landers, for a moments seemed to
participate in the delusion. Because she was indignant at the insolence
of the Duke of Alva to her self, the honest citizens began to give her
credit for a sympathy with their own wrongs. She expressed herself
determined to move about from one city to another, until the answer to
her demand for dismissal should arrive. She allowed her immediate
attendants to abuse the Spaniards in good set terms upon every occasion.
Even her private chaplain permitted himself, in preaching before her in
the palace chapel, to denounce the whole nation as a race of traitors and
ravishers, and for this offence was only reprimanded, much against her
will, by the Duchess, and ordered to retire for a season to his convent.
She did not attempt to disguise her dissatisfaction at every step which
had been taken by the Duke. In all this there was much petulance, but
very little dignity, while there was neither a spark of real sympathy for
the oppressed millions, nor a throb of genuine womanly emotion for the
impending fate of the two nobles. Her principal grief was that she had
pacified the provinces, and that another had now arrived to reap the
glory; but it was difficult, while the unburied bones of many heretics
were still hanging, by her decree, on the rafters of their own dismantled
churches, for her successfully to enact the part of a benignant and
merciful Regent. But it is very true that the horrors of the Duke's
administration have been propitious to the fame of Margaret, and perhaps
more so to that of Cardinal Granvelle. The faint and struggling rays of
humanity which occasionally illumined the course of their government,
were destined to be extinguished in a chaos so profound and dark, that
these last beams of light seemed clearer and more bountiful by the
contrast.

The Count of Hoogstraaten, who was on his way to Brussels, had, by good
fortune, injured his hand through the accidental discharge of a pistol.
Detained by this casualty at Cologne, he was informed, before his arrival
at the capital, of the arrest of his two distinguished friends, and
accepted the hint to betake himself at once to a place of Safety.

The loyalty of the elder Mansfeld was beyond dispute even by Alva. His
son Charles had, however, been imprudent, and, as we have seen, had even
affixed his name to the earliest copies of the Compromise. He had
retired, it is true, from all connexion with the confederates, but his
father knew w