ree archiepiscopates and fifteen bishoprics.
The administration of justice, which was only allowed in free and local
courts, distinct for each province, was to be placed, so far as regarded
the most important of human interests, in the, hands of bishops and their
creatures, many of them foreigners and most of them monks. The lives and
property of the whole population were to be at the mercy of these utterly
irresponsible conclaves. All classes were outraged. The nobles were
offended because ecclesiastics, perhaps foreign ecclesiastics, were to be
empowered to sit in the provincial estates and to control their
proceedings in place of easy, indolent, ignorant abbots and friars, who
had generally accepted the influence of the great seignors. The priests
were enraged because the religious houses were thus taken out of their
control and confiscated to a bench of bishops, usurping the places of
those superiors who had formally been elected by and among themselves.
The people were alarmed because the monasteries, although not respected
nor popular, were at least charitable and without ambition to exercise
ecclesiastical cruelty; while, on the other hand, by the new episcopal
arrangements, a force of thirty new inquisitors was added to the
apparatus for enforcing orthodoxy already established. The odium of the
measure was placed upon the head of that churchman, already appointed
Archbishop of Mechlin, and soon to be known as Cardinal Granvelle. From
this time forth, this prelate began to be regarded with a daily
increasing aversion. He was looked upon as the incarnation of all the
odious measures which had been devised; as the source of that policy of
absolutism which revealed itself more and more rapidly after the King's
departure from the country. It was for this reason that so much stress
was laid by popular clamor upon the clause prohibiting foreigners from
office. Granvelle was a Burgundian; his father had passed most of his
active life in Spain, while both he and his more distinguished son were
identified in the general mind with Spanish politics. To this prelate,
then, were ascribed the edicts, the new bishoprics, and the continued
presence of the foreign troops. The people were right as regarded the
first accusation. They were mistaken as to the other charges.

The King had not consulted Anthony Perrenot with regard to the creation
of the new bishoprics. The measure, which had been successively
contemplated by Philip "th