in the provinces.  They maintained that it was a novelty; that the institution was a more rigorous one than the Spanish Inquisition, which, said Margaret, “was most odious, as the King knew.”  It was utterly impossible to carry the edicts into execution.  Nearly all the governors of provinces had told her plainly that they would not help to burn fifty or sixty thousand Netherlanders.  Thus bitterly did Margaret of Parma bewail the royal decree; not that she had any sympathy for the victims, but because she felt the increasing danger to the executioner.  One of two things it was now necessary to decide upon, concession or armed compulsion.  Meantime, while Philip was slowly and secretly making his levies, his sister, as well as his people, was on the rack.  Of all the seigniors, not one was placed in so painful a position as Egmont.  His military reputation and his popularity made him too important a personage to be slighted, yet he was deeply mortified at the lamentable mistake which he had committed.  He now averred that he would never take arms against the King, but that he would go where man should never see him more.

Such was the condition of the nobles, greater and less.  That of the people could not well be worse.  Famine reigned in the land.  Emigration, caused not by over population, but by persecution, was fast weakening the country.  It was no wonder that not only, foreign merchants should be scared from the great commercial cities by the approaching disorders; but that every industrious artisan who could find the means of escape should seek refuge among strangers, wherever an asylum could be found.  That asylum was afforded by Protestant England, who received these intelligent and unfortunate wanderers with cordiality, and learned with eagerness the lessons in mechanical skill which they had to teach.  Already thirty thousand emigrant Netherlanders were established in Sandwich, Norwich, and other places, assigned to them by Elizabeth.  It had always, however, been made a condition of the liberty granted to these foreigners for practising their handiwork, that each house should employ at least one English apprentice.  “Thus,” said a Walloon historian, splenetically, “by this regulation, and by means of heavy duties on foreign manufactures, have the English built up their own fabrics and prohibited those of the Netherlands.  Thus have they drawn over to their own country our skilful artisans to practise their industry, not at home but abroad, and our poor people are thus losing the means of earning their livelihood.  Thus has clothmaking, silk-making and the art of dyeing declined in this country, and would have been quite extinguished but by our wise countervailing edicts.”  The writer, who derived most of his materials and his wisdom from the papers of Councillor d’Assonleville, could hardly doubt that the persecution to which these industrious artisans, whose sufferings he affected to deplore, had been subjected, must have had something