The culminating career of Alva seemed to have closed in the mist which gathered around the setting star of the empire.  Having accompanied Philip to England in 1554, on his matrimonial-expedition, he was destined in the following years, as viceroy and generalissimo of Italy, to be placed in a series of false positions.  A great captain engaged in a little war, the champion of the cross in arms against the successor of St. Peter, he had extricated himself, at last, with his usual adroitness, but with very little glory.  To him had been allotted the mortification, to another the triumph.  The lustre of his own name seemed to sink in the ocean while that of a hated rival, with new spangled ore, suddenly “flamed in the forehead of the morning sky.”  While he had been paltering with a dotard, whom he was forbidden to crush, Egmont had struck down the chosen troops of France, and conquered her most illustrious commanders.  Here was the unpardonable crime which could only be expiated by the blood of the victor.  Unfortunately for his rival, the time was now approaching when the long-deferred revenge was to be satisfied.

On the whole, the Duke of Alva was inferior to no general of his age.  As a disciplinarian he was foremost in Spain, perhaps in Europe.  A spendthrift of time, he was an economist of blood, and this was, perhaps, in the eye of humanity, his principal virtue.  Time and myself are two, was a frequent observation of Philip, and his favorite general considered the maxim as applicable to war as to politics.  Such were his qualities as a military commander.  As a statesman, he had neither experience nor talent.  As a man his character was simple.  He did not combine a great variety of vices, but those which he had were colossal, and he possessed no virtues.  He was neither lustful nor intemperate, but his professed eulogists admitted his enormous avarice, while the world has agreed that such an amount of stealth and ferocity, of patient vindictiveness and universal bloodthirstiness, were never found in a savage beast of the forest, and but rarely in a human bosom.  His history was now to show that his previous thrift of human life was not derived from any love of his kind.  Personally he was stern and overbearing.  As difficult of access as Philip himself, he was even more haughty to those who were admitted to his presence.  He addressed every one with the depreciating second person plural.  Possessing the right of being covered in the presence of the Spanish monarch, he had been with difficulty brought to renounce it before the German Emperor.  He was of an illustrious family; but his territorial possessions were not extensive.  His duchy was a small one, furnishing him with not more than fourteen thousand crowns of annual income, and with four hundred soldiers.  He had, however, been a thrifty financier all his life, never having been without a handsome sum of ready money at interest.  Ten years before his arrival in the Netherlands,