For some time after Philip’s departure, the Netherlands continued to enjoy considerable prosperity.  From the period of the Peace of Cateau-Cambresis, commerce and navigation had acquired new and increasing activity.  The fisheries, but particularly that of herrings, became daily more important; that one alone occupying two thousand boats.  While Holland, Zealand and Friesland made this progress in their peculiar branches of industry, the southern provinces were not less active or successful.  Spain and the colonies offered such a mart for the objects of their manufacture that in a single year they received from Flanders fifty large ships filled with articles of household furniture and utensils.  The exportation of woollen goods amounted to enormous sums.  Bruges alone sold annually to the amount of four million florins of stuffs of Spanish, and as much of English, wool; and the least value of the florin then was quadruple its present worth.  The commerce with England, though less important than that with Spain, was calculated yearly at twenty-four million florins, which was chiefly clear profit to the Netherlands, as their exportations consisted almost entirely of objects of their own manufacture.  Their commercial relations with France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, and the Levant, were daily increasing.  Antwerp was the centre of this prodigious trade.  Several sovereigns, among others Elizabeth of England, had recognized agents in that city, equivalent to consuls of the present times; and loans of immense amount were frequently negotiated by them with wealthy merchants, who furnished them, not in negotiable bills or for unredeemable debentures, but in solid gold, and on a simple acknowledgment.

Flanders and Brabant were still the richest and most flourishing portions of the state.  Some municipal fetes given about this time afford a notion of their opulence.  On one of these occasions the town of Mechlin sent a deputation to Antwerp, consisting of three hundred and twenty-six horsemen dressed in velvet and satin with gold and silver ornaments; while those of Brussels consisted of three hundred and forty, as splendidly equipped, and accompanied by seven huge triumphal chariots and seventy-eight carriages of various constructions—­a prodigious number for those days.

But the splendor and prosperity which thus sprung out of the national industry and independence, and which a wise or a generous sovereign would have promoted, or at least have established on a permanent basis, was destined speedily to sink beneath the bigoted fury of Philip II.  The new government which he had established was most ingeniously adapted to produce every imaginable evil to the state.  The king, hundreds of leagues distant, could not himself issue an order but with a lapse of time ruinous to any object of pressing importance.  The stadtholderess, who represented him, having but a nominal authority, was forced to follow her instructions, and liable to have