peninsula of North Holland,
washed by the stormy waters of the German Ocean, were the ancient castle,
town, and lordship, whence Egmont derived his family name, and the title
by which he was most familiarly known. He was supposed to trace his
descent, through a line of chivalrous champions and crusaders, up to the
pagan kings of the most ancient of existing Teutonic races. The eighth
century names of the Frisian Radbold and Adgild among his ancestors were
thought to denote the antiquity of a house whose lustre had been
increased in later times by the splendor of its alliances. His father,
united to Francoise de Luxemburg, Princess of Gavere, had acquired by
this marriage, and transmitted to his posterity, many of the proudest
titles and richest estates of Flanders. Of the three children who
survived him, the only daughter was afterwards united to the Count of
Vaudemont, and became mother of Louise de Vaudemont, queen of the French
monarch, Henry the Third.

Of his two sons, Charles, the elder, had died young and unmarried,
leaving all the estates and titles of the family to his brother. Lamoral,
born in 1522, was in early youth a page of the Emperor. When old enough
to bear arms he demanded and obtained permission to follow the career of
his adventurous sovereign. He served his apprenticeship as a soldier in
the stormy expedition to Barbary, where, in his nineteenth year, he
commanded a troop of light horse, and distinguished himself under the
Emperor's eye for his courage and devotion, doing the duty not only of a
gallant commander but of a hardy soldier. Returning, unscathed by the
war, flood, or tempest of that memorable enterprise, he reached his
country by the way of Corsica, Genoa, and Lorraine, and was three years
afterwards united (in the year 1545) to Sabina of Bavaria, sister of
Frederick, Elector Palatine. The nuptials had taken place at Spiers, and
few royal weddings could have been more brilliant. The Emperor, his
brother Ferdinand King of the Romans, with the Archduke Maximilian, all
the imperial electors, and a concourse of the principal nobles of the
empire, were present on the occasion been at the Emperor's side during
the unlucky siege of Metz; in 1554 he had been sent at the head of a
splendid embassy to England, to solicit for Philip the hand of Mary
Tudor, and had witnessed the marriage in Winchester Cathedral, the same
year. Although one branch of his house had, in past times, arrived at the
sover