The amount to be received by individuals from this source may be estimated from the fact that Count Horn, by no means one of the most favored in the victorious armies, had received from Leonor d’Orleans, Due de Loggieville, a ransom of eighty thousand crowns.  The sum due, if payment were enforced, from the prisoners assigned to Egmont, Orange, and others, must have been very large.  Granvelle estimated the whole amount at two millions; adding, characteristically, “that this kind of speculation was a practice” which our good old fathers, lovers of virtue, would not have found laudable.  In this the churchman was right, but he might have added that the “lovers of virtue” would have found it as little “laudable” for ecclesiastics to dispose of the sacred offices in their gift, for carpets, tapestry, and annual payments of certain percentages upon the cure of souls.  If the profits respectively gained by military and clerical speculators in that day should be compared, the disadvantage would hardly be found to lie with those of the long robe.

Such, then, at the beginning of 1560, was William of Orange; a generous, stately, magnificent, powerful grandee.  As a military commander, he had acquitted himself very creditably of highly important functions at an early age.  Nevertheless it was the opinion of many persons, that he was of a timid temperament.  He was even accused of having manifested an unseemly panic at Philippeville, and of having only been restrained by the expostulations of his officers, from abandoning both that fortress and Charlemont to Admiral Coligny, who had made his appearance in the neighborhood, merely at the head of a reconnoitring party.  If the story were true, it would be chiefly important as indicating that the Prince of Orange was one of the many historical characters, originally of an excitable and even timorous physical organization, whom moral courage and a strong will have afterwards converted into dauntless heroes.  Certain it is that he was destined to confront open danger in every form, that his path was to lead through perpetual ambush, yet that his cheerful confidence and tranquil courage were to become not only unquestionable but proverbial.  It may be safely asserted, however, that the story was an invention to be classed with those fictions which made him the murderer of his first wife, a common conspirator against Philip’s crown and person, and a crafty malefactor in general, without a single virtue.  It must be remembered that even the terrible Alva, who lived in harness almost from the cradle to the grave, was, so late as at this period, censured for timidity, and had been accused in youth of flat cowardice.  He despised the insinuation, which for him had no meaning.  There is no doubt too that caution was a predominant characteristic of the Prince.  It was one of the chief sources of his greatness.  At that period, perhaps at any period, he would have been incapable of such brilliant and dashing exploits as had made the name of Egmont so famous.  It had even become a proverb, “the counsel of Orange, the execution of Egmont,” yet we shall have occasion to see how far this physical promptness which had been so felicitous upon the battle-field was likely to avail the hero of St. Quentin in the great political combat which was approaching.