He had given orders to enforce conformity to the ancient Church, not with bloodshed, yet with comparative strictness, in his principality of Orange.  Beyond the compliance with rites and forms, thought indispensable in those days to a personage of such high degree, he did not occupy himself with theology.  He was a Catholic, as Egmont and Horn, Berlaymont and Mansfeld, Montigny and even Brederode, were Catholic.  It was only tanners, dyers and apostate priests who were Protestants at that day in the Netherlands.  His determination to protect a multitude of his harmless inferiors from horrible deaths did not proceed from sympathy with their religious sentiments, but merely from a generous and manly detestation of murder.  He carefully averted his mind from sacred matters.  If indeed the seed implanted by his pious parents were really the germ of his future conversion to Protestantism, it must be confessed that it lay dormant a long time.  But his mind was in other pursuits.  He was disposed for an easy, joyous, luxurious, princely life.  Banquets, masquerades, tournaments, the chase, interspersed with the routine of official duties, civil and military, seemed likely to fill out his life.  His hospitality, like his fortune, was almost regal.  While the King and the foreign envoys were still in the Netherlands, his house, the splendid Nassau palace of Brussels, was ever open.  He entertained for the monarch, who was, or who imagined himself to be, too poor to discharge his own duties in this respect, but he entertained at his own expense.  This splendid household was still continued.  Twenty-four noblemen and eighteen pages of gentle birth officiated regularly in his family.  His establishment was on so extensive a scale that upon one day twenty-eight master cooks were dismissed, for the purpose of diminishing the family expenses, and there was hardly a princely house in Germany which did not send cooks to learn their business in so magnificent a kitchen.  The reputation of his table remained undiminished for years.  We find at a later period, that Philip, in the course of one of the nominal reconciliations which took place several times between the monarch and William of Orange, wrote that, his head cook being dead, he begged the Prince to “make him a present of his chief cook, Master Herman, who was understood to be very skilful.”

In this hospitable mansion, the feasting continued night and day.  From early morning till noon, the breakfast-tables were spread with wines and luxurious viands in constant succession, to all comers and at every moment.—­The dinner and supper were daily banquets for a multitude of guests.  The highest nobles were not those alone who were entertained.  Men of lower degree were welcomed with a charming hospitality which made them feel themselves at their ease.  Contemporaries of all parties unite in eulogizing the winning address and gentle manners of the Prince.  “Never,” says a most bitter Catholic historian,