Here was plain speaking.  Here were all the coming horrors distinctly foreshadowed.  Here was the truth told to the only being with whom Philip ever was sincere.  Yet even on this occasion, he permitted himself a falsehood by which his Holiness was not deceived.  Philip had no intention of going to the Netherlands in person, and the Pope knew that he had none.  “I feel it in my bones,” said Granvelle, mournfully, “that nobody in Rome believes in his Majesty’s journey to the provinces.”  From that time forward, however, the King began to promise this visit, which was held out as a panacea for every ill, and made to serve as an excuse for constant delay.

It may well be supposed that if Philip’s secret policy had been thoroughly understood in the Netherlands, the outbreak would have come sooner.  On the receipt, however, of the public despatches from Madrid, the administration in Brussels made great efforts to represent their tenor as highly satisfactory.  The papal inquisition was to be abolished, a pardon was to be granted, a new moderation was to be arranged at some indefinite period; what more would men have?  Yet without seeing the face of the cards, the people suspected the real truth, and Orange was convinced of it.  Viglius wrote that if the King did not make his intended visit soon, he would come too late, and that every week more harm was done by procrastination than could be repaired by months of labor and perhaps by torrents of blood.  What the precise process was, through which Philip was to cure all disorders by his simple presence, the President did not explain.

As for the measures propounded by the King after so long a delay, they were of course worse than useless; for events had been marching while he had been musing.  The course suggested was, according to Viglius, but “a plaster for a wound, but a drag-chain for the wheel.”  He urged that the convocation of the states-general was the only remedy for the perils in which the country was involved; unless the King should come in person.  He however expressed the hope that by general consultation some means would be devised by which, if not a good, at least a less desperate aspect would be given to public affairs, “so that the commonwealth, if fall it must, might at least fall upon its feet like a cat, and break its legs rather than its neck.”

Notwithstanding this highly figurative view of the subject; and notwithstanding the urgent representations of Duchess Margaret to her brother, that nobles and people were all clamoring about the necessity of convening the states general, Philip was true to his instincts on this as on the other questions.  He knew very well that the states-general of the Netherlands and Spanish despotism were incompatible ideas, and he recoiled from the idea of the assembly with infinite aversion.  At the same time a little wholesome deception could do no harm.  He wrote to the Duchess, therefore, that he was determined never to allow the