that she attempted a word in their defence, or lifted, at any subsequent moment, a finger to save them.  She was not anxious to wash her hands of the blood of two innocent men; she was only offended that they had been arrested without her permission.  The Duke had, it is true, sent Berlaymont and Mansfeld to give her information of the fact, as soon as the capture had been made, with the plausible excuse that he preferred to save her from all the responsibility and all the unpopularity of the measure, Nothing, however, could appease her wrath at this and every other indication of the contempt in which he appeared to hold the sister of his sovereign.  She complained of his conduct daily to every one who was admitted to her presence.  Herself oppressed by a sense of personal indignity, she seemed for a moment to identify herself with the cause of the oppressed provinces.  She seemed to imagine herself the champion of their liberties, and the Netherlanders, for a moments seemed to participate in the delusion.  Because she was indignant at the insolence of the Duke of Alva to her self, the honest citizens began to give her credit for a sympathy with their own wrongs.  She expressed herself determined to move about from one city to another, until the answer to her demand for dismissal should arrive.  She allowed her immediate attendants to abuse the Spaniards in good set terms upon every occasion.  Even her private chaplain permitted himself, in preaching before her in the palace chapel, to denounce the whole nation as a race of traitors and ravishers, and for this offence was only reprimanded, much against her will, by the Duchess, and ordered to retire for a season to his convent.  She did not attempt to disguise her dissatisfaction at every step which had been taken by the Duke.  In all this there was much petulance, but very little dignity, while there was neither a spark of real sympathy for the oppressed millions, nor a throb of genuine womanly emotion for the impending fate of the two nobles.  Her principal grief was that she had pacified the provinces, and that another had now arrived to reap the glory; but it was difficult, while the unburied bones of many heretics were still hanging, by her decree, on the rafters of their own dismantled churches, for her successfully to enact the part of a benignant and merciful Regent.  But it is very true that the horrors of the Duke’s administration have been propitious to the fame of Margaret, and perhaps more so to that of Cardinal Granvelle.  The faint and struggling rays of humanity which occasionally illumined the course of their government, were destined to be extinguished in a chaos so profound and dark, that these last beams of light seemed clearer and more bountiful by the contrast.

The Count of Hoogstraaten, who was on his way to Brussels, had, by good fortune, injured his hand through the accidental discharge of a pistol.  Detained by this casualty at Cologne, he was informed, before his arrival at the capital, of the arrest of his two distinguished friends, and accepted the hint to betake himself at once to a place of Safety.