e of
Valenciennes.--The Government triumphant.

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.

[Sidenote: REACTION.]

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
despatches and letters, or in answering them."[872]

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 any one. 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
practised by the