Upon the 11th of July, the Prince formally accepted the government.  He, however, made an essential change in a very important clause of the ordinance.  In place of the words, the “Roman religion,” he insisted that the words, “religion at variance with the Gospel,” should be substituted in the article by which he was enjoined to prohibit the exercise of such religion.  This alteration rebuked the bigotry which had already grown out of the successful resistance to bigotry, and left the door open for a general religious toleration.

Early in this year the Prince had despatched Saint Aldegonde on a private mission to the Elector Palatine.  During some of his visits to that potentate he had seen at Heidelberg the Princess Charlotte of Bourbon.  That lady was daughter of the Due de Montpensier, the most ardent of the Catholic Princes of France, and the one who at the conferences of Bayonne had been most indignant at the Queen Dowager’s hesitation to unite heartily with the, schemes of Alva and Philip for the extermination of the Huguenots.  His daughter, a woman of beauty, intelligence, and virtue, forced before the canonical age to take the religious vows, had been placed in the convent of Joliarrs, of which she had become Abbess.  Always secretly inclined to the Reformed religion, she had fled secretly from her cloister, in the year of horrors 1572, and had found refuge at the court of the Elector Palatine, after which step her father refused to receive her letters, to contribute a farthing to her support, or even to acknowledge her claims upon him by a single line or message of affection.

Under these circumstances the outcast princess, who had arrived at the years of maturity, might be considered her own mistress, and she was neither morally nor legally bound, when her hand was sought in marriage by the great champion of the Reformation, to ask the consent of a parent who loathed her religion and denied her existence.  The legality of the divorce from Anne of Saxony had been settled by a full expression of the ecclesiastical authority which she most respected;

     [Acte de, cinq Ministres du St. Evangile par lequel ils declarent le
     mariage du Prince d’Orange etre legitime.—­Archives, etc., v. 216-
     226.]

the facts upon which the divorce had been founded having been proved beyond peradventure.

Nothing, in truth, could well be more unfortunate in its results than the famous Saxon marriage, the arrangements for which had occasioned so much pondering to Philip, and so much diplomatic correspondence on the part of high personages in Germany, the Netherlands, and Spain.  Certainly, it was of but little consequence to what church the unhappy Princess belonged, and they must be lightly versed in history or in human nature who can imagine these nuptials to have exercised any effect upon the religious or political sentiments of Orange.  The Princess was of a stormy, ill-regulated