From words, too, the government of Leicester passed to acts.  Seventy papists were banished from the city of Utrecht at the time of the arrest of Buys.  The Queen had constantly enforced upon Leicester the importance of dealing justly with the Catholics in the Netherlands, on the ground that they might be as good patriots and were as much interested in the welfare of their country as were the Protestants; and he was especially enjoined “not to meddle in matters of religion.”  This wholesome advice it would have been quite impossible for the Earl, under the guidance of Reingault, Burgrave, and Stephen Perret, to carry out.  He protested that he should have liked to treat Papists and Calvinists “with indifference,” but that it had proved impossible; that the Catholics were perpetually plotting with the Spanish faction, and that no towns were safe except those in which Papists had been excluded from office.  “They love the Pope above all,” he said, “and the Prince of Parma hath continual intelligence with them.”  Nor was it Catholics alone who gave the governor trouble.  He was likewise very busy in putting down other denominations that differed from the Calvinists.  “Your Majesty will not believe,” he said, “the number of sects that are in most towns; especially Anabaptists, Families of Love, Georgians; and I know not what.  The godly and good ministers were molested by them in many places, and ready to give over; and even such diversities grew among magistrates in towns, being caused by some sedition-sowers here.”  It is however, satisfactory to reflect that the anabaptists and families of love, although discouraged and frowned upon, were not burned alive, buried alive, drowned in dungeons, and roasted at slow fires, as had been the case with them and with every other species of Protestants, by thousands and tens of thousands, so long as Charles V. and Philip II. had ruled the territory of that commonwealth.  Humanity had acquired something by the war which the Netherlanders had been waging for twenty years, and no man or woman was ever put to death for religious causes after the establishment of the republic.

With his hands thus full of business, it was difficult for the Earl to obey the Queen’s command not to meddle in religious matters; for he was not of the stature of William the Silent, and could not comprehend that the great lesson taught by the sixteenth century was that men were not to meddle with men in matters of religion.

But besides his especial nightmare—­Mr. Paul Buys—­the governor-general had a whole set of incubi in the Norris family.  Probably no two persons ever detested each other more cordially than did Leicester and Sir John Norris.  Sir John had been commander of the forces in the Netherlands before Leicester’s arrival, and was unquestionably a man of larger experience than the Earl.  He had, however, as Walsingham complained, acquired by his services in “countries where neither discipline