William the silent, Prince of Orange, had been murdered on the 10th of July, 1584.  It is difficult to imagine a more universal disaster than the one thus brought about by the hand of a single obscure fanatic.  For nearly twenty years the character of the Prince had been expanding steadily as the difficulties of his situation increased.  Habit, necessity, and the natural gifts of the man, had combined to invest him at last with an authority which seemed more than human.  There was such general confidence in his sagacity, courage, and purity, that the nation had come to think with his brain and to act with his hand.  It was natural that, for an instant, there should be a feeling as of absolute and helpless paralysis.

Whatever his technical attributes in the polity of the Netherlands—­and it would be difficult to define them with perfect accuracy—­there is no doubt that he stood there, the head of a commonwealth, in an attitude such as had been maintained by but few of the kings, or chiefs, or high priests of history.  Assassination, a regular and almost indispensable portion of the working machinery of Philip’s government, had produced, in this instance, after repeated disappointments, the result at last which had been so anxiously desired.  The ban of the Pope and the offered gold of the King had accomplished a victory greater than any yet achieved by the armies of Spain, brilliant as had been their triumphs on the blood-stained soil of the Netherlands.

Had that “exceeding proud, neat, and spruce” Doctor of Laws, William Parry, who had been busying himself at about the same time with his memorable project against the Queen of England, proved as successful as Balthazar Gerard, the fate of Christendom would have been still darker.  Fortunately, that member of Parliament had made the discovery in time—­not for himself, but for Elizabeth—­that the “Lord was better pleased with adverbs than nouns;” the well-known result being that the traitor was hanged and the Sovereign saved.

Yet such was the condition of Europe at that day.  A small, dull, elderly, imperfectly-educated, patient, plodding invalid, with white hair and protruding under jaw, and dreary visage, was sitting day after day; seldom speaking, never smiling, seven or eight hours out of every twenty-four, at a writing table covered with heaps of interminable despatches, in a cabinet far away beyond the seas and mountains, in the very heart of Spain.  A clerk or two, noiselessly opening and shutting the door, from time to time, fetching fresh bundles of letters and taking away others—­all written and composed by secretaries or high functionaries—­and all to be scrawled over in the margin by the diligent old man in a big schoolboy’s hand and style—­if ever schoolboy, even in the sixteenth century, could write so illegibly or express himself so awkwardly; couriers in the court-yard arriving from or departing for the uttermost parts of earth-Asia, Africa America,