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.[693] 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.

[Sidenote: ALARM OF THE COUNTRY.]

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
councillors--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 occa