The general features of the great project having been thus mapped out, a few indispensable preliminaries were at once executed.  In order that Egmont, Horn, and other distinguished victims might not take alarm, and thus escape the doom deliberately arranged for them, royal assurances were despatched to the Netherlands, cheering their despondency and dispelling their doubts.  With his own hand Philip wrote the letter, full of affection and confidence, to Egmont, to which allusion has already been made.  He wrote it after Alva had left Madrid upon his mission of vengeance.  The same stealthy measures were pursued with regard to others.  The Prince of Orange was not capable of falling into the royal trap, however cautiously baited.  Unfortunately he could not communicate his wisdom to his friends.

It is difficult to comprehend so very sanguine a temperament as that to which Egmont owed his destruction.  It was not the Prince of Orange alone who had prophesied his doom.  Warnings had come to the Count from every quarter, and they were now frequently repeated.  Certainly he was not without anxiety, but he had made his decision; determined to believe in the royal word, and in the royal gratitude for his services rendered, not only against Montmorency and De Thermes, but against the heretics of Flanders.  He was, however, much changed.  He had grown prematurely old.  At forty-six years his hair was white, and he never slept without pistols under his pillow.  Nevertheless he affected, and sometimes felt, a light-heartedness which surprised all around him.  The Portuguese gentleman Robles, Seigneur de Billy, who had returned early in the summer from Spain; whither he had been sent upon a confidential mission by Madame de Parma, is said to have made repeated communications to Egmont as to the dangerous position in which he stood.  Immediately after his arrival in Brussels he had visited the Count, then confined to his house by an injury caused by the fall of his horse.  “Take care to get well very fast,” said De Billy, “for there are very bad stories told about you in Spain.”  Egmont laughed heartily at the observation, as if, nothing could well be more absurd than such a warning.  His friend—­for De Billy is said to have felt a real attachment to the Count—­persisted in his prophecies, telling him that “birds in the field sang much more sweetly than those in cages,” and that he would do well to abandon the country before the arrival of Alva.

These warnings were repeated almost daily by the same gentleman, and by others, who were more and more astonished at Egmont’s infatuation.  Nevertheless, he had disregarded their admonitions, and had gone forth to meet the Duke at Tirlemont.  Even then he might have seen, in the coldness of his first reception, and in the disrespectful manner of the Spanish soldiers, who not only did not at first salute him, but who murmured audibly that he was a Lutheran and traitor, that he was not so great a favorite with the government at Madrid as he desired to be.