ed at the arrival of the Spaniards. The day of doom for all the
crimes which had ever been committed in the course of ages, seemed now to
have dawned upon the Netherlands. The sword which had so long been
hanging over them, seemed now about to descend. Throughout the provinces,
there was but one feeling of cold and hopeless dismay. Those who still
saw a possibility of effecting their escape from the fated land, swarmed
across the frontier. All foreign merchants deserted the great marts. The
cities became as still as if the plague-banner had been unfurled on every
house-top.

Meantime the Captain-General proceeded methodically with his work. He
distributed his troops through Brussels, Ghent, Antwerp, and other
principal cities. As a measure of necessity and mark of the last
humiliation, he required the municipalities to transfer their keys to his
keeping. The magistrates of Ghent humbly remonstrated against the
indignity, and Egmont was imprudent enough to make himself the
mouth-piece of their remonstrance, which, it is needless to add, was
unsuccessful. Meantime his own day of reckoning had arrived.

As already observed, the advent of Alva at the head of a foreign army was
the natural consequence of all which had gone before. The delusion of the
royal visit was still maintained, and the affectation of a possible
clemency still displayed, while the monarch sat quietly in his cabinet
without a remote intention of leaving Spain, and while the messengers of
his accumulated and long-concealed wrath were already descending upon
their prey. It was the deliberate intention of Philip, when the Duke was
despatched to the Netherlands, that all the leaders of the
anti-inquisition party, and all who had, at any time or in any way,
implicated themselves in opposition to the government, or in censure of
its proceedings, should be put to death. It was determined that the
provinces should be subjugated to the absolute domination of the council
of Spain, a small body of foreigners sitting at the other end of Europe,
a junta in which Netherlanders were to have no voice and exercise no
influence. The despotic government of the Spanish and Italian possessions
was to be extended to these Flemish territories, which were thus to be
converted into the helpless dependencies of a foreign and an absolute
crown. There was to be a re-organization of the inquisition, upon the
same footing claimed for it before the outbreak of the troubles, together