Other measures of the government aroused Catholic hostility.  In this year, 1819, a decree forbade the holding of more than two religious processions in a year.  In such a country as Belgium this restriction was strongly resented.  But the establishment in 1825 by the king of a Collegium Philosophicum at Louvain, at which all candidates for the priesthood were by royal decree required (after 1826) to have a two-years’ course before proceeding to an episcopal seminary, met with strenuous resistance.  The instruction was in ancient languages, history, ethics and canon-law; and the teachers were nominated by the king.  The first effect of this decree was that young men began to seek education in foreign seminaries.  Another royal decree at once forbade this, and all youths were ordered to proceed either to the Collegium or to one of the High Schools of the land; unless they did so, access to the priesthood or to any public office was barred to them.  This was perhaps the most serious of all the king’s mistakes.  He miscalculated both the strength and the sincerity of the opposition he thus deliberately courted.  His decrees were doomed to failure.  The bishops on their part refused to admit to their seminaries or to ordination anyone who attended the Collegium Philosophicum.  The king, in the face of the irrevocable decision of the Belgian hierarchy, found himself in an untenable position.  He could not compel the bishops to ordain candidates for Holy Orders, and his decrees were therefore a dead letter; nor on the other hand could he trample upon the convictions of the vast majority of his Belgian subjects by making admission to the priesthood impossible.  He had to give way and to send a special envoy—­De Celles—­to the Pope in 1827 to endeavour to negotiate a Concordat.  It was accomplished.  By Article III of the Concordat, there were to be eight bishops in the Netherlands instead of five.  They were to be chosen by the Pope, but the king was to have the right of objection, and they were required to take the oath of allegiance.  The course at the Collegium Philosophicum was made optional.  William thus yielded on practically all the points at issue, but prided himself on having obtained the right of rejecting a papal nominee.  The Pope, however, in an allocution made no mention of this right, and declared that the decree about the Collegium was annulled, and that in matters of education the bishops would act in accordance with instructions from Rome.  The government immediately issued a confidential notice to the governors of provinces, that the carrying-out of the Concordat was indefinitely postponed.  Thus the effort at conciliation ended in the humiliation of the king, and the triumph of the astute diplomacy of the Vatican.