personal bravery, he was the last of the paladins and the crusaders.  His accomplishments were also considerable, and he spoke Italian, German, French, and Spanish with fluency.  His beauty was remarkable; his personal fascinations acknowledged by either sex; but as a commander of men, excepting upon the battle-field, he possessed little genius.  His ambition was the ambition of a knight-errant, an adventurer, a Norman pirate; it was a personal and tawdry ambition.  Vague and contradictory dreams of crowns, of royal marriages, of extemporized dynasties, floated ever before him; but he was himself always the hero of his own romance.  He sought a throne in Africa or in Britain; he dreamed of espousing Mary of Scotland at the expense of Elizabeth, and was even thought to aspire secretly to the hand of the great English Queen herself.  Thus, crusader and bigot as he was, he was willing to be reconciled with heresy, if heresy could furnish him with a throne.

It is superfluous to state that he was no match, by mental endowments, for William of Orange; but even had he been so, the moral standard by which each measured himself placed the Conqueror far below the Father of a people.  It must be admitted that Don John is entitled to but small credit for his political achievements in the Netherlands.  He was incapable of perceiving that the great contest between the Reformation and the Inquisition could never be amicably arranged in those provinces, and that the character of William of Orange was neither to be softened by royal smiles, nor perverted by appeals to sordid interests.  It would have been perhaps impossible for him, with his education and temperament, to have embraced what seems to us the right cause, but it ought, at least, to have been in his power to read the character of his antagonist, and to estimate his own position with something like accuracy.  He may be forgiven that he did not succeed in reconciling hostile parties, when his only plan to accomplish such a purpose was the extermination of the most considerable faction; but although it was not to be expected that he would look on the provinces with the eyes of William the Silent, he might have comprehended that the Netherland chieftain was neither to be purchased nor cajoled.  The only system by which the two religions could live together in peace had been discovered by the Prince; but toleration, in the eyes of Catholics, and of many Protestants, was still thought the deadliest heresy of all.

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MOTLEY’S HISTORY OF THE NETHERLANDS, Project Gutenberg Edition, Vol. 31

THE RISE OF THE DUTCH REPUBLIC