He had been pained that commissioners had been sent to the Prince.  He regretted such a demonstration in his favor as had now been made by the mission of the Archduke to Madrid.  That which, however, had caused the King the deepest sorrow was, that his Imperial Majesty should wish to persuade him in religious matters to proceed with mildness.  The Emperor ought to be aware that no human consideration, no regard for his realms, nothing in the world which could be represented or risked, would cause him to swerve by a single hair’s breadth from his path in the matter of religion.  This path was the same throughout all his kingdoms.  He had ever trod in it faithfully, and he meant to keep in it perpetually.  He would admit neither counsel nor persuasion to the contrary, and should take it ill if counsel or persuasion should be offered.  He could not but consider the terms of the instructions given to the Archduke as exceeding the limits of amicable suggestion.  They in effect amounted to a menace, and he was astonished that a menace should be employed, because, with princes constituted like himself, such means could have but little success.

On the 23rd of January, 1569, the Archduke presented the King with a spirited reply to the public letter.  It was couched in the spirit of the instructions, and therefore need not be analysed at length.  He did not believe that his Imperial Majesty would admit any justification of the course pursued in the Netherlands.  The estates of the Empire would never allow Philip’s reasoning concerning the connexion of those countries with the Empire, nor that they were independent, except in the particular articles expressed in the treaty of Augsburg.  In 1555, when Charles the Fifth and King Ferdinand had settled the religious peace, they had been assisted by envoys from the Netherlands.  The princes of the Empire held the ground, therefore, that the religious peace, which alone had saved a vestige of Romanism in Germany, should of right extend to the provinces.  As to the Prince of Orange, the Archduke would have preferred to say nothing more, but the orders of the Emperor did not allow him to be silent.  It was now necessary to put an end to this state of things in Lower Germany.  The princes of the Empire were becoming exasperated.  He recalled the dangers of the Smalcaldian war—­the imminent peril in which the Emperor had been placed by the act of a single elector.  They who believed that Flanders could be governed in the same manner as Italy and Spain were greatly mistaken, and Charles the Fifth had always recognised that error.

This was the sum and substance of the Archduke’s mission to Madrid, so far as its immediate objects were concerned.  In the course, however, of the interview between this personage and Philip, the King took occasion to administer a rebuke to his Imperial Majesty for his general negligence in religious matters.  It was a matter which lay at his heart, he said, that the Emperor, although, as he doubted not, a Christian and Catholic prince, was from policy unaccustomed to make those exterior demonstrations which matters of faith required.  He therefore begged the Archduke to urge this matter upon the attention of his Imperial Majesty.