favor anywhere.  As the provinces, for an instant, had seemingly got the better of their foe, they turned madly upon each other, and the fires of religious discord, which had been extinguished by the common exertions of a whole race trembling for the destruction of their fatherland, were now re-lighted with a thousand brands plucked from the sacred domestic hearth.  Fathers and children, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, were beginning to wrangle, and were prepared to persecute.  Catholic and Protestant, during the momentary relief from pressure, forgot their voluntary and most blessed Pacification, to renew their internecine feuds.  The banished Reformers, who had swarmed back in droves at the tidings of peace and good-will to all men, found themselves bitterly disappointed.  They were exposed in the Walloon provinces to the persecutions of the Malcontents, in the Frisian regions to the still powerful coercion of the royal stadholders.

Persecution begat counter-persecution.  The city of Ghent became the centre of a system of insurrection, by which all the laws of God and man were outraged under the pretence of establishing a larger liberty in civil and religious matters.  It was at Ghent that the opening scenes, in Parma’s administration took place.  Of the high-born suitors for the Netherland bride, two were still watching each other with jealous eyes.  Anjou was at Mons, which city he had secretly but unsuccessfully attempted to master for, his, own purposes.  John Casimir was at Ghent, fomenting an insurrection which he had neither skill to guide, nor intelligence to comprehend.  There was a talk of making him Count of Flanders,—­and his paltry ambition was dazzled by the glittering prize.  Anjou, who meant to be Count of Flanders himself, as well as Duke or Count of all the other Netherlands, was highly indignant at this report, which he chose to consider true.  He wrote to the estates to express his indignation.  He wrote to Ghent to offer his mediation between the burghers and the Malcontents.  Casimir wanted money for his troops.  He obtained a liberal supply, but he wanted more.  Meantime, the mercenaries were expatiating on their own account throughout the southern provinces; eating up every green leaf, robbing and pillaging, where robbery and pillage had gone so often that hardly anything was left for rapine.  Thus dealt the soldiers in the open country, while their master at Ghent was plunging into the complicated intrigues spread over that unfortunate city by the most mischievous demagogues that ever polluted a sacred cause.  Well had Cardinal Granvelle, his enemy, William of Hesse, his friend and kinsman, understood the character of John Casimir.  Robbery and pillage were his achievements, to make chaos more confounded was his destiny.  Anjou—­disgusted with the temporary favor accorded to a rival whom he affected to despise—­disbanded his troops in dudgeon, and prepared to retire to France.  Several thousand of these mercenaries took service