Alva, while he sat at the council board with Egmont and Horn, was secretly informed that those important personages, Bakkerzeel and Straalen, with the private secretary of the Admiral, Alonzo de la Loo, in addition, had been thus successfully arrested.  He could with difficulty conceal his satisfaction, and left the apartment immediately that the trap might be sprung upon the two principal victims of his treachery.  He had himself arranged all the details of these two important arrests, while his natural son, the Prior Don Ferdinando, had been compelled to superintend the proceedings.  The plot had been an excellent plot, and was accomplished as successfully as it bad been sagaciously conceived.  None but Spaniards had been employed in any part of the affair.  Officers of high rank in his Majesty’s army had performed the part of spies and policemen with much adroitness, nor was it to be expected that the duty would seem a disgrace, when the Prior of the Knights of Saint John was superintendent of the operations, when the Captain-General of the Netherlands had arranged the whole plan, and when all, from subaltern to viceroy, had received minute instructions as to the contemplated treachery from the great chief of the Spanish police, who sat on the throne of Castile and Aragon.

No sooner were these gentlemen in custody than the secretary Albornoz was dispatched to the house of Count Horn, and to that of Bakkerzeel, where all papers were immediately seized, inventoried, and placed in the hands of the Duke.  Thus, if amid the most secret communications of Egmont and Horn or their correspondents, a single treasonable thought should be lurking, it was to go hard but it might be twisted into a cord strong enough to strangle them all.

The Duke wrote a triumphant letter to his Majesty that very night.  He apologized that these important captures had been deferred so long but, stated that he had thought it desirable to secure all these leading personages at a single stroke.  He then narrated the masterly manner in which the operations had been conducted.  Certainly, when it is remembered that the Duke had only reached Brussels upon the 23d August, and that the two Counts were securely lodged in prison on the 9th of September, it seemed a superfluous modesty upon his part thus to excuse himself for an apparent delay.  At any rate, in the eyes of the world and of posterity, his zeal to carry out the bloody commands of his master was sufficiently swift.

The consternation was universal throughout the provinces when the arrests became known.  Egmont’s great popularity and distinguished services placed him so high above the mass of citizens, and his attachment to the Catholic religion was moreover so well known, as to make it obvious that no man could now be safe, when men like him were in the power of Alva and his myrmidons.  The animosity to the Spaniards increased hourly.  The Duchess affected indignation at the arrest of the two nobles, although it nowhere appears