insufficient votes.  With a special subsidy obtained in April and May, he had organized the slight attempt at relief, which was all which he had been empowered to make, but which proved entirely unsuccessful.  Now that the massacre to be averted was accomplished, men were loud in reproof, who had been silent, and passive while there was yet time to speak and to work.  It was the Prince, they said, who had delivered so many thousands of his fellow-countrymen to, butchery.  To save himself, they insinuated he was now plotting to deliver the land into the power of the treacherous Frenchman, and he alone, they asserted, was the insuperable obstacle to an honorable peace with Spain.

A letter, brought by an unknown messenger, was laid before the states’ assembly, in full session, and sent to the clerk’s table, to be read aloud.  After the first few sentences, that functionary faltered in his recital.  Several members also peremptorily ordered him to stop; for the letter proved to be a violent and calumnious libel upon Orange, together with a strong appeal in favor of the peace propositions then under debate at Cologne.  The Prince alone, of all the assembly, preserving his tranquillity, ordered the document to be brought to him, and forthwith read it aloud himself, from beginning to end.  Afterwards, he took occasion to express his mind concerning the ceaseless calumnies of which he was the mark.  He especially alluded to the oft-repeated accusation that he was the only obstacle to peace, and repeated that he was ready at that moment to leave the land, and to close his lips for ever, if by so doing he could benefit his country, and restore her to honorable repose.  The outcry, with the protestations of attachment and confidence which at once broke from the assembly, convinced him, however, that he was deeply rooted in the hearts of all patriotic Netherlanders, and that it was beyond the power of slanderers to loosen his hold upon their affection.

Meantime, his efforts had again and again been demanded to restore order in that abode of anarchy, the city of Ghent.  After his visit during the previous winter, and the consequent departure of John Casimir to the palatinate, the pacific arrangements made by the Prince had for a short time held good.  Early in March, however, that master of misrule, John van Imbize, had once more excited the populace to sedition.  Again the property of Catholics, clerical and lay, was plundered; again the persons of Catholics, of every degree, were maltreated.  The magistrates, with first senator Imbize at their head, rather encouraged than rebuked the disorder; but Orange, as soon as he received official intelligence of the event, hastened to address them in the words of earnest warning and wisdom.  He allowed that the inhabitants of the province had reason to be discontented with the presence and the misconduct of the Walloon soldiery.  He granted that violence and the menaces of a foreign tyranny made it difficult for honest burghers to gain a livelihood.  At the same time he expressed astonishment that reasonable men should seek a remedy for such evils in tumults which would necessarily bring utter destruction upon the land.  “It was,” he observed, “as if a patient should from impatience, tear the bandages from his wounds, and, like a maniac, instead of allowing himself to be cured, plunge a dagger into his own heart.”