The same two men among Philip’s advisers were prominent as at an earlier day—­the Prince of Eboli and the Duke of Alva.  They still represented entirely opposite ideas, and in character, temper, and history, each was the reverse of the other.  The policy of the Prince was pacific and temporizing; that of the Duke uncompromising and ferocious.  Ruy Gomez was disposed to prevent, if possible, the armed mission of Alva, and he now openly counselled the King to fulfil his long-deferred promise, and to make his appearance in person before his rebellious subjects.  The jealousy and hatred which existed between the Prince and the Duke—­between the man of peace and the man of wrath—­were constantly exploding, even in the presence of the King.  The wrangling in the council was incessant.  Determined, if possible; to prevent the elevation of his rival, the favorite was even for a moment disposed to ask for the command of the army himself.  There was something ludicrous in the notion, that a man whose life had been pacific, and who trembled at the noise of arms, should seek to supersede the terrible Alva, of whom his eulogists asserted, with, Castilian exaggeration, that the very name of fear inspired him with horror.  But there was a limit beyond which the influence of Anna de Mendoza and her husband did not extend.  Philip was not to be driven to the Netherlands against his will, nor to be prevented from assigning the command of the army to the most appropriate man in Europe for his purpose.

It was determined at last that the Netherland heresy should be conquered by force of arms.  The invasion resembled both a crusade against the infidel, and a treasure-hunting foray into the auriferous Indies, achievements by which Spanish chivalry had so often illustrated itself.  The banner of the cross was to be replanted upon the conquered battlements of three hundred infidel cities, and a torrent of wealth, richer than ever flowed from Mexican or Peruvian mines, was to flow into the royal treasury from the perennial fountains of confiscation.  Who so fit to be the Tancred and the Pizarro of this bicolored expedition as the Duke of Alva, the man who had been devoted from his earliest childhood, and from his father’s grave, to hostility against unbelievers, and who had prophesied that treasure would flow in a stream, a yard deep, from the Netherlands as soon as the heretics began to meet with their deserts.  An army of chosen troops was forthwith collected, by taking the four legions, or terzios, of Naples, Sicily, Sardinia, and Lombardy, and filling their places in Italy by fresh levies.  About ten thousand picked and veteran soldiers were thus obtained, of which the Duke of Alva was appointed general-in-chief.