If these were the characteristics of the most distinguished society, it may be supposed that they were reproduced with more or less intensity throughout all the more remote but concentric circles of life, as far as the seductive splendor of the court could radiate.  The lesser nobles emulated the grandees, and vied with each other in splendid establishments, banquets, masquerades, and equipages.  The natural consequences of such extravagance followed.  Their estates were mortgaged, deeply and more deeply; then, after a few years, sold to the merchants, or rich advocates and other gentlemen of the robe, to whom they had been pledged.  The more closely ruin stared the victims in the face, the more heedlessly did they plunge into excesses.  “Such were the circumstances,” moralizes a Catholic writer, “to which, at an earlier period, the affairs of Catiline, Cethegus, Lentulus, and others of that faction had been reduced, when they undertook to overthrow the Roman republic.”  Many of the nobles being thus embarrassed, and some even desperate, in their condition, it was thought that they were desirous of creating disturbances in the commonwealth, that the payment of just debts might be avoided, that their mortgaged lands might be wrested by main force from the low-born individuals who had become possessed of them, that, in particular, the rich abbey lands held by idle priests might be appropriated to the use of impoverished gentlemen who could turn them to so much better account.  It is quite probable that interested motives such as these were not entirely inactive among a comparatively small class of gentlemen.  The religious reformation in every land of Europe derived a portion of its strength from the opportunity it afforded to potentates and great nobles for helping themselves to Church property.  No doubt many Netherlanders thought that their fortunes might be improved at the expense of the monks, and for the benefit of religion.  Even without apostasy from the mother Church, they looked with longing eyes on the wealth of her favored and indolent children.  They thought that the King would do well to carve a round number of handsome military commanderies out of the abbey lands, whose possessors should be bound to military service after the ancient manner of fiefs, so that a splendid cavalry, headed by the gentlemen of the country, should be ever ready to mount and ride at the royal pleasure, in place of a horde of lazy epicureans, telling beads and indulging themselves in luxurious vice.

Such views were entertained; such language often held.  These circumstances and sentiments had their influence among the causes which produced the great revolt now impending.  Care should be taken, however, not to exaggerate that influence.  It is a prodigious mistake to refer this great historical event to sources so insufficient as the ambition of a few great nobles, and the embarrassments of a larger number of needy gentlemen.  The Netherlands revolt was not an aristocratic,