[The time is past when it could be said that the cruelty of Alva, or the enormities of his administration, have been exaggerated by party violence.  Human invention is incapable of outstripping the truth upon this subject.  To attempt the defence of either the man or his measures at the present day is to convict oneself of an amount of ignorance or of bigotry against which history and argument are alike powerless.  The publication of the Duke’s letters in the correspondence of Simancas and in the Besancon papers, together with that compact mass of horror, long before the world under the title of “Sententien van Alva,” in which a portion only of the sentences of death and banishment pronounced by him during his reign, have been copied from the official records—­these in themselves would be a sufficient justification of all the charges ever brought by the most bitter contemporary of Holland or Flanders.  If the investigator should remain sceptical, however, let him examine the “Registre des Condamnes et Bannia a Cause des Troubles des Pays Bas,” in three, together with the Records of the “Conseil des Troubles,” in forty-three folio volumes, in the Royal Archives at Brussels.  After going through all these chronicles of iniquity, the most determined historic, doubter will probably throw up the case.]

ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS: 

Advised his Majesty to bestow an annual bribe upon Lord Burleigh
Angle with their dissimulation as with a hook
Luther’s axiom, that thoughts are toll-free
Only kept alive by milk, which he drank from a woman’s breast
Scepticism, which delights in reversing the judgment of centuries
So much responsibility and so little power
Sometimes successful, even although founded upon sincerity
We are beginning to be vexed

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