It may be supposed that this train of living was attended with expense.  Moreover, he had various other establishments in town and country; besides his almost royal residence in Brussels.  He was ardently fond of the chase, particularly of the knightly sport of falconry.  In the country he “consoled himself by taking every day a heron in the clouds.”  His falconers alone cost him annually fifteen hundred florins, after he had reduced their expenses to the lowest possible point.  He was much in debt, even at this early period and with his princely fortune.  “We come of a race,” he wrote carelessly to his brother Louis, “who are somewhat bad managers in our young days, but when we grow older, we do better, like our late father:  ’sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper et in secula seculorum’.  My greatest difficulty,” he adds, “as usual, is on account of the falconers.”

His debts already amounted, according to Granvelle’s statement, to 800,000 or 900,000 florins.  He had embarrassed himself, not only through his splendid extravagance, by which all the world about him were made to partake of his wealth, but by accepting the high offices to which he had been appointed.  When general-in-chief on the frontier, his salary was three hundred florins monthly; “not enough,” as he said, “to pay the servants in his tent,” his necessary expenses being twenty-five hundred florins, as appears by a letter to his wife.  His embassy to carry the crown to Ferdinand, and his subsequent residence as a hostage for the treaty in Paris, were also very onerous, and he received no salary; according to the economical system in this respect pursued by Charles and Philip.  In these two embassies or missions alone, together with the entertainments offered by him to the court and to foreigners, after the peace at Brussels, the Prince spent, according to his own estimate, 1,500,000 florins.  He was, however, although deeply, not desperately involved, and had already taken active measures to regulate and reduce his establishment.  His revenues were vast, both in his own right and in that of his deceased wife.  He had large claims upon the royal treasury for service and expenditure.  He had besides ample sums to receive from the ransoms of the prisoners of St. Quentin and Gravelines, having served in both campaigns.  The amount to be received by individuals from this source may be estimated from the fact that Count Horn, by no means one of the most favored in the victorious armies, had received from Leonor d’Orleans, Due de Loggieville, a ransom of eighty thousand crowns.  The sum due, if payment were enforced, from the prisoners assigned to Egmont, Orange, and others, must have been very large.  Granvelle estimated the whole amount at two millions; adding, characteristically, “that this kind of speculation was a practice” which our good old fathers, lovers of virtue, would not have found laudable.  In this the churchman was right, but he might have added that the “lovers of virtue” would have found it as little “laudable” for ecclesiastics to dispose of the sacred offices in their gift, for carpets, tapestry, and annual payments of certain percentages upon the cure of souls.  If the profits respectively gained by military and clerical speculators in that day should be compared, the disadvantage would hardly be found to lie with those of the long robe.