step which had been taken by the Duke.  In all this there was much petulance, but very little dignity, while there was neither a spark of real sympathy for the oppressed millions, nor a throb of genuine womanly emotion for the impending fate of the two nobles.  Her principal grief was that she had pacified the provinces, and that another had now arrived to reap the glory; but it was difficult, while the unburied bones of many heretics were still hanging, by her decree, on the rafters of their own dismantled churches, for her successfully to enact the part of a benignant and merciful Regent.  But it is very true that the horrors of the Duke’s administration have been propitious to the fame of Margaret, and perhaps more so to that of Cardinal Granvelle.  The faint and struggling rays of humanity which occasionally illumined the course of their government, were destined to be extinguished in a chaos so profound and dark, that these last beams of light seemed clearer and more bountiful by the contrast.

The Count of Hoogstraaten, who was on his way to Brussels, had, by good fortune, injured his hand through the accidental discharge of a pistol.  Detained by this casualty at Cologne, he was informed, before his arrival at the capital, of the arrest of his two distinguished friends, and accepted the hint to betake himself at once to a place of Safety.

The loyalty of the elder Mansfeld was beyond dispute even by Alva.  His son Charles had, however, been imprudent, and, as we have seen, had even affixed his name to the earliest copies of the Compromise.  He had retired, it is true, from all connexion with the confederates, but his father knew well that the young Count’s signature upon that famous document would prove his death-warrant, were he found in the country.  He therefore had sent him into Germany before the arrival of the Duke.

The King’s satisfaction was unbounded when he learned this important achievement of Alva, and he wrote immediately to express his approbation in the most extravagant terms.  Cardinal Granvelle, on the contrary, affected astonishment at a course which he had secretly counselled.  He assured his Majesty that he had never believed Egmont to entertain sentiments opposed to the Catholic religion, nor to the interests of the Crown, up to the period of his own departure from the Netherlands.  He was persuaded, he said, that the Count had been abused by others, although, to be sure, the Cardinal had learned with regret what Egmont had written on the occasion of the baptism of Count Hoogstraaten’s child.  As to the other persons arrested, he said that no one regretted their fate.  The Cardinal added, that he was supposed to be himself the instigator of these captures, but that he was not disturbed by that, or by other imputations of a similar nature.