By the influence of the leaders many signatures were obtained during the first two months of the year.  The language of the document was such that patriotic Catholics could sign it as honestly as Protestants.  It inveighed bitterly against the tyranny of “a heap of strangers,” who, influenced only by private avarice and ambition, were making use of an affected zeal for the Catholic religion, to persuade the King into a violation of his oaths.  It denounced the refusal to mitigate the severity of the edicts.  It declared the inquisition, which it seemed the intention of government to fix permanently upon them, as “iniquitous, contrary to all laws, human and divine, surpassing the greatest barbarism which was ever practised by tyrants, and as redounding to the dishonor of God and to the total desolation of the country.”  The signers protested, therefore, that “having a due regard to their duties as faithful vassals of his Majesty, and especially, as noblemen—­and in order not to be deprived of their estates and their lives by those who, under pretext of religion, wished to enrich themselves by plunder and murder,” they had bound themselves to each other by holy covenant and solemn oath to resist the inquisition.  They mutually promised to oppose it in every shape, open or covert, under whatever mask, it might assume, whether bearing the name of inquisition, placard, or edict, “and to extirpate and eradicate the thing in any form, as the mother of all iniquity and disorder.”  They protested before God and man, that they would attempt nothing to the dishonor of the Lord or to the diminution of the King’s grandeur, majesty, or dominion.  They declared, on the contrary, an honest purpose to “maintain the monarch in his estate, and to suppress all seditious, tumults, monopolies, and factions.”  They engaged to preserve their confederation, thus formed, forever inviolable, and to permit none of its members to be persecuted in any manner, in body or goods, by any proceeding founded on the inquisition, the edicts, or the present league.

It will be seen therefore, that the Compromise was in its origin, a covenant of nobles.  It was directed against the foreign influence by which the Netherlands were exclusively governed, and against the inquisition, whether papal, episcopal, or by edict.  There is no doubt that the country was controlled entirely by Spanish masters, and that the intention was to reduce the ancient liberty of the Netherlands into subjection to a junta of foreigners sitting at Madrid.  Nothing more legitimate could be imagined than a constitutional resistance to such a policy.