of his capacity, they were silenced.  This conversation had been going on before all the servants, the Marquis being especially vociferous, although the room was quite full of them.  As soon as the cloth was removed, and while some of the lackies still remained, Berghen had resumed the conversation.  He said he was of the same mind as his ancestor, John of Berghen, had been, who had once told the King’s grandfather, Philip the Fair, that if his Majesty was bent on his own perdition, he had no disposition to ruin himself.  If the present monarch means to lose these provinces by governing them as he did govern them, the Marquis affirmed that he had no wish to lose the little property that he himself possessed in the country.  “But if,” argued the Duke of Aerschot, “the King absolutely refuse to do what you demand of him; what then?”—­“Par la cordieu!” responded Berghen, in a rage, “we will let him see!” whereupon all became silent.

Granvelle implored the King to keep these things entirely to himself; adding that it was quite necessary for his Majesty to learn in this manner what were the real dispositions of the gentlemen of the provinces.  It was also stated in the same letter, that a ruffian Genoese, who had been ordered out of the Netherlands by the Regent, because of a homicide he had committed, was kept at Weert, by Count Horn, for the purpose of murdering the Cardinal.

He affirmed that he was not allowed to request the expulsion of the assassin from the Count’s house; but that he would take care, nevertheless, that neither this ruffian nor any other, should accomplish his purpose.  A few weeks afterwards, expressing his joy at the contradiction of a report that Philip had himself been assassinated, Granvelle added; “I too, who am but a worm in comparison, am threatened on so many sides, that many must consider me already dead.  Nevertheless, I will endeavor, with God’s help, to live as long as I can, and if they kill me, I hope they will not gain every thing.”  Yet, with characteristic Jesuitism, the Cardinal could not refrain, even in the very letter in which he detailed the rebellious demonstrations of Berghen, and the murderous schemes of Horn, to protest that he did not say these things “to prejudice his Majesty against any one, but only that it might be known to what a height the impudence was rising.”  Certainly the King and the ecclesiastic, like the Roman soothsayers, would have laughed in each other’s face, could they have met, over the hollowness of such demonstrations.  Granvelle’s letters were filled, for the greater part, with pictures of treason, stratagem, and bloody intentions, fabricated mostly out of reports, table-talk, disjointed chat in the careless freedom of domestic intercourse, while at the same time a margin was always left to express his own wounded sense of the injurious suspicions uttered against him by the various subjects of his letters.  “God knows,” said he to Perez, “that I always speak of them with respect, which is more than they do of me.  But God forgive them all.  In times like these, one must hold one’s tongue.  One must keep still, in order not to stir up a hornet’s nest.”