The Duke was, doubtless, lower sunk in the estimation of all classes than he had ever been before, during his long and generally successful life.  The reverses sustained by his army, the belief that his master had grown cold towards him, the certainty that his career in the Netherlands was closing without a satisfactory result, the natural weariness produced upon men’s minds by the contemplation of so monotonous and unmitigated a tyranny during so many years, all contributed to diminish his reputation.  He felt himself odious alike to princes and to plebeians.  With his cabinet councillors he had long been upon unsatisfactory terms.  President Tisnacq had died early, in the summer, and Viglius, much against his will, had been induced, provisionally, to supply his place.  But there was now hardly a pretence of friendship between the learned Frisian and the Governor.  Each cordially detested the other.  Alva was weary of Flemish and Frisian advisers, however subservient, and was anxious to fill the whole council with Spaniards of the Vargas stamp.  He had forced Viglius once more into office, only that, by a little delay, he might expel him and every Netherlander at the same moment.  “Till this ancient set of dogmatizers be removed,” he wrote to Philip, “with Viglius, their chief, who teaches them all their lessons, nothing will go right.  ’Tis of no use adding one or two Spaniards to fill vacancies; that is only pouring a flask of good wine into a hogshead of vinegar; it changes to vinegar likewise.  Your Majesty will soon be able to reorganize the council at a blow; so that Italians or Spaniards, as you choose, may entirely govern the country.”

Such being his private sentiments with regard to his confidential advisers, it may be supposed that his intercourse with his council during the year was not like to be amicable.  Moreover, he had kept himself, for the most part, at a distance from the seat of government.  During the military operations in Holland, his head-quarters had been at Amsterdam.  Here, as the year drew to its close, he had become as unpopular as in Brussels.  The time-serving and unpatriotic burghers, who, at the beginning of the spring, set up his bust in their houses, and would give large sums for his picture in little, now broke his images and tore his portraits from their walls, for it was evident that the power of his name was gone, both with prince and people.  Yet, certainly, those fierce demonstrations which had formerly surrounded his person with such an atmosphere of terror had not slackened or become less frequent than heretofore.  He continued to prove that he could be barbarous, both on a grand and a minute scale.  Even as in preceding years, he could ordain wholesale massacres with a breath, and superintend in person the executions of individuals.  This was illustrated, among other instances, by the cruel fate of Uitenhoove.  That unfortunate nobleman, who had been taken prisoner in the course of the summer, was accused of having