nger a Nassau except in name. The change
wrought by the pressure of the Spanish atmosphere was complete. All that
was left of his youthful self was a passionate reverence for his father's
memory, strangely combined with a total indifference to all that his
father held dear, all for which his father had laboured his whole
lifetime, and for which his heart's blood had been shed. On being at last
set free from bondage he had been taken to the Escorial, and permitted to
kiss the hand of the king--that hand still reeking with his father's
murder. He had been well received by the Infante and the Infanta, and by
the empress-mother, daughter of Charles V., while the artistic treasures
of the palace and cloister were benignantly pointed out to him. It was
also signified to him that he was to receive the order of the Golden
Fleece, and to enter into possession of his paternal and maternal
estates. And Philip William had accepted these conditions as if a born
loyal subject of his Most Catholic Majesty.

Could better proof be wanting that in that age religion was the only
fatherland, and that a true papist could sustain no injury at the hands
of his Most Catholic Majesty. If to be kidnapped in boyhood, to be
imprisoned during a whole generation of mankind, to be deprived of vast
estates, and to be made orphan by the foulest of assassinations, could
not engender resentment against, the royal, perpetrator of these crimes
in the bosom of his victim, was it strange that Philip should deem
himself, something far, more than man, and should placidly accept the
worship rendered to him by inferior beings, as to the holy impersonation
of Almighty Wrath?

Yet there is no doubt that the prince had a sincere respect for his
father, and had bitterly sorrowed at his death. When a Spanish officer,
playing chess with him, in prison, had ventured to speak lightly of that
father, Philip William had seized him bodily, thrown him from the window,
and thus killed him on the spot. And when on his arrival in Brussels it
was suggested to him by President Riehardat that it was the king's
intention to reinstate him in the possession of his estates, but that a
rent-charge of eighteen thousand florins a year was still to be paid from
them; to the heirs of Balthazar Gerard, his father's assassin, he flamed
into a violent rage, drew his poniard, and would have stabbed the
president; had not the bystanders forcibly interferred. In consequence of
this refusal--ca