seek a refuge in Mons,—a strong town in Hainault, belonging to the duke of Arschot, which, from its sturdy attachment to the Romish faith, had little to fear from the fanatics.

Having completed her preparations with the greatest secrecy, on the day fixed for her flight Margaret called her council together to communicate her design. It met with the most decided opposition, not merely from the lords with whom she had hitherto acted, but from the president Viglius. They all united in endeavoring to turn her from a measure which would plainly intimate such a want of confidence on the part of the duchess as must dishonor them in the eyes of the world. The preparations for Margaret's flight had not been conducted so secretly but that some rumor of them had taken wind; and the magistrates of the city now waited on her in a body, and besought her not to leave them, defenseless as they were, to the mercy of their enemies.

The prince was heard to say, that, if the regent thus abandoned the government, it would be necessary to call the states-general together at once, to take measures for the protection of the country. And Egmont declared that, if she fled to Mons, he would muster forty thousand men, and besiege Mons in person. The threat was not a vain one, for no man in the country could have gathered such a force under his banner more easily than Egmont. The question seems to have been finally settled by the magistrates causing the gates of the town to be secured, and a strong guard placed over them, with orders to allow no passage either to the duchess or her followers.—Thus a prisoner in her own capital, Margaret conformed to necessity, and, with the best grace she could, consented to relinquish her scheme of departure.

The question now recurred as to the course to be pursued; and the more she pondered on the embarrassments of her position, the more she became satisfied that no means of extricating herself remained but that proposed by the nobles. Yet, in thus yielding to necessity, she did so protesting that she was acting under compulsion. On the twenty-third of August, Margaret executed an instrument, by which she engaged that no harm should come to the members of the league for anything hitherto done by them. She further authorized the lords to announce to the confederates her consent to the religious meetings of the Reformed, in places where they had been hitherto held, until his majesty and the states-general should otherwise determine. It was on the condition, however, that they should go there unarmed, and nowhere offer disturbance to the Catholics.

On the twenty-fifth of the month the confederate nobles signed an agreement on their part and solemnly swore that they would aid the regent to the utmost in suppressing the disorders of the country, and in bringing their authors to justice; agreeing, moreover, that, so long as the regent should be true to the compact, the league should be considered as null and void.

The feelings of Margaret, in making the concessions required of her, may be gathered from the perusal of her private correspondence with her brother. No act in her public life ever caused her so deep a mortification; and she never forgave the authors of it. “It was forced upon me”, she writes to Philip; “but, happily, you will not be bound by it”. And she beseeches him to come at once, in such strength as would enable him to conquer the country for himself, or to give her the means of doing so.—Margaret, in early life, had been placed in the hands of Ignatius Loyola. More than one passage in her history proves that the lessons of the Jesuit had not been thrown away.

During these discussions the panic had been such, that it was thought advisable to strengthen the garrison under command of Count Mansfeldt, and keep the greater part of the citizens under arms day and night. When this arrangement was concluded, the great lords dispersed on their mission to restore order in their several governments. The prince went first to Antwerp, where, as we have seen, he held the office of burgrave. He made strict investigation into the causes of the late tumult, hung three of the ringleaders, and banished three others. He found it, however, no easy matter to come to terms with the sectaries, who had possession of all the churches, from which they had driven the Catholics. After long negotiation, it was arranged that they should be allowed to hold six, and should resign the rest to the ancient possessors. The arrangement gave general satisfaction, and the principal citizens and merchants congratulated William on having rescued them from the evils of anarchy.

Not so the regent. She knew well that the example of Antwerp would become a precedent for the rest of the country. She denounced the compact, as compromising the interests of Catholicism, and openly accused the prince of having transcended his powers, and betrayed the trust reposed in him. Finally, she wrote, commanding him at once to revoke his concessions.

William, in answer, explained to her the grounds on which they had been made, and their absolute necessity, in order to save the city from anarchy. It is a strong argument in his favor, that the Protestants, who already claimed the prince as one of their own sect, accused him, in this instance, of sacrificing their cause to that of their enemies; and caricatures of him were made, representing him with open hands and a double face. William, while thus explaining his conduct, did not conceal his indignation at the charges brought against him by the regent, and renewed his request for leave to resign his offices, since he no longer enjoyed her confidence. But whatever disgust she may have felt at his present conduct, William’s services were too important to Margaret in this crisis to allow her to dispense with them; and she made haste to write to him in a conciliatory tone, explaining away as far as possible what had been offensive in her former letters. Yet from this hour the consciousness of mutual distrust raised a barrier between the parties never to be overcome.

William next proceeded to his governments of Utrecht and Holland, which, by a similar course of measures to that pursued at Antwerp, he soon restored to order. While in Utrecht, he presented to the states of the province a memorial, in which he briefly reviewed the condition of the country. He urged the necessity of religious toleration, as demanded by the spirit of the age, and as particularly necessary in a country like that, the resort of so many foreigners, and inhabited by sects of such various denominations. He concluded by recommending them to lay a petition to that effect before the throne,—not, probably, from any belief that such a petition would be heeded by the monarch, but from the effect it would have in strengthening the principles of religious freedom in his countrymen. William's memorial is altogether a remarkable paper for the time, and in the wise and liberal tenor of its arguments strikingly contrasts with the intolerant spirit of the court of Madrid.

The regent proved correct in her prediction that the example of Antwerp would be made a precedent for the country. William’s friends, the Counts Hoorne and Hoogstraten, employed the same means for conciliating the sectaries in their own governments. It was otherwise with Egmont. He was too stanch a Catholic at heart to approve of such concessions. He carried matters, therefore, with a high hand in his provinces of Flanders and Artois, where his personal authority was unbounded. He made a severe scrutiny into the causes of the late tumult, and dealt with its authors so sternly, as to provoke a general complaint among the reformed party, some of whom, indeed, became so far alarmed for their own safety, that they left the provinces and went beyond sea.

Order now seemed to be reestablished in the land, through the efforts of the nobles, aided by the confederates, who seem to have faithfully executed their part of the compact with the regent. The Protestants took possession of the churches assigned to them, or busied themselves with raising others on the ground before reserved for their meetings. All joined in the good work; the men laboring at the building, the women giving their jewels and ornaments to defray the cost of the materials. A calm succeeded,—a temporary lull after the hurricane; and Lutheran and Calvinist again indulged in the pleasing illusion, that, however distasteful it might be to the government, they were at length secure of the blessings of religious toleration.

During the occurrence of these events a great change had taken place in the relations of parties. The Catholic members of the league, who had proposed nothing beyond the reform of certain glaring abuses, and, least of all, anything prejudicial to their own religion, were startled as they saw the inevitable result of the course they were pursuing. Several of them, as we have seen, had left the league before the outbreak of the iconoclasts; and after that event, but very few remained in it. The confederates, on the other hand, lost ground with the people, who looked with distrust on their late arrangement with the regent, in which they had so well provided for their own security. The confidence of the people was not restored by the ready aid which their old allies seemed willing to afford the great nobles in bringing to justice the authors of the recent disorders. Thus deserted by many of its own members, distrusted by the Reformers, and detested by the regent, the league ceased from that period to exert any considerable influence on the affairs of the country.

A change equally important had taken place in the politics of the court. The main object with Margaret, from the first, had been to secure the public tranquility. To effect this she had more than once so far deferred to the judgment of William and his friends, as to pursue a policy not the most welcome to herself. But it had never been her thought to extend that policy to the point of religious toleration. So far from it, she declared that, even though the king should admit two religions in the state, she would rather be torn in pieces than consent to it. It was not till the coalition of the nobles, that her eyes were opened to the path she was treading. The subsequent outrages of the iconoclasts made her comprehend she was on the verge of a precipice. The concessions wrung from her, at that time, by Orange and his friends, filled up the measure of her indignation. A great gulf now opened between her and the party by whom she had been so long directed. Yet where could she turn for support? One course only remained; and it was with a bitter feeling that she felt constrained to throw herself into the arms of the very party which she had almost estranged from her counsels. In her extremity she sent for the president Viglius, on whose head she had poured out so many anathemas in her correspondence with Philip,—whom she had not hesitated to charge with the grossest peculation.

Margaret sent for the old councilor, and, with tears in her eyes, demanded his advice in the present exigency. The president naturally expressed his surprise at this mark of confidence from one who had so carefully excluded him from her counsels for the last two years. Margaret, after some acknowledgment of her mistake, intimated a hope that this would be no impediment to his giving her the counsel she now so much needed. Viglius answered by inquiring whether she were prepared faithfully to carry out what she knew to be the will of the king. On Margaret's replying in the affirmative, he recommended that she should put the same question to each member of her cabinet. “Their answers”, said the old statesman, “will show you whom you are to trust”. The question—the touchstone of loyalty—was accordingly put; and the minister, who relates the anecdote himself, tells us that three only, Mansfeldt, Barlaimont, and Arschot, were prepared to stand by the regent in carrying out the policy of the crown. From that hour the regent's confidence was transferred from the party with which she had hitherto acted, to their rivals.

It is amusing to trace the change of Margaret's sentiments in her correspondence of this period with her brother. “Orange and Hoorne prove themselves, by word and by deed, enemies of God and the king”. Of Egmont she speaks no better. “With all his protestations of loyalty”, she fears he is only plotting mischief to the state. “He has openly joined the Gueux, and his eldest daughter is reported to be a Huguenot”. Her great concern is for the safety of Viglius, “almost paralyzed by his fears, as the people actually threaten to tear him in pieces”. The factious lords conduct affairs according to their own pleasure in the council; and it is understood they are negotiating at the present moment to bring about a collision between the Protestants of Germany, France, and England, hoping in the end to drive the house of Austria from the throne, to shake off the yoke of Spain from the Netherlands, and divide the provinces among themselves and their friends! Margaret's credulity seems to have been in proportion to her hatred, and her hatred in proportion to her former friendship. So it was in her quarrel with Granvelle, and she now dealt the same measure to the men who had succeeded that minister in her confidence.

The prince of Orange cared little for the regent's estrangement. He had long felt that his own path lay wide asunder from that of the government, and, as we have seen, had more than once asked leave to resign his offices, and withdraw into private life. Hoorne viewed the matter with equal indifference. He had also asked leave to retire, complaining that his services had been poorly requited by the government. He was a man of a bold, impatient temper. In a letter to Philip he told him that it was not the regent, but his majesty, of whom he complained, for compelling him to undergo the annoyance of dancing attendance at the court of Brussels! He further added, that he had not discussed his conduct with the duchess, as it was not his way to treat of affairs of honor with ladies! There was certainly no want of plain-dealing in this communication with majesty.

Count Egmont took the coolness of the regent in a very different manner. It touched his honor, perhaps his vanity, to be thus excluded from her confidence. He felt it the more keenly as he was so loyal at heart, and strongly attached to the Romish faith. On the other hand, his generous nature was deeply sensible to the wrongs of his countrymen. Thus drawn in opposite directions, he took the middle course,—by no means the safest in politics. Under these opposite influences he remained in a state of dangerous irresolution. His sympathy with the cause of the confederates lost him the confidence of the government. His loyalty to the government excluded him from the councils of the confederates. And thus, though perhaps the most popular man in the Netherlands, there was no one who possessed less real influence in public affairs.

The tidings of the tumults in the Netherlands, which travelled with the usual expedition of evil news, caused as great consternation at the court of Castile as it had done at that of Brussels. Philip, on receiving his dispatches, burst forth, it is said, into the most violent fit of anger, and, tearing his beard, he exclaimed, “It shall cost them dear; by the soul of my father I swear it, it shall cost them dear!”. The anecdote, often repeated, rests on the authority of Granvelle’s correspondent, Morillon. If it be true, it affords a solitary exception to the habitual self-command—displayed in circumstances quite as trying—of the “prudent” monarch. The account given by Hopper, who was with the court at the time, is the more probable of the two. According to that minister, the king, when he received the tidings, lay ill of a tertian fever at Segovia. As letter after letter came to him with particulars of the tumult, he maintained his usual serenity, exhibiting no sign of passion or vexation. Though enfeebled by his malady, he allowed himself no repose, but gave unremitting attention to business. He read all the despatches; made careful notes of their contents, sending such information as he deemed best to his council, for their consideration; and, as his health mended, occasionally attended in person the discussions of that body.

One can feel but little doubt as to the light in which the proceedings in the Netherlands were regarded by the royal council of Castile. Yet it did not throw the whole, or even the chief blame, on the iconoclasts. They were regarded as mere tools in the hands of the sectaries. The sectaries, on their part, were, it was said, moved by the confederates, on whom they leaned for protection. The confederates, in their turn, made common cause with the great lords, to whom many of them were bound by the closest ties of friendship and of blood. By this ingenious chain of reasoning, all were made responsible for the acts of violence; but the chief responsibility lay on the heads of the great nobles, on whom all in the last resort depended. It was against them that the public indignation should be directed, not against the meaner offenders, over whom alone the sword of justice had been hitherto suspended. But the king should dissemble his sentiments until he was in condition to call these great vassals to account for their misdeeds. All joined in beseeching Philip to defer no longer his visit to Flanders; and most of them recommended that he should go in such force as to look down opposition, and crush the rebellion in its birth.

Such was the counsel of Alva, in conformity with that which he had always given on the subject. But although all concurred in urging the king to expedite his departure, some of the councilors followed the prince of Eboli in advising Philip that, instead of this warlike panoply, he should go in peaceable guise, accompanied only by such a retinue as befitted the royal dignity. Each of the great rivals recommended the measures most congenial with his own temper, the direction of which would no doubt be entrusted to the man who recommended them. It is not strange that the more violent course should have found favor with the majority.

Philip’s own decision he kept, as usual, locked in his own bosom. He wrote indeed to his sister, warning her not to allow the meeting of the legislature, and announcing his speedy coming,—all as usual; and he added, that, in repressing the disorders of the country, he should use no other means than those of gentleness and kindness, under the sanction of the states. These gentle professions weighed little with those who, like the prince of Orange, had surer means of arriving at the king’s intent than what were afforded by the royal correspondence. Montigny, the Flemish envoy, was still in Madrid, held there, sorely against his will, in a sort of honorable captivity by Philip. In a letter to his brother, Count Hoorne, he wrote: “Nothing can be in worse odor than our affairs at the court of Castile. The great lords, in particular, are considered as the source of all the mischief. Violent counsels are altogether in the ascendant, and the storm may burst on you sooner than you think. Nothing remains but to fly from it like a prudent man, or to face it like a brave one!”

William had other sources of intelligence, the secret agents whom he kept in pay at Madrid. From them he learned, not only what was passing at the court, but in the very cabinet of the monarch; and extracts, sometimes full copies, of the correspondence of Philip and Margaret, were transmitted to the prince. Thus the secrets which the most jealous prince in Europe supposed to be locked in his own breast were often in possession of his enemies; and William, as we are told, declared that there was no word of Philip's, public or private, but was reported to his ears!

This secret intelligence, on which the prince expended large sums of money, was not confined to Madrid. He maintained a similar system of espionage in Paris, where the court of Castile was busy with its intrigues for the extermination of heresy. Those who look on these trickish proceedings as unworthy of the character of the prince of Orange and the position which he held, should consider that it was in accordance with the spirit of the age. It was but turning Philip’s own arts against himself, and using the only means by which William could hope to penetrate the dark and unscrupulous policy of a cabinet whose chief aim, as he thought, was to subvert the liberties of his country.

It was at this time that his agents in France intercepted a letter from Alava, the Spanish minister at the French court. It was addressed to the duchess of Parma. Among other things, the writer says it is well understood at Madrid, that the great nobles are at the bottom of the troubles of Flanders. The king is levying a strong force, with which he will soon visit the country, and call the three lords to a heavy reckoning. In the meantime the duchess must be on her guard not by any change in her deportment to betray her consciousness of this intent.

Thus admonished from various quarters, the prince felt that it was no longer safe for him to remain in his present position; and that in the words of Montigny, he must be prepared to fight or to fly. He resolved to take counsel with some of those friends who were similarly situated with himself. In a communication made to Egmont in order to persuade him to a conference, William speaks of Philip’s military preparations as equally to be dreaded by Catholic and Protestant; for under the pretext of religion, Philip had no other object in view than to enslave the nation. “This has been always feared by us”, he adds; “and I cannot stay to witness the ruin of my country”.

The parties met at Dendermonde on the third of October. Besides the two friends and Count Hoorne, there were William’s brother, Louis, and a few other persons of consideration. Little is actually known of the proceedings at this conference, notwithstanding the efforts of more than one officious chronicler to enlighten us. Their contradictory accounts, like so many cross lights on his path, serve only to perplex the eye of the student. It seems probable, however, that the nobles generally, including the prince, considered the time had arrived for active measures; and that any armed intrusion on the part of Philip into the Netherlands should be resisted by force. But Egmont, with all his causes of discontent, was too loyal at heart not to shrink from the attitude of rebellion. He had a larger stake than most of the company, in a numerous family of children, who, in case of a disastrous revolution, would be thrown helpless on the world. The benignity with which he had been received by Philip on his mission to Spain, and which subsequent slights had not effaced from his memory, made him confide, most unhappily, in the favorable dispositions of the monarch. From whatever motives, the count refused to become a party to any scheme of resistance; and as his popularity with the troops made his cooperation of the last importance, the conference broke up without coming to a determination.

Egmont at once repaired to Brussels, whither he had been summoned by the regent to attend the council of state. Orange and Hoorne received, each, a similar summons, to which neither of them paid any regard. Before taking his seat at the board, Egmont showed the duchess Alava’s letter, upbraiding her, at the same time, with her perfidious conduct towards the nobles. Margaret, who seems to have given way to temper or to tears, as the exigency demanded, broke forth into a rage, declaring it “an impudent forgery, and the greatest piece of villany in the world!”. The same sentiment she repeats in a letter addressed soon after to her brother, in which she asserts her belief that no such letter as that imputed to Alava had ever been written by him. How far the duchess was honest in her declaration it is impossible at this day to determine. Egmont, after passing to other matters, concludes with a remark which shows, plainly enough, his own opinion of her sincerity. “In fine, she is a woman educated in Rome. There is no faith to be given to her”.

In her communication above noticed Margaret took occasion to complain to Philip of his carelessness in regard to her letters. The contents of them, she said, were known in Flanders almost as soon as at Madrid; and not only copies, but the original autographs, were circulating in Brussels. She concludes by begging her brother, if he cannot keep her letters safe, to burn them.

The king, in answer, expresses his surprise at her complaints, assuring Margaret that it is impossible any one can have seen her letters, which are safely locked up, with the key in his own pocket. It is amusing to see Philip's incredulity in regard to the practice of those arts on himself which he had so often practiced on others. His sister, however, seems to have relied henceforth more on her own precautions than on his, as we find her communications from this time frequently shrouded in cipher.

Rumors of Philip’s warlike preparations were now rife in the Netherlands; and the Protestants began to take counsel as to the best means of providing for their own defense. One plan suggested was to send thirty thousand Calvinistic tracts to Seville for distribution among the Spaniards. This would raise a good crop of heresy, and give the king work to do in his own dominions. It would, in short, be carrying the war into the enemy's country. The plan, it must be owned, had the merit of novelty.

In Holland the nobles and merchants mutually bound themselves to stand by one another in asserting the right of freedom of conscience. Levies went forward briskly in Germany, under the direction of Count Louis of Nassau. It was attempted, moreover, to interest the Protestant princes of that country so far in the fate of their brethren in the Netherlands as to induce them to use their good offices with Philip to dissuade him from violent measures. The emperor had already offered privately his own mediation to the king, to bring about, if possible, a better understanding with his Flemish subjects. The offer made in so friendly a spirit, though warmly commended by some of the council, seems to have found no favor in the eyes of their master.

The princes of Germany who had embraced the Reformation were Lutherans. They had almost as little sympathy with the Calvinists as with the Catholics. Men of liberal minds in the Netherlands, like William and his brother, would gladly have seen the two great Protestant parties which divided their country united on some common basis. They would have had them, in short, in a true Christian spirit, seek out the points on which they could agree rather than those on which they differed,—points of difference which, in William's estimation, were after all of minor importance. He was desirous that the Calvinists should adopt a confession of faith accommodated in some degree to the “Confession of Augsburg”,—a step which would greatly promote their interests with the princes of Germany.

But the Calvinists were altogether the dominant party in the Low Countries. They were thoroughly organized, and held their consistories, composed of a senate and a sort of lower house, in many of the great towns, all subordinate to the great consistory at Antwerp. They formed, in short, what the historian well calls an independent Protestant republic. Strong in their power, sturdy in their principles, they refused to bend in any degree to circumstances, or to make any concession, or any compromise with the weaker party. The German princes, disgusted with this conduct, showed no disposition to take any active measures in their behalf, and, although they made some efforts in favor of the Lutherans, left their Calvinistic brethren in the Netherlands to their fate.

It was generally understood, at this time, that the prince of Orange had embraced Lutheran opinions. His wife's uncle, the landgrave of Hesse, pressed him publicly to avow his belief. To this the prince objected, that he should thus become the open enemy of the Catholics, and probably lose his influence with the Calvinists, already too well disposed to acts of violence. Yet not long after we find William inquiring of the landgrave if it would not be well to advise the king, in terms as little offensive as possible, of his change of religion, asking the royal permission at the same time, to conform his worship to it.

William’s father had been a Lutheran, and in that faith had lived and died. In that faith he had educated his son. When only eleven years old, the latter, as we have seen, was received into the imperial household. The plastic mind of boyhood readily took its impressions from those around, and without much difficulty, or indeed examination, William conformed to the creed fashionable at the court of Castile. In this faith—if so it should be called—the prince remained during the lifetime of the emperor. Then came the troubles of the Netherlands; and William’s mind yielded to other influences. He saw the workings of Catholicism under a terrible aspect. He beheld his countrymen dragged from their firesides, driven into exile, thrown into dungeons, burned at the stake; and all this for no other cause than dissent from the dogmas of the Romish Church. His soul sickened at these enormities, and his indignation kindled at this invasion of the inalienable right of private judgment. Thus deeply interested for the oppressed Protestants, it was natural that William should feel a sympathy for their cause. His wife too was of the Lutheran persuasion. So was his mother, still surviving. So were his brothers and sisters, and indeed all those nearest akin to him. Under these influences, public and domestic, it was not strange, that he should have been led to review the grounds of his own belief; that he should have gradually turned to the faith of his parents,—the faith in which he had been nurtured in childhood. At what precise period the change in his opinions took place we are not informed. But his letter to the landgrave of Hesse, in November, 1566, affords, so far as I am aware, the earliest evidence that exists, under his own hand, that he had embraced the doctrines of the Reformation.

CHAPTER XXII.

THE REGENT'S AUTHORITY REESTABLISHED.

1566-1567.

The excesses of the iconoclasts, like most excesses, recoiled on the heads of those who committed them. The Roman Catholic members of the league withdrew, as we have seen, from an association which connected them, however remotely, with deeds so atrocious. Other Catholics, who had looked with no unfriendly eye on the revolution, now that they saw it was to go forward over the ruins of their religion, were only eager to show their detestation of it, and their loyalty to the government. The Lutherans, who, as already noticed, had never moved in much harmony with the Calvinists, were anxious to throw the whole blame of the excesses on the rival sect; and thus the breach, growing wider and wider between the two great divisions of the Protestants, worked infinite prejudice to the common cause of reform. Lastly, men like Egmont, who from patriotic motives had been led to dally with the revolution in its infancy, seeming indeed almost ready to embrace it, now turned coldly away, and hastened to make their peace with the regent.

Margaret felt the accession of strength she was daily deriving from these divisions of her enemies, and she was not slow to profit by it. As she had no longer confidence in those on whom she had hitherto relied for support, she was now obliged to rely more exclusively on herself. She was indefatigable in her application to business. “I know not”, writes her secretary, Armenteros, “how the regent contrives to live, amidst the disgusts and difficulties which incessantly beset her. For some months she has risen before dawn. Every morning and evening, sometimes oftener, she calls her council together. The rest of the day and night she is occupied with giving audiences, or with receiving dispatches and letters, or in answering them”.

Margaret now bent all her efforts to retrace the humiliating path into which she had been led, and to reestablish the fallen authority of the crown. If she did not actually revoke the concessions wrung from her, she was careful to define them so narrowly that they should be of little service to anyone. She wrote to the governors of the provinces, that her license for public preaching was to be taken literally, and was by no means intended to cover the performance of other religious rites, as those of baptism, marriage, and burial, which she understood were freely practiced by the reformed ministers. She published an edict reciting the terrible penalties of the law against all offenders in this way, and she enjoined the authorities to enforce the execution of it to the letter.

The Protestants loudly complained of what they termed a most perfidious policy on the part of the regent. The right of public preaching, they said, naturally included that of performing the other religious ceremonies of the Reformed Church. It was a cruel mockery to allow men to profess a religion, and yet not to practice the rites which belong to it.—The construction given by Margaret to her edict must be admitted to savor somewhat of the spirit of that given by Portia to Shylock's contract. The pound of flesh might indeed be taken; but if so much as a drop of blood followed, woe to him that took it!

This measure was succeeded by others on the part of the government of a still more decisive character. Instead of the civil magistracy, Margaret now showed her purpose to call in the aid of a strong military force to execute the laws. She ordered into the country the levies lately raised for her in Germany. These she augmented by a number of Walloon regiments; and she placed them under the command of Aremberg, Megen, and other leaders in whom she confided. She did not even omit the prince of Orange, for though Margaret had but little confidence in William, she did not care to break with him. To the provincial governors she wrote to strengthen themselves as much as possible by additional recruits; and she ordered them to introduce garrisons into such places as had shown favor to the new doctrines.

The province of Hainault was that which gave the greatest uneasiness to the regent. The spirit of independence was proverbially high amongst the people; and the neighborhood of France gave easy access to the Huguenot ministers, who reaped an abundant harvest in the great towns of that district. The flourishing commercial city of Valenciennes was particularly tainted with heresy. Margaret ordered Philip de Noircarmes, governor of Hainault, to secure the obedience of the place by throwing into it a garrison of three companies of horse and as many of foot.

When the regent's will was announced to the people of Valenciennes, it met at first with no opposition. But among the ministers in the town was a Frenchman named La Grange, a bold enthusiast, gifted with a stirring eloquence, which gave him immense ascendancy over the masses. This man told the people, that to receive a garrison would be the death-blow to their liberties, and that those of the reformed religion would be the first victims. Thus warned, the citizens were now even more unanimous in refusing a garrison than they had before been in their consent to admit one. Noircarmes, though much surprised by this sudden change, gave the inhabitants some days to consider the matter before placing themselves in open resistance to the government. The magistrates and some of the principal persons in the town were willing to obey his requisition, and besought La Grange to prevail on the people to consent to it. “I would rather”, replied the high-spirited preacher, “that my tongue should cleave to the roof of my mouth, and that I should become dumb as a fish, than open my lips to persuade the people to consent to so cruel and outrageous an act”. Finding the inhabitants still obstinate, the general, by Margaret's orders, proclaimed the city to be in a state of rebellion,—proscribed the persons of the citizens as traitors to their sovereign, and confiscated their property. At the same time, active preparations were begun for laying siege to the place, and proclamation was made in the regent's name prohibiting the people of the Netherlands from affording any aid, by counsel, arms, or money, to the rebellious city, under the penalties incurred by treason.

But the inhabitants of Valenciennes, sustained by the promises of their preacher, were nothing daunted by these measures, nor by the formidable show of troops which Noircarmes was assembling under their walls. Their town was strongly situated, tolerably well victualled for a siege, and filled with a population of hardy burghers devoted to the cause, whose spirits were raised by the exhortations of the consistories in the neighboring provinces to be of good courage, as their brethren would speedily come to their relief.

The high-handed measures of the government caused great consternation through the country, especially amongst those of the reformed religion. A brisk correspondence went on between the members of the league and the consistories. Large sums were raised by the merchants well affected to the cause, in order to levy troops in Germany, and were entrusted to Brederode for the purpose. It was also determined that a last effort should be made to soften the duchess by means of a petition, which that chief, at the head of four hundred knights, was to bear to Brussels. But Margaret had had enough of petitions, and she bluntly informed Brederode, that, if he came in that guise, he would find the gates of Brussels shut against him.

Still the sturdy cavalier was not to be balked in his purpose; and, by means of an agent, he caused the petition to be laid before the regent. It was taken up mainly with a remonstrance on the course pursued by Margaret, so much at variance with her promises. It particularly enlarged on the limitation of her license for public preaching. In conclusion, it besought the regent to revoke her edict, to disband her forces, to raise the siege of Valenciennes, and to respect the agreement she had made with the league; in which case they were ready to assure her of their support in maintaining order.

Margaret laid the document before her council, and on the sixteenth of February, 1567, an answer which might be rather said to be addressed to the country at large than to Brederode, was published. The duchess intimated her surprise that any mention should be made of the league, as she had supposed that body had ceased to exist, since so many of its members had been but too glad, after the late outrages, to make their peace with the government. As to her concession of public preaching, it could hardly be contended that that was designed to authorize the sectaries to lay taxes, levy troops, create magistrates, and to perform, among other religious rites, that of marriage, involving the transfer of large amounts of property. She could hardly be thought mad enough to invest them with powers like these. She admonished the petitioners not to compel their sovereign to forego his native benignity of disposition. It would be well for them, she hinted, to give less heed to public affairs, and more to their own; and she concluded with the assurance, that she would take good care that the ruin which they so confidently predicted for the country should not be brought about by them.

The haughty tone of the reply showed too plainly that the times were changed; that Margaret was now conscious of her strength, and meant to use it. The confederates felt that the hour had come for action. To retrace their steps was impossible. Yet their present position was full of peril. The rumor went that King Philip was soon to come, at the head of a powerful force, to take vengeance on his enemies. To remain as they were, without resistance, would be to offer their necks to the stroke of the executioner. An appeal to arms was all that was left to them. This was accordingly resolved on. The standard of revolt was raised. The drum beat to arms in the towns and villages, and recruits were everywhere enlisted. Count Louis was busy in enforcing levies in Germany. Brederode’s town of Viana was named as the place of rendezvous. That chief was now in his element. His restless spirit delighted in scenes of tumult. He had busied himself in strengthening the works of Viana, and in furnishing it with artillery and military stores. Thence he had secretly passed over to Amsterdam, where he was occupied in organizing resistance among the people, already, by their fondness for the new doctrines, well disposed to it.

Hostilities first broke out in Brabant, where Count Megen was foiled in an attempt on Bois-le-Duc, which had refused to receive a garrison. He was more fortunate in an expedition against the refractory city of Utrecht, which surrendered without a struggle to the royalist chief.

In other quarters the insurgents were not idle. A body of some two thousand men, under Marnix, lord of Thoulouse, brother of the famous St. Aldegonde, made a descent on the island of Walcheren, where it was supposed Philip would land. But they were baffled in their attempts on this place by the loyalty and valor of the inhabitants. Failing in this scheme, Thoulouse was compelled to sail up the Scheldt, until he reached the little village of Austruweel, about a league from Antwerp. There he disembarked his whole force, and took up his quarters in the dwellings of the inhabitants. From this place he sallied out, making depredations on the adjoining country, burning the churches, sacking the convents, and causing great alarm to the magistrates of Antwerp by the confidence which his presence gave to the reformed party in that city.

Margaret saw the necessity of dislodging the enemy without delay from this dangerous position. She dispatched a body of Walloons on the service, under command of an experienced officer named Launoy. Her orders show the mood she was in. “They are miscreants”, she said, “who have placed themselves beyond the pale of mercy. Show them no mercy then, but exterminate with fire and sword!” Launoy, by a rapid march, arrived at Austruweel. Though taken unawares, Thoulouse and his men made a gallant resistance; and a fierce action took place almost under the walls of Antwerp.

The noise of the musketry soon brought the citizens to the ramparts; and the dismay of the Calvinists was great, as they beheld the little army of Thoulouse thus closely beset by their enemies. Furious at the spectacle, they now called on one another to rush to the rescue of their friends. Pouring down from the ramparts, they hurried to the gates of the city. But the gates were locked. This had been done by the order of the prince of Orange, who had moreover caused a bridge across the Scheldt to be broken down to cut off all communication between the city and the camp of Thoulouse.

The people now loudly called on the authorities to deliver up the keys, demanding for what purpose the gates were closed. Their passions were kindled to madness by the sight of the wife—now, alas! the widow—of Thoulouse, who, with streaming eyes and disheveled hair, rushing wildly into the crowd, besought them piteously to save her husband and their own brethren from massacre.

It was too late. After a short though stout resistance, the insurgents had been driven from the field, and taken refuge in their defences. These were soon set on fire. Thoulouse, with many of his followers, perished in the flames. Others, to avoid this dreadful fate, cut their way through the enemy, and plunged into the Scheldt, which washes the base of the high land occupied by the village. There they miserably perished in the waters, or were pierced by the lances of the enemy, who hovered on its borders. Fifteen hundred were slain. Three hundred, who survived, surrendered themselves prisoners. But Launoy feared an attempt at rescue from the neighboring city; and, true to the orders of the regent, he massacred nearly all of them on the spot!

While this dismal tragedy was passing, the mob imprisoned within the walls of Antwerp was raging and bellowing like the waves of the ocean chafing wildly against the rocks that confine them. With fierce cries, they demanded that the gates should be opened, calling on the magistrates with bitter imprecations to deliver up the keys. The magistrates had no mind to face the infuriated populace. But the prince of Orange fortunately, at this crisis, did not hesitate to throw himself into the midst of the tumult, and take on himself the whole responsibility of the affair. It was by his command that the gates had been closed, in order that the regent’s troops, if victorious, might not enter the city, and massacre those of the reformed religion. This plausible explanation did not satisfy the people. Some called out that the true motive was, not to save the Calvinists in the city, but to prevent their assisting their brethren in the camp. One man, more audacious than the rest, raised a musket to the prince’s breast, saluting him, at the same time, with the epithet of "traitor!" But the fellow received no support from his companions, who, in general, entertained too great respect for William to offer any violence to his person.

Unable to appease the tumult, the prince was borne along by the tide, which now rolled back from the gates to the Meer Bridge, where it soon received such accessions that the number amounted to more than ten thousand. The wildest schemes were then agitated by the populace, among whom no one appeared to take the lead. Some were for seizing the Hôtel de Ville, and turning out the magistrates. Others were for sacking the convents, and driving their inmates, as well as all priests, from the city. Meanwhile, they had got possession of some pieces of artillery from the arsenal, with which they fortified the bridge. Thus passed the long night;—the armed multitude gathered together like a dark cloud, ready at any moment to burst in fury on the city, while the defenseless burghers, especially those who had any property at stake, were filled with the most dismal apprehensions.

Yet the Catholics contrived to convey some casks of powder, it is said, under the Meer Bridge, resolving to blow it into the air with all upon it, as soon as their enemies should make a hostile movement.

All eyes were now turned on the prince of Orange as the only man at all capable of extricating them from their perilous situation. William had stationed a guard over the mint, and another at the Hôtel de Ville, to protect these buildings from the populace. A great part of this anxious night he spent in endeavoring to bring about such an understanding between the two great parties of the Catholics and the Lutherans as should enable them to act in concert. This was the less difficult, on account of the jealousy which the latter sect entertained of the Calvinists. The force thus raised was swelled by the accession of the principal merchants and men of substance, as well as most of the foreigners resident in the city, who had less concern for spiritual matters than for the security of life and fortune. The following morning beheld the mob of Calvinists formed into something like a military array, their green and white banners bravely unfurled, and the cannon which they had taken from the arsenal posted in front. On the opposite side of the great square before the Hôtel de Ville were gathered the forces of the prince of Orange, which, if wanting artillery, were considerably superior in numbers to their adversaries. The two hosts now stood face to face, as if waiting only the signal to join in mortal conflict. But no man was found bold enough to give the signal—for brother to lift his hand against brother.

At this juncture William, with a small guard, and accompanied by the principal magistrates, crossed over to the enemy's ranks, and demanded an interview with the leaders. He represented to them the madness of their present course; which, even if they were victorious, must work infinite mischief to the cause. It would be easy for them to obtain by fair means all they could propose by violence; and for his own part, he concluded, however well-disposed to them he now might be, if a single drop of blood were shed in this quarrel, he would hold them from that hour as enemies.

The remonstrance of the prince, aided by the conviction of their own inferiority in numbers, prevailed over the stubborn temper of the Calvinists. They agreed to an accommodation, one of the articles of which was, that no garrison should be admitted within the city. The prince of Orange subscribed and swore to the treaty, on behalf of his party: and it is proof of the confidence that even the Calvinists reposed in him, that they laid down their arms sooner than either the Lutherans or the Catholics. Both these, however, speedily followed their example. The martial array, which had assumed so menacing an aspect, soon melted away. The soldier of an hour, subsiding into the quiet burgher, went about his usual business; and tranquility and order once more reigned within the walls of Antwerp.—Thus, by the coolness and discretion of a single man, the finest city in the Netherlands was saved from irretrievable ruin.

It was about the middle of March, 1567, that the disturbances occurred at Antwerp. During this time Noircarmes was enforcing the blockade of Valenciennes, but with little prospect of bringing it to a speedy issue. The inhabitants, confident in their strength, had made more than one successful sally, burning the cloisters in which the general had lodged part of his troops, and carrying back considerable booty into the city. It was evident that to reduce the place by blockade would be a work of no little time.

Margaret wrote to her brother to obtain his permission to resort to more vigorous measures, and, without further delay, to bombard the place. But Philip peremptorily refused. It was much to his regret, he said, that the siege of so fair a city had been undertaken. Since it had been, nothing remained but to trust to a blockade for its reduction.

At this time an army of the confederates, some three or four thousand strong, appeared in the neighborhood of Tournay, designed partly to protect that town, which had refused a garrison, and partly to create a diversion in favor of Valenciennes. No sooner had Noircarmes got tidings of this, than, leaving a sufficient detachment to carry on the blockade, he made a rapid march with the rest of his forces, came suddenly on the enemy, engaged him in a pitched battle, completely routed him, and drove his scattered legions up to the walls of Tournay. That city, now incapable of resistance, opened its gates at once, and submitted to the terms of the conqueror, who soon returned, with his victorious army, to resume the siege of Valenciennes.

But the confidence of the inhabitants was not shaken. On the contrary, under the delusive promises of their preacher, it seemed to rise higher than ever, and they rejected with scorn every invitation to surrender. Again the regent wrote to her brother, that, unless he allowed more active operations, there was great danger the place would be relieved by the Huguenots on the frontier, or by the Gueux, whose troops were scattered through the country.

Urged by the last consideration, Philip yielded a reluctant assent to his sister's wishes. But in his letter, dated on the thirteenth of March, he insisted that, before resorting to violence, persuasion and menace should be first tried; and that, in case of an assault, great care should be had that no harm came to the old and infirm, to women or children, to any, in short, who were not found actually in arms against the government.—The clemency shown by Philip on this occasion reflects infinite credit on him; and if it be disposed of by some as mere policy, it must be allowed to be a policy near akin to humanity. It forms a striking contrast with the ferocious mood in which Margaret indulged at this time, when she seems to have felt that a long arrear of vengeance was due for the humiliations she had been compelled to endure.

The regent lost no time in profiting by the royal license. She first, however, proposed, in obedience to her instructions, to see what could be done by milder measures. She sent two envoys, Count Egmont and the duke of Arschot, to Valenciennes, in order to expostulate with the citizens, and if possible bring them to reason. The two nobles represented to the people the folly of attempting to cope, thus single-handed, as it were, with the government. Their allies had been discomfited one after another. With the defeat before Tournay must have faded the last ray of hope. They besought the citizens to accept, while there was time, the grace proffered them by the duchess, who was willing, if the town submitted, that such as chose to leave it might take their effects and go wherever they listed.

But the people of Valenciennes, fortified by the promises of their leaders, and with a blind confidence in their own resources, which had hitherto proved effectual, held lightly both the arguments and offers of the envoys, who returned to the camp of Noircarmes greatly disgusted with the ill-success of their mission. There was no room for further delay, and preparations were made for reducing the place by more active operations.

Valenciennes stands on the crest of an eminence that sweeps down by a gradual slope towards the river Scheldt, which, washing the walls of the city, forms a good defense on that quarter. The ramparts encompassing the town, originally strong and of great thickness, were now somewhat impaired by age. They were protected by a wide ditch, which in some places was partially choked up with rubbish. The walls were well lined with artillery, and the magazines provided with ammunition. In short, the place was one which, in earlier days, from the strength of its works as well as its natural position, might have embarrassed an army more formidable than that which now lay before it.

The first step of Noircarmes was to contract his lines, and closely to invest the town. He next availed himself of a dark and stormy night to attack one of the suburbs, which he carried after a sharp engagement, and left in the charge of some companies of Walloons.

The following day these troops opened a brisk fire on the soldiers who defended the ramparts, which was returned by the latter with equal spirit. But while amusing the enemy in this quarter, Noircarmes ordered a battery to be constructed, consisting at first of ten, afterwards of twenty, heavy guns and mortars, besides some lighter pieces. From this battery he opened a well-directed and most disastrous fire on the city, demolishing some of the principal edifices, which, from their size, afforded a prominent mark. The great tower of St. Nicholas, on which some heavy ordnance was planted, soon crumbled, under this fierce cannonade, and its defenders were buried in its ruins. At length, at the end of four hours, the inhabitants, unable longer to endure the storm of shot and shells which penetrated every quarter of the town, so far humbled their pride as to request a parley. To this Noircarmes assented, but without intermitting his fire for a moment.

The deputies informed the general, that the city was willing to capitulate on the terms before proposed by the Flemish nobles. But Noircarmes contemptuously told them that “things were not now as they then were, and it was not his wont to talk of terms with a fallen enemy”. The deputies, greatly discomfited by the reply, returned to report the failure of their mission to their townsmen.

Meanwhile the iron tempest continued with pitiless fury. The wretched people could find no refuge from it in their dwellings, which filled the streets with their ruins. It was not, however, till two-and-thirty hours more had passed away that a practicable breach was made in the walls; while the rubbish which had tumbled into the fosse from the crumbling ramparts afforded a tolerable passage for the besiegers, on a level nearly with the breach itself. By this passage Noircarmes now prepared to march into the city, through the open breach, at the head of his battalions.

The people of Valenciennes too late awoke from their delusion. They were no longer cheered by the voice of their fanatical leader, for he had provided for his own safety by flight; and, preferring any fate to that of being delivered over to the ruthless soldiery of Noircarmes, they offered at once to surrender the town at discretion, throwing themselves on the mercy of their victor. Six-and-thirty hours only had elapsed since the batteries of the besiegers had opened their fire, and during that time three thousand bombs had been thrown into the city; which was thought scarcely less than a miracle in that day.

On the second of April, 1567, just four months after the commencement of the siege, the victorious army marched into Valenciennes. As it defiled through the long and narrow streets, which showed signs of the dismal fray in their shattered edifices, and in the dead and dying still stretched on the pavement, it was met by troops of women and young maidens bearing green branches in their hands, and deprecating with tears and piteous lamentations the wrath of the conquerors. Noircarmes marched at once to the town-house, where he speedily relieved the municipal functionaries of all responsibility, by turning them out of office. His next care was to seize the persons of the zealous ministers and the other leaders. Many had already contrived to make their escape. Most of these were soon after taken, the preacher La Grange among the rest, and to the number of thirty-six were sentenced either to the scaffold or the gallows. The general then caused the citizens to be disarmed, and the fortifications, on which were mounted eighty pieces of artillery, to be dismantled. The town was deprived of its privileges and immunities, and a heavy fine imposed on the inhabitants to defray the charges of the war. The Protestant worship was abolished, the churches were restored to their former occupants, and none but the Roman Catholic service was allowed henceforth to be performed in the city. The bishop of Arras was invited to watch over the spiritual concerns of the inhabitants, and a strong garrison of eight battalions was quartered in the place, to secure order and maintain the authority of the crown.

The keys of Valenciennes, it was commonly said, opened to the regent the gates of all the refractory cities of the Netherlands. Maestricht, Tornhut, Ghent, Ypres, Oudenarde, and other places which had refused to admit a garrison within their walls, now surrendered, one after another, to Margaret, and consented to receive her terms. In like manner Megen established the royal authority in the province of Gueldres, and Aremberg, after a more prolonged resistance, in Gröningen and Friesland. In a few weeks, with the exception of Antwerp and some places in Holland, the victorious arms of the regent had subdued the spirit of resistance in every part of the country. The movement of the insurgents had been premature.

CHAPTER XXIII.

TRANQUILLITY RESTORED.

1567.

The perplexities in which the regent had been involved had led her to conceive a plan, early in January, 1567, the idea of which may have been suggested by the similar plan of Viglius. This was to require an oath from the great nobles, the knights of the Golden Fleece, and those in high stations, civil or military, that they would yield implicit and unqualified obedience to the commands of the king, of whatever nature they might be. Her object in this measure was not to secure a test of loyalty. She knew full well who were the friends and who were the foes of the government. But she wished a decent apology for ridding herself of the latter; and it was made a condition, that those who refused to take the oath were to be dismissed from office.

The measure seems to have met with no opposition when first started in the council; where Mansfeldt, Arschot, Megen, Barlaimont, all signified their readiness to sign the oath. Egmont indeed raised some scruples. After the oath of allegiance he had once taken, a new one seemed superfluous. The bare word of a man of honor and a chevalier of the Toison ought to suffice. But after a short correspondence on the subject, his scruples vanished before the arguments or persuasions of the regent.

Brederode, who held a military command, was not of so accommodating a temper. He indignantly exclaimed, that it was a base trick of the government, and he understood the drift of it. He refused to subscribe the oath, and at once threw up his commission. The Counts Hoorne and Hoogstraten declined also, but in more temperate terms, and resigning their employments, withdrew to their estates in the country.

The person of most importance was the prince of Orange; and it was necessary to approach him with the greatest caution. Margaret, it is true, had long since withdrawn from him her confidence. But he had too much consideration and authority in the country for her to wish to break with him. Nor would she willingly give him cause of disgust. She accordingly addressed him a note, couched in the most insinuating terms she had at her command.

She could not doubt he would be ready to set a good example, when his example would be so important in the perplexed condition of the country. Rumors had been circulated to the prejudice of his loyalty. She did not give them credit. She could not for a moment believe that he would so far dishonor his great name and his illustrious descent as to deserve such a reproach; and she had no doubt he would gladly avail himself of the present occasion to wipe away all suspicion.

The dispatch enclosed a form of the oath, by which the party was to bind himself to “serve the king, and act for or against whomever his majesty might command, without restriction or limitation”, on pain of being dismissed from office.

William was not long in replying to a requisition, to obey which would leave him less freedom than might be claimed by the meanest peasant in the country. On the twenty-eighth of April, the same day on which he received the letter, he wrote to the regent, declining in the most positive terms to take the oath. Such an act, he said, would of itself imply that he had already violated the oath he had previously taken. Nor could he honorably take it, since it might bind him to do what would be contrary to the dictates of his own conscience, as well as to what he conceived to be the true interests of his majesty and the country. He was aware that such a demand on the regent's part was equivalent to a dismissal from office. He begged her, therefore, to send someone fully empowered to receive his commissions, since he was ready forthwith to surrender them. As for himself, he should withdraw from the Netherlands, and wait until his sovereign had time to become satisfied of his fidelity. But wherever he might be, he should ever be ready to devote both life and property to the service of the king and the common weal of the country.

Whatever hesitation the prince of Orange may have before felt as to the course he was to take, it was clear the time had now come for decisive action. Though the steady advocate of political reform, his policy, as we have seen, had been to attempt this by constitutional methods, not by violence. But all his more moderate plans had been overthrown by the explosion of the iconoclasts. The outrages then perpetrated had both alienated the Catholics and disgusted the more moderate portion of the Protestants; while the divisions of the Protestants among themselves had so far paralyzed their action, that the whole strength of the party of reform had never been fairly exerted in the conflict. That conflict, unprepared as the nation was for it, had been most disastrous. Everywhere the arms of the regent had been victorious. It was evident the hour for resistance had not yet come.

Yet for William to remain in his present position was hazardous in the extreme. Rumors had gone abroad that the duke of Alva would soon be in the Netherlands, at the head of a force sufficient to put down all opposition. “Beware of Alva”, said his wife’s kinsman, the landgrave of Hesse, to William; “I know him well”. The prince of Orange also knew him well,—too well to trust him. He knew the hard, inexorable nature of the man who was now coming with an army at his back, and clothed with the twofold authority of judge and executioner. The first blow would, he knew, be aimed at the highest mark. To await Alva’s coming would be to provoke his fate. Yet the prince felt all the dreariness of his situation. “I am alone”, he wrote to the Landgrave William of Hesse, “with dangers menacing me on all sides, yet without one trusty friend to whom I can open my heart”.

Margaret seems to have been less prepared than might have been expected for the decision of Orange. Yet she determined not to let him depart from the country without an effort to retain him. She accordingly sent her secretary, Berty, to the prince at Antwerp, to enter into the matter more freely, and, if possible, prevail on him to review the grounds of his decision. William freely, and at some length, stated his reasons for declining the oath. “If I thus blindly surrender myself to the will of the king, I may be driven to do what is most repugnant to my principles, especially in the stern mode of dealing with the sectaries. I may be compelled to denounce some of my own family, even my wife, as Lutherans, and to deliver them into the hands of the executioner. Finally”, said he, “the king may send some one in his royal name to rule over us, to whom it would be derogatory for me to submit”. The name of Alva escaped, as if involuntarily, from his lips,—and he was silent.

Berty endeavored to answer the objections of the prince, but the latter, interrupting him before he had touched on the duke of Alva, bluntly declared that the king would never be content while one of his great vassals was wedded to a heretic. It was his purpose, therefore, to leave the country at once, and retire to Germany; and with this remark he abruptly closed the conference.

The secretary, though mortified at his own failure, besought William to consent to an interview, before his departure, with Count Egmont, who, Berty trusted, might be more successful. To this William readily assented. This celebrated meeting took place at Willbroek, a village between Antwerp and Brussels. Besides the two lords there were only present Count Mansfeldt and the secretary.

After some discussion, in which each of the friends endeavored to win over the other to his own way of thinking, William expressed the hope that Egmont would save himself in time from the bloody tempest that, he predicted, was soon to fall on the heads of the Flemish nobles. “I trust in the clemency of my sovereign”, answered the count; “he cannot deal harshly with men who have restored order to the country”. “This clemency you so extol”, replied William, “will be your ruin. Much I fear that the Spaniards will make use of you as a bridge to effect their entrance into the country!”. With this ominous prediction on his lips, he tenderly embraced the count, with tears in his eyes, bidding him a last farewell. And thus the two friends parted, like men who were never to meet again.

The different courses pursued by the two nobles were such as might be expected from the difference of both their characters and their circumstances. Egmont, ardent, hopeful, and confiding, easily surrendered himself to the illusions of his own fancy, as if events were to shape themselves according to his wishes. He had not the far-seeing eye of William, which seemed to penetrate into events as it did into characters. Nor had Egmont learned, like William, not to put his trust in princes. He was, doubtless, as sincerely attached to his country as the prince of Orange, and abhorred, like him, the system of persecution avowed by the government. But this persecution fell upon a party with whom he had little sympathy. William, on the other hand, was a member of that party. A blow aimed at them was aimed also at him. It is easy to see how different were the stakes of the two nobles in the coming contest, both in respect to their sympathies and their interests. Egmont was by birth a Fleming. His estates were in Flanders, and there, too, were his hopes of worldly fortune. Exile to him would have been beggary and ruin. But a large, if not the larger part of William's property, lay without the confines of the Netherlands. In withdrawing to Germany, he went to his native land. His kindred were still there. With them he had maintained a constant correspondence, and there he would be welcomed by troops of friends. It was a home, and no place of exile, that William was to find in Germany.

Shortly after this interview, the prince went to his estates at Breda, there to remain a few days before quitting the country. From Breda he wrote to Egmont, expressing the hope that, when he had weighed them in his mind, he would be contented with the reasons assigned for his departure. The rest he would leave to God, who would order all for his own glory. “Be sure”, he added, “you have no friend more warmly devoted to you than myself; for the love of you is too deeply rooted in my heart to be weakened either by time or distance”. It is pleasing to see that party spirit had not, as in the case of more vulgar souls, the power to rend asunder the ties which had so long bound these great men to each other; to see them still turning back, with looks of accustomed kindness, when they were entering the paths that were to lead in such opposite directions.

William wrote also to the king, acquainting him with what he had done, and explaining the grounds of it; at the same time renewing the declaration that, wherever he might be, he trusted never to be found wanting to the obligations of a true and faithful vassal. Before leaving Breda, the prince received a letter from the politic regent, more amiable in its import than might have been expected. Perhaps it was not wholly policy that made her unwilling to part with him in anger. She expressed her readiness to do him any favor in her power. She had always felt for him, she said, the same affection as for her own son, and should ever continue to do so.

On the last of April, William departed for Germany. He took with him all his household except his eldest son, the count of Buren, then a boy thirteen years old, who was pursuing his studies at the university of Louvain. Perhaps William trusted to the immunities of Brabant, or to the tender age of the youth, for his protection. If so, he grievously miscalculated. The boy would serve as too important a hostage for his father, and Philip caused him to be transferred to Madrid; where, under the monarch’s eye, he was educated in religious as well as in political sentiments very little in harmony with those of the prince of Orange. Fortunately, the younger brother, Maurice, who inherited the genius of his father, and was to carry down his great name to another generation, was allowed to receive his training under the paternal roof.

Besides his family, William was accompanied by a host of friends and followers, some of them persons of high consideration, who preferred banishment with him to encountering the troubles that awaited them at home. Thus attended, he fixed his residence at Dillemburg, in Nassau, the seat of his ancestors, and the place of his own birth. He there occupied himself with studying the Lutheran doctrine under an experienced teacher of that persuasion; and, while he kept a watchful eye on the events passing in his unhappy country, he endeavored to make himself acquainted with the principles of that glorious Reformation, of which, in connection with political freedom, he was one day to become the champion.

The departure of the prince of Orange caused general consternation in the Netherlands. All who were in anyway compromised by the late disturbances watched more anxiously than ever the signs of the coming tempest, as they felt they had lost the pilot who alone could enable them to weather it. Thousands prepared to imitate his example by quitting the country before it was too late. Among those who fled were the Counts Culemborg, Berg, Hoogstraten, Louis of Nassau, and others of inferior note, who passed into Germany, where they gathered into a little circle round the prince, waiting, like him, for happier days.

Some of the great lords, who had held out against the regent, now left alone, intimated their willingness to comply with her demands. “Count Hoorne”, she writes to Philip, “has offered his services to me, and declares his readiness to take the oath. If he has spoken too freely, he says, it was not from any disaffection to the government, but from a momentary feeling of pique and irritation. I would not drive him to desperation, and from regard to his kindred I have consented that he should take his seat in the council again”. The haughty tone of the duchess shows that she felt herself now so strongly seated as to be nearly indifferent whether the person she dealt with were friend or foe.

Egmont, at this time, was endeavoring to make amends for the past by such extraordinary demonstrations of loyalty as should efface all remembrance of it. He rode through the land at the head of his troops, breaking up the consistories, arresting the rioters, and everywhere reestablishing the Catholic worship. He loudly declared that those who would remain his friends must give unequivocal proofs of loyalty to the crown and the Roman Catholic faith. Some of those with whom he had been most intimate, disgusted with, this course, and distrusting, perhaps, such a deposit for their correspondence, sent back the letters they had received from him, and demanded their own in return.

At Brussels Egmont entered into all the gayeties of the court, displaying his usual magnificence in costly fêtes and banquets, which the duchess of Parma sometimes honored with her presence. The count’s name appears among those which she mentions to Philip as of persons well affected to the government. “It is impossible”, she says, “not to be satisfied with his conduct”. Thus elated by the favor of the regent—next in importance to that of royalty itself—the ill-fated nobleman cherished the fond hope that the past would now be completely effaced from the memory of his master,—a master who might forget a benefit, but who was never known to forgive an injury.

The great towns throughout the land had now generally intimated their willingness to submit to the requisitions of Margaret, and many of them had admitted garrisons within their walls. Antwerp only, of the cities of Brabant, remained intractable. At length it yielded to the general impulse, and a deputation was sent to the regent to sue for her forgiveness, and to promise that the leaders in the late disturbances should be banished from the city. This was a real triumph to the royal party, considering the motley character of the population, in which there was so large an infusion of Calvinism. But Margaret, far from showing her satisfaction, coolly answered that they must first receive a garrison; then she would intercede for them with the king, and would herself consent to take up her residence in the city. In this the inhabitants, now well humbled, affected willingly to acquiesce; and soon after Count Mansfeldt, at the head of sixteen companies of foot, marched into Antwerp in battle array, and there quartered his soldiers as in a conquered capital.

A day was fixed for the regent's entry, which was to be made with all becoming pomp. Detachments of troops were stationed in the principal avenues, and on the thirtieth of April Margaret rode into Antwerp, escorted by twelve hundred Walloons, and accompanied by the knights of the Golden Fleece, the great lords, and the provincial magistrates. As the glittering procession passed through the files of the soldiery, along the principal streets, it was greeted with the huzzas of the fickle populace. Thus cheered on her way, the regent proceeded first to the cathedral, where Te Deum was chanted, and on her knees she returned thanks to the Almighty, that this great city had been restored without battle or bloodshed to the king and the true faith. As her eyes wandered over the desecrated altars and the walls despoiled of their ornaments, their rich sculpture and paintings, by the rude hand of violence, Margaret could not restrain her tears. Her first care was to recover, as far as possible, the stolen property, and repair the injuries to the building; the next, to punish the authors of these atrocities; and the execution in the market-place of four of the ringleaders proclaimed to the people of Antwerp that the reign of anarchy was over.

Margaret next caused the churches of the reformed party to be levelled with the ground. Those of the Romish faith, after being purified, and the marks of violence, as far as practicable, effaced, were restored to their ancient occupants. The Protestant schools were everywhere closed. The children who had been baptized with Protestant rites were now re-baptized after the Catholic. In fine, the reformed worship was interdicted throughout the city, and that of the Romish church, with its splendid ritual, was established in its place.

On occupying Antwerp, Margaret had allowed all who were not implicated in the late riots to leave the city with their effects. Great numbers now availed themselves of this permission, and the streets presented the melancholy spectacle of husbands parting from their wives, parents from their children, or, it might be, taking their families along with them to some kinder land, where they would be allowed to worship God according to the dictates of their own consciences.

But even this glimmering of a tolerant spirit,—if so it can be called,—which Margaret exhibited at the outset, soon faded away before the dark spirit of the Inquisition. On the twenty-fourth of May, she published an edict, written in the characters of blood which distinguished the worst times of Charles and of Philip. By this edict, all who had publicly preached, or who had performed the religions exercises after the Protestant manner, all who had furnished the places of meeting, or had harbored or aided the preachers, all printers of heretical tracts, or artists who with their pencil had brought ridicule on the Church of Rome,—all, in short, who were guilty of these or similar iniquities, were to be punished with death and confiscation of property. Lighter offences were to be dealt with according to the measure of their guilt. The edict containing these humane provisions is of considerable length, and goes into a large specification of offences, from which few, if any, of the reformed could have been entirely exempt. When this ordinance of the regent was known at Madrid, it caused great dissatisfaction. The king pronounced it “indecorous, illegal, and altogether repugnant to the true spirit of Christianity”; and he ordered Margaret forthwith to revoke the edict. It was accordingly repealed on the twenty-third of July following. The reader who may be disposed to join heartily in the malediction may not be prepared to learn that the cause of the royal indignation was not that the edict was too severe, but that it was too lenient! It nowhere denounced the right of private worship. A man might still be a heretic at heart and at his own fireside, so long as he did not obtrude it on the public. This did not suit the Inquisition, whose jealous eye penetrated into the houses and the hearts of men, dragging forth their secret thoughts into open day, and punishing these like overt acts. Margaret had something yet to learn in the school of persecution.

While at Antwerp, the regent received an embassy from the elector of Saxony, the landgrave of Hesse, and other Protestant princes of Germany, interceding for the oppressed Lutherans, and praying that she would not consent to their being so grievously vexed by the Catholic government. Margaret, who was as little pleased with the plain terms in which this remonstrance was conveyed as with the object of it, coldly replied, that the late conduct of the Flemish Protestants doubtless entitled them to all this sympathy from the German princes; but she advised the latter to busy themselves with their own affairs, and leave the king of Spain to manage his as he thought best.

Of all the provinces, Holland was the only one which still made resistance to the will of the regent. And here, as we have already seen, was gathered a military array of some strength. The head-quarters were at Brederode’s town of Viana. But that chief had left his followers for the present, and had been secretly introduced into Amsterdam, where, as before noticed, he was busy in rousing a spirit of resistance in the citizens, already well prepared for it by their Protestant preachers. The magistrates, sorely annoyed, would gladly have rid themselves of Brederode’s presence, but he had too strong a hold on the people. Yet, as hour after hour brought fresh tidings of the disasters of his party, the chief himself became aware that all hopes of successful resistance must be deferred to another day. Quitting the city by night, he contrived, with the aid of his friends, to make his escape into Germany. Some months he passed in Westphalia, occupied with raising forces for a meditated invasion of the Netherlands, when, in the summer of 1568, he was carried off by a fever, brought on, it is said, by his careless, intemperate way of life.

Brederode was a person of a free and fearless temper,—with the defects, and the merits too, that attach to that sort of character. The friendship with which he seems to have been regarded by some of the most estimable persons of his party—Louis of Nassau, especially—speaks well for his heart. The reckless audacity of the man is shown in his correspondence; and the free manner in which he deals with persons and events makes his letters no less interesting than important for the light they throw on these troubled times. Yet it cannot be denied that, after all, Brederode is indebted much more to the circumstances of his situation than to his own character for the space he occupies in the pages of history.

Thus left without a leader, the little army which Brederode had gathered under his banner soon fell to pieces. Detachments, scattering over the country, committed various depredations, plundering the religious houses and engaging in encounters with the royal troops under Megen and Aremberg, in which the insurgents fared the worst. Thus broken on all sides, those who did not fall into the enemy's hands, or on the field, were too glad to make their escape into Germany. One vessel, containing a great number of fugitives, was wrecked, and all on board were made prisoners. Among them were two brothers, of the name of Battenberg; they were of a noble family, and prominent members of the league. They were at once, with their principal followers, thrown into prison, to await their doom from the bloody tribunal of Alva.

Deprived of all support from without, the city of Amsterdam offered no further resistance, but threw open its gates to the regent, and consented to accept her terms. These were the same that had been imposed on all the other refractory towns. The immunities of the city were declared to be forfeited, a garrison was marched into the place, and preparations were made for building a fortress, to guard against future commotions. Those who chose—with the customary exceptions—were allowed to leave the city. Great numbers availed themselves of the permission. The neighboring dikes were crowded with fugitives from the territory around, as well as from the city, anxiously waiting for vessels to transport them to Embden, the chief asylum of the exiles. There they stood, men, women, and children, a melancholy throng, without food, almost without raiment or any of the common necessaries of life, exciting the commiseration of even their Catholic adversaries.

The example of Amsterdam was speedily followed by Delft, Haarlem, Rotterdam, Leyden, and the remaining towns of Holland, which now seemed to vie with one another in demonstrations of loyalty to the government. The triumph of the regent was complete. Her arms had been everywhere successful, and her authority was fully recognized throughout the whole extent of the Netherlands. Doubtful friends and open foes, Catholics and Reformers, were alike prostrate at her feet. With the hour of triumph came also the hour of vengeance. And we can hardly doubt that the remembrance of past humiliation gave a sharper edge to the sword of justice. Fortresses, to overawe the inhabitants, were raised in the principal towns; and the expense of their construction, as well as of maintaining their garrison, was defrayed by fines laid on the refractory cities. The regent's troops rode over the country, and wherever the reformed were gathered to hear the word, they were charged by the troopers, who trampled them under their horses' hoofs, shooting them down without mercy, or dragging them off by scores to execution. No town was so small that fifty at least did not perish in this way, while the number of the victims sometimes rose to two or even three hundred. Everywhere along the road-side the traveler beheld the ghastly spectacle of bodies swinging from gibbets, or met with troops of miserable exiles flying from their native land. Confiscation followed, as usual, in the train of persecution. At Tournay, the property of a hundred of the richest merchants was seized and appropriated by the government. Even the populace, like those animals who fall upon and devour one of their own number when wounded, now joined in the cry against the Reformers. They worked with the same alacrity as the soldiers in pulling down the Protestant churches; and from the beams, in some instances, formed the very gallows from which their unhappy victims were suspended. Such is the picture, well charged with horrors, left to us by Protestant writers. We may be quite sure that it lost nothing of its darker coloring under their hands.

So strong was now the tide of emigration, that it threatened to depopulate some of the fairest provinces of the country. The regent, who at first rejoiced in this as the best means of ridding the land of its enemies, became alarmed, as she saw it was drawing off so large a portion of the industrious population. They fled to France, to Germany, and very many to England, where the wise Elizabeth provided them with homes, knowing well that, though poor, they brought with them a skill in the mechanic arts which would do more than gold and silver for the prosperity of her kingdom.

Margaret would have stayed this tide of emigration by promises of grace, if not by a general amnesty for the past. But though she had power to punish, Philip had not given her the power to pardon. And indeed promises of grace would have availed little with men flying from the dread presence of Alva. It was the fear of him which gave wings to their flight, as Margaret herself plainly intimated in a letter to the duke, in which she deprecated his coming with an army, when nothing more was needed than a vigilant police.

In truth, Margaret was greatly disgusted by the intended mission of the duke of Alva, of which she had been advised by the king some months before. She knew well the imperious temper of the man, and that, however high-sounding might be her own titles, the power would be lodged in his hands. She felt this to be a poor requital for her past services,—a personal indignity, no less than an injury to the state. She gave free vent to her feelings on the subject in more than one letter to her brother.

In a letter of the fifth of April she says: “You have shown no regard for my wishes or my reputation. By your extraordinary restrictions on my authority, you have prevented my settling the affairs of the country entirely to my mind. Yet, seeing things in so good a state, you are willing to give all the credit to another, and leave me only the fatigue and danger. But I am resolved, instead of wasting the remainder of my days, as I have already done my health, in this way, to retire and dedicate myself to a tranquil life in the service of God”. In another letter, dated four weeks later, on the third of May, after complaining that the king withdraws his confidence more and more from her, she asks leave to withdraw, as the country is restored to order, and the royal authority more assured than in the time of Charles the Fifth.

In this assurance respecting the public tranquility, Margaret was no doubt sincere; as are also the historians who have continued to take the same view of the matter, down to the present time, and who consider the troubles of the country to have been so far composed by the regent, that, but for the coming of Alva, there would have been no revolution in the Netherlands. Indeed, there might have seemed to be good ground for such a conclusion. The revolt had been crushed. Resistance had everywhere ceased. The authority of the regent was recognized throughout the land. The league, which had raised so bold a front against the government, had crumbled away. Its members had fallen in battle, or lay waiting their sentence in dungeons, or were wandering as miserable exiles in distant lands. The name of Gueux, and the insignia of the bowl and the beggar's scrip, which they had assumed in derision, were now theirs by right. It was too true for a jest.

The party of reform had disappeared, as if by magic. Its worship was everywhere proscribed. On its ruins the Catholic religion had risen in greater splendor than ever. Its temples were restored, its services celebrated with more than customary pomp. The more austere and uncompromising of the Reformers had fled the country. Those who remained purchased impunity by a compulsory attendance on mass; or the wealthier sort, by the aid of good cheer or more substantial largesses, bribed the priest to silence. At no time since the beginning of the Reformation had the clergy been treated with greater deference, or enjoyed a greater share of authority in the land. The dark hour of revolution seemed, indeed, to have passed away.

Yet a Fleming of that day might well doubt whether the prince of Orange were a man likely to resign his fair heritage and the land so dear to his heart without striking one blow in their defense. One who knew the wide spread of the principles of reform, and the sturdy character of the reformer, might distrust the permanence of a quiet which had been brought about by so much violence. He might rather think that, beneath the soil he was treading, the elements were still at work, which, at no distant time perhaps, would burst forth with redoubled violence, and spread ruin over the land!

BOOK III. THE WARS OF RELIGIONS IN NETHERLANDS (CONTINUED)