the Catholic faith; the nobility and the Church being the two columns upon which the whole social fabric reposed.  It is to be feared that the President became rather prosy upon the occasion.  Perhaps his homily, like those of the fictitious Archbishop of Granada, began to smack of the apoplexy from which he had so recently escaped.  Perhaps, the meeting being one of hilarity, the younger nobles became restive under the infliction of a very long and very solemn harangue.  At any rate, as the meeting broke up, there was a good dial of jesting on the subject.  De Hammes, commonly called “Toison d’Or,” councillor and king-at-arms of the Order, said that the President had been seeing visions and talking with Saint Andrew in a dream.  Marquis Berghen asked for the source whence he had derived such intimate acquaintance with the ideas of the Saint.  The President took these remarks rather testily, and, from trifling, the company became soon earnestly engaged in a warm discussion of the agitating topics of the day.  It soon became evident to Viglius that De Hammer and others of his comrades had been dealing with dangerous things.  He began shrewdly to suspect that the popular heresy was rapidly extending into higher regions; but it was not the President alone who discovered how widely the contamination was spreading.  The meeting, the accidental small talk, which had passed so swiftly from gaiety to gravity, the rapid exchange of ideas, and the free-masonry by which intelligence upon forbidden topics had been mutually conveyed, became events of historical importance.  Interviews between nobles, who, in the course of the festivities produced by the Montigny and Parma marriages, had discovered that they entertained a secret similarity of sentiment upon vital questions, became of frequent occurrence.  The result to which such conferences led will be narrated in the following chapter.

Meantime, upon the 11th November, 1565, the marriage of Prince Alexander and Donna Maria was celebrated; with great solemnity, by the Archbishop of Cambray, in the chapel of the court at Brussels.  On the following Sunday the wedding banquet was held in the great hall, where, ten years previously, the memorable abdication of the bridegroom’s imperial grandfather had taken place.

The walls were again hung with the magnificent tapestry of Gideon, while the Knights of the Fleece, with all the other grandees of the land, were assembled to grace the spectacle.  The King was represented by his envoy in England, Don Guzman de Silva, who came to Brussels for the occasion, and who had been selected for this duty because, according to Armenteros, “he was endowed, beside his prudence, with so much witty gracefulness with ladies in matters of pastime and entertainment.”  Early in the month of December, a famous tournament was held in the great market-place of Brussels, the Duke of Parma, the Duke of Aerschot, and Count Egmont being judges of the jousts.  Count Mansfeld was the challenger,