The reader who has followed step by step the career of the two distinguished victims through the perilous days of Margaret’s administration, is sufficiently aware of the amount of treason with which they are chargeable.  It would be an insult to common sense for us to set forth, in full, the injustice of their sentence.  Both were guiltless towards the crown; while the hands of one, on the contrary, were deeply dyed in the blood of the people.  This truth was so self-evident, that even a member of the Blood-Council, Pierre Arsens, president of Artois, addressed an elaborate memoir to the Duke of Alva, criticising the case according to the rules of law, and maintaining that Egmont, instead of deserving punishment, was entitled to a signal reward.

So much for the famous treason of Counts Egmont and Horn, so far as regards the history of the proceedings and the merits of the case.  The last act of the tragedy was precipitated by occurrences which must be now narrated.

The Prince of Orange had at last thrown down the gauntlet.  Proscribed, outlawed, with his Netherland property confiscated, and his eldest child kidnapped, he saw sufficient personal justification for at last stepping into the lists, the avowed champion of a nation’s wrongs.  Whether the revolution was to be successful, or to be disastrously crushed; whether its result would be to place him upon a throne or a scaffold, not even he, the deep-revolving and taciturn politician, could possibly foresee.  The Reformation, in which he took both a political and a religious interest, might prove a sufficient lever in his hands for the overthrow of Spanish power in the Netherlands.  The inquisition might roll back upon his country and himself, crushing them forever.  The chances seemed with the inquisition.  The Spaniards, under the first chieftain in Europe, were encamped and entrenched in the provinces.  The Huguenots had just made their fatal peace in France, to the prophetic dissatisfaction of Coligny.  The leading men of liberal sentiments in the Netherlands were captive or in exile.  All were embarrassed by the confiscations which, in anticipation of sentence, had severed the nerves of war.  The country was terror-stricken; paralyzed, motionless, abject, forswearing its convictions, and imploring only life.  At this moment William of Orange reappeared upon the scene.

He replied to the act of condemnation, which had been pronounced against him in default, by a published paper, of moderate length and great eloquence.  He had repeatedly offered to place himself, he said, upon trial before a competent court.  As a Knight of the Fleece, as a member of the Holy Roman Empire, as a sovereign prince, he could acknowledge no tribunal save the chapters of the knights or of the realm.  The Emperor’s personal intercession with Philip had been employed in vain, to obtain the adjudication of his case by either.  It would be both death and degradation on his part to acknowledge the jurisdiction of the infamous Council of Blood.  He scorned, he said, to plead his cause “before he knew not what base knaves, not fit to be the valets of his companions and himself.”