The Duke wrote a triumphant letter to his Majesty that very night.  He apologized that these important captures had been deferred so long but, stated that he had thought it desirable to secure all these leading personages at a single stroke.  He then narrated the masterly manner in which the operations had been conducted.  Certainly, when it is remembered that the Duke had only reached Brussels upon the 23d August, and that the two Counts were securely lodged in prison on the 9th of September, it seemed a superfluous modesty upon his part thus to excuse himself for an apparent delay.  At any rate, in the eyes of the world and of posterity, his zeal to carry out the bloody commands of his master was sufficiently swift.

The consternation was universal throughout the provinces when the arrests became known.  Egmont’s great popularity and distinguished services placed him so high above the mass of citizens, and his attachment to the Catholic religion was moreover so well known, as to make it obvious that no man could now be safe, when men like him were in the power of Alva and his myrmidons.  The animosity to the Spaniards increased hourly.  The Duchess affected indignation at the arrest of the two nobles, although it nowhere appears that she attempted a word in their defence, or lifted, at any subsequent moment, a finger to save them.  She was not anxious to wash her hands of the blood of two innocent men; she was only offended that they had been arrested without her permission.  The Duke had, it is true, sent Berlaymont and Mansfeld to give her information of the fact, as soon as the capture had been made, with the plausible excuse that he preferred to save her from all the responsibility and all the unpopularity of the measure, Nothing, however, could appease her wrath at this and every other indication of the contempt in which he appeared to hold the sister of his sovereign.  She complained of his conduct daily to every one who was admitted to her presence.  Herself oppressed by a sense of personal indignity, she seemed for a moment to identify herself with the cause of the oppressed provinces.  She seemed to imagine herself the champion of their liberties, and the Netherlanders, for a moments seemed to participate in the delusion.  Because she was indignant at the insolence of the Duke of Alva to her self, the honest citizens began to give her credit for a sympathy with their own wrongs.  She expressed herself determined to move about from one city to another, until the answer to her demand for dismissal should arrive.  She allowed her immediate attendants to abuse the Spaniards in good set terms upon every occasion.  Even her private chaplain permitted himself, in preaching before her in the palace chapel, to denounce the whole nation as a race of traitors and ravishers, and for this offence was only reprimanded, much against her will, by the Duchess, and ordered to retire for a season to his convent.  She did not attempt to disguise her dissatisfaction at every