The Duchess of Parma had been kept in a continued state of irritation.  She had not ceased for many months to demand her release from the odious position of a cipher in a land where she had so lately been sovereign, and she had at last obtained it.  Philip transmitted his acceptance of her resignation by the same courier who brought Alva’s commission to be governor-general in her place.  The letters to the Duchess were full of conventional compliments for her past services, accompanied, however, with a less barren and more acceptable acknowledgment, in the shape of a life income of 14,000 ducats instead of the 8000 hitherto enjoyed by her Highness.

In addition to this liberal allowance, of which she was never to be deprived, except upon receiving full payment of 140,000 ducats, she was presented with 25,000 florins by the estates of Brabant, and with 30,000 by those of Flanders.

With these substantial tokens of the success of her nine years’ fatigue and intolerable anxiety, she at last took her departure from the Netherlands, having communicated the dissolution of her connexion with the provinces by a farewell letter to the Estates dated 9th December, 1567.  Within a few weeks afterwards, escorted by the Duke of Alva across the frontier of Brabant; attended by a considerable deputation of Flemish nobility into Germany, and accompanied to her journey’s end at Parma by the Count and Countess of Mansfeld, she finally closed her eventful career in the Netherlands.

The horrors of the succeeding administration proved beneficial to her reputation.  Upon the dark ground of succeeding years the lines which recorded her history seemed written with letters of light.  Yet her conduct in the Netherlands offers but few points for approbation, and many for indignant censure.  That she was not entirely destitute of feminine softness and sentiments of bounty, her parting despatch to her brother proved.  In that letter she recommended to him a course of clemency and forgiveness, and reminded him that the nearer kings approach to God in station, the more they should endeavor to imitate him in his attributes of benignity.  But the language of this farewell was more tender than had been the spirit of her government.  One looks in vain, too, through the general atmosphere of kindness which pervades the epistle; for a special recommendation of those distinguished and doomed seigniors, whose attachment to her person and whose chivalrous and conscientious endeavors to fulfil her own orders, had placed them upon the edge of that precipice from which they were shortly to be hurled.  The men who had restrained her from covering herself with disgrace by a precipitate retreat from the post of danger, and who had imperilled their lives by obedience to her express instructions, had been long languishing in solitary confinement, never to be terminated except by a traitor’s death—­yet we search in vain for a kind word in their behalf.