“The Prince of Orange is doing very great and notable services at Antwerp to the King and to the country,” said Assonleville.  “That seignior is very skilful in managing great affairs.”  Margaret of Parma wrote letters to him fixed with the warmest gratitude, expressions of approbation, and of wishes that he could both remain in Antwerp and return to assist her in Brussels.  Philip, too, with his own pen, addressed him a letter, in which implicit confidence in the Prince’s character was avowed, all suspicion on the part of the Sovereign indignantly repudiated, earnest thanks for his acceptance of the Antwerp mission uttered, and a distinct refusal given to the earnest request made by Orange to resign his offices.  The Prince read or listened to all this commendation, and valued it exactly at its proper worth.  He knew it to be pure grimace.  He was no more deceived by it than if he had read the letter sent by Margaret to Philip, a few weeks later, in which she expressed herself as “thoroughly aware that it was the intention of Orange to take advantage of the impending tumults, for the purpose of conquering the provinces and of dividing the whole territory among himself and friends.”  Nothing could be more utterly false than so vile and ridiculous a statement.

The course of the Prince had hitherto been, and was still, both consistent and loyal.  He was proceeding step by step to place the monarch in the wrong, but the only art which he was using, was to plant himself more firmly upon the right.  It was in the monarch’s power to convoke the assembly of the states-general, so loudly demanded by the whole nation, to abolish the inquisition, to renounce persecution, to accept the great fact of the Reformation.  To do so he must have ceased to be Philip.  To have faltered in attempting to bring him into that path, the Prince must have ceased to be William of Orange.  Had he succeeded, there would have been no treason and no Republic of Holland.  His conduct at the outbreak of the Antwerp troubles was firm and sagacious.  Even had his duty required him to put down the public preaching with peremptory violence, he had been furnished with no means to accomplish the purpose.  The rebellion, if it were one, was already full-grown.  It could not be taken by the throat and strangled with one hand, however firm.

A report that the High Sheriff of Brabant was collecting troops by command of government, in order to attack the Reformers at their field-preachings, went far to undo the work already accomplished by the Prince.  The assemblages swelled again from ten or twelve thousand to twenty-five thousand, the men all providing themselves more thoroughly with weapons than before.  Soon afterwards, the intemperate zeal of another individual, armed to the teeth—­not, however, like the martial sheriff and his forces, with arquebus and javelin, but with the still more deadly weapons of polemical theology,—­was very near causing a general outbreak.  A peaceful and not very numerous