from which to aid the operations of Bouillon in Luxembourg.  Heraugiere was, however, not sufficiently reinforced, and Huy was a month later recaptured by La Motte.  The campaigning was languid during that winter in the United Netherlands, but the merry-making was energetic.  The nuptials of Hohenlo with Mary, eldest daughter of William the Silent and own sister of the captive Philip William; of the Duke of Bouillon with Elizabeth, one of the daughters of the same illustrious prince by his third wife, Charlotte of Bourbon; and of Count Everard Solms, the famous general of the Zeeland troops, with Sabina, daughter of the unfortunate Lamoral Egmont, were celebrated with much pomp during the months of February and March.  The States of Holland and of Zeeland made magnificent presents of diamonds to the brides; the Countess Hohenlo receiving besides a yearly income of three thousand florins for the lives of herself and her husband.

In the midst of these merry marriage bells at the Hague a funeral knell was sounding in Brussels.  On the 20th February, the governor-general of the obedient Netherlands, Archduke Ernest, breathed his last.  His career had not been so illustrious as the promises of the Spanish king and the allegories of schoolmaster Houwaerts had led him to expect.  He had not espoused the Infanta nor been crowned King of France.  He had not blasted the rebellious Netherlands with Cyclopean thunderbolts, nor unbound the Belgic Andromeda from the rock of doom.  His brief year of government had really been as dismal as, according to the announcement of his sycophants, it should have been amazing.  He had accomplished nothing, and all that was left him was to die at the age of forty-two, over head and ears in debt, a disappointed, melancholy man.  He was very indolent, enormously fat, very chaste, very expensive, fond of fine liveries and fine clothes, so solemn and stately as never to be known to laugh, but utterly without capacity either as a statesman or a soldier.  He would have shone as a portly abbot ruling over peaceful friars, but he was not born to ride a revolutionary whirlwind, nor to evoke order out of chaos.  Past and Present were contending with each other in fierce elemental strife within his domain.  A world was in dying agony, another world was coming, full-armed, into existence within the hand-breadth of time and of space where he played his little part, but he dreamed not of it.  He passed away like a shadow, and was soon forgotten.

An effort was made, during the last illness of Ernest, to procure from him the appointment of the elector of Cologne as temporary successor to tho government, but Count Fuentes was on the spot and was a man of action.  He produced a power in the French language from Philip, with a blank for the name.  This had been intended for the case of Peter Ernest Mansfeld’s possible death during his provisional administration, and Fuentes now claimed the right of inserting his own name.