After this remonstrance had been delivered, the Prince of Orange, Count Horn, and Count Egmont abstained entirely from the sessions of the state council.  She was left alone with the Cardinal, whom she already hated, and with his two shadows, Viglius and Berlaymont.

Armenteros, after a month spent on his journey, arrived in Spain, and was soon admitted to an audience by Philip.  In his first interview, which lasted four hours, he read to the King all the statements and documents with which he had come provided, and humbly requested a prompt decision.  Such a result was of course out of the question.  Moreover, the Cortes of Tarragon, which happened then to be in session, and which required the royal attention, supplied the monarch with a fresh excuse for indulging in his habitual vacillation.  Meantime, by way of obtaining additional counsel in so grave an emergency, he transmitted the letters of the nobles, together with the other papers, to the Duke of Alva, and requested his opinion on the subject.  Alva replied with the roar of a wild beast, “Every time,” he wrote, “that I see the despatches of those three Flemish seigniors my rage is so much excited that if I did not use all possible efforts to restrain it, my sentiments would seem those of a madman.”  After this splenitive exordium he proceeded to express the opinion that all the hatred and complaints against the Cardinal had arisen from his opposition to the convocation of the states-general.  With regard to persons who had so richly deserved such chastisement, he recommended “that their heads should be taken off; but, until this could be done, that the King should dissemble with them.”  He advised Philip not to reply to their letters, but merely to intimate, through the Regent, that their reasons for the course proposed by them did not seem satisfactory.  He did not prescribe this treatment of the case as “a true remedy, but only as a palliative; because for the moment only weak medicines could be employed, from which, however, but small effect could be anticipated.”  As to recalling the Cardinal, “as they had the impudence to propose to his Majesty,” the Duke most decidedly advised against the step.  In the mean time, and before it should be practicable to proceed “to that vigorous chastisement already indicated,” he advised separating the nobles as much as possible by administering flattery and deceitful caresses to Egmont, who might be entrapped more easily than the others.

Here, at least, was a man who knew his own mind.  Here was a servant who could be relied upon to do his master’s bidding whenever this master should require his help.  The vigorous explosion of wrath with which the Duke thus responded to the first symptoms of what he regarded as rebellion, gave a feeble intimation of the tone which he would assume when that movement should have reached a more advanced stage.  It might be guessed what kind of remedies he would one day prescribe in place of the “mild medicines” in which he so reluctantly acquiesced for the present.