arbitrary power was profound and slavish. God and "the master," as he
always called Philip, he professed to serve with equal humility. "It
seems to me," said he, in a letter of this epoch, "that I shall never be
able to fulfil the obligation of slave which I owe to your majesty, to
whom I am bound by so firm a chain;--at any rate, I shall never fail to
struggle for that end with sincerity."

As a matter of course, he was a firm opponent of the national rights of
the Netherlands, however artfully he disguised the sharp sword of violent
absolutism under a garland of flourishing phraseology. He had strenuously
warned Philip against assembling the States-general before his departure
for the sake of asking them for supplies. He earnestly deprecated
allowing the constitutional authorities any control over the expenditures
of the government, and averred that this practice under the Regent Mary
had been the cause of endless trouble. It may easily be supposed that
other rights were as little to his taste as the claim to vote the
subsidies, a privilege which was in reality indisputable. Men who stood
forth in defence of the provincial constitutions were, in his opinion,
mere demagogues and hypocrites; their only motive being to curry favor
with the populace. Yet these charters were, after all, sufficiently
limited. The natural rights of man were topics which had never been
broached. Man had only natural wrongs. None ventured to doubt that
sovereignty was heaven-born, anointed of God. The rights of the
Netherlands were special, not general; plural, not singular; liberties,
not liberty; "privileges," not maxims. They were practical, not
theoretical; historical, not philosophical. Still, such as they were,
they were facts, acquisitions. They had been purchased by the blood and
toil of brave ancestors; they amounted--however open to criticism upon
broad humanitarian grounds, of which few at that day had ever dreamed--to
a solid, substantial dyke against the arbitrary power which was ever
chafing and fretting to destroy its barriers. No men were more subtle or
more diligent in corroding the foundation of these bulwarks than the
disciples of Granvelle. Yet one would have thought it possible to
tolerate an amount of practical freedom so different from the wild,
social speculations which in later days, have made both tyrants and
reasonable lovers of our race tremble with apprehension. The
Netherlanders claimed, mainly, the right to vote t