his determination to hold those for enemies who should cease to conduct themselves as faithful vassals, declared himself to be without fear that the country was to be placed in the hands of Spaniards, and disavowed all intention, in any case whatever, of taking arms against the King.  His subsequent course, as we have seen, had been entirely in conformity with these solemn declarations.  Nevertheless, the Prince, to whom they had been made, thought it still possible to withdraw his friend from the precipice upon which he stood, and to save him from his impending fate.  His love for Egmont had, in his own noble; and pathetic language, “struck its roots too deeply into his heart” to permit him, in this their parting interview, to neglect a last effort, even if this solemn warning were destined to be disregarded.

By any reasonable construction of history, Philip was an unscrupulous usurper, who was attempting to convert himself from a Duke of Brabant and a Count of Holland into an absolute king.  It was William who was maintaining, Philip who was destroying; and the monarch who was thus blasting the happiness of the provinces, and about to decimate their population, was by the same process to undermine his own power forever, and to divest himself of his richest inheritance.  The man on whom he might have leaned for support, had he been capable of comprehending his character, and of understanding the age in which he had himself been called upon to reign, was, through Philip’s own insanity, converted into the instrument by which his most valuable provinces were, to be taken from him, and eventually re-organized into:  an independent commonwealth.  Could a vision, like that imagined by the immortal dramatist for another tyrant and murderer, have revealed the future to Philip, he, too, might have beheld his victim, not crowned himself, but pointing to a line of kings, even to some who ‘two-fold balls and treble sceptres carried’, and smiling on them for his.  But such considerations as these had no effect upon the Prince of Orange.  He knew himself already proscribed, and he knew that the secret condemnation had extended to Egmont also.  He was anxious that his friend should prefer the privations of exile, with the chance of becoming the champion of a struggling country, to the wretched fate towards which his blind confidence was leading him.  Even then it seemed possible that the brave soldier, who had been recently defiling his sword in the cause of tyranny, might be come mindful of his brighter and earlier fame.  Had Egmont been as true to his native land as, until “the long divorce of steel fell on him,” he was faithful to Philip, he might yet have earned brighter laurels than those gained at St. Quentin and Gravelines.  Was he doomed to fall, he might find a glorious death upon freedom’s battle-field, in place of that darker departure then so near him, which the prophetic language of Orange depicted, but which he was too sanguine to fear.