The friends of the Union and of liberty used all their eloquence to arrest the city of Ghent in its course, and to save the province of Flanders from accepting the proposed arrangement with Parma.  The people of Ghent were reminded that the chief promoter of this new negotiation was Champagny, a man who owed a deep debt of hatred to their city, for the long, and as he believed, the unjust confinement which he had endured within its walls.  Moreover, he was the brother of Granvelle, source of all their woes.  To take counsel with Champagny, was to come within reach of a deadly foe, for “he who confesses himself to a wolf,” said the burgomasters of Antwerp, “will get wolf’s absolution.”  The Flemings were warned by all their correspondents that it was puerile to hope for faith in Philip; a monarch whose first principle was, that promises to heretics were void.  They were entreated to pay no heed to the “sweet singing of the royalists,” who just then affected to disapprove of the practice adopted by the Spanish Inquisition, that they might more surely separate them from their friends.  “Imitate not,” said the magistrates of Brussels, “the foolish sheep who made with the wolves a treaty of perpetual amity, from which the faithful dogs were to be excluded.”  It was affirmed—­and the truth was certainly beyond peradventure—­that religious liberty was dead at the moment when the treaty with Parma should be signed.  “To look for political privilege or evangelical liberty,” said the Antwerp authorities, “in any arrangement with the Spaniards, is to look for light in darkness, for fire in water.”  “Philip is himself the slave of the Inquisition,” said the states-general, “and has but one great purpose in life—­to cherish the institution everywhere, and particularly in the Netherlands.  Before Margaret of Parma’s time, one hundred thousand Netherlanders had been burned or strangled, and Alva had spent seven years in butchering and torturing many thousands more.”  The magistrates of Brussells used similar expressions.  “The King of Spain,” said they to their brethren of Ghent, “is fastened to the Inquisition.  Yea, he is so much in its power, that even if he desired, he is unable to maintain his promises.”  The Prince of Orange too, was indefatigable in public and private efforts to counteract the machinations of Parma and the Spanish party in Ghent.  He saw with horror the progress which the political decomposition of that most important commonwealth was making, for he considered the city the keystone to the union of the provinces, for he felt with a prophetic instinct that its loss would entail that of all the southern provinces, and make a united and independent Netherland state impossible.  Already in the summer of 1583, he addressed a letter full of wisdom and of warning to the authorities of Ghent, a letter in which he set fully before them the iniquity and stupidity of their proceedings, while at the same time he expressed himself with so much dexterity and caution as to avoid giving offence, by accusations which he made, as it were, hypothetically, when, in truth, they were real ones.