cause which he had once begun to favour.  A man of singular ability, courage, and energy, distinguished both for military and diplomatic services, he was a formidable enemy to the party from which he was now for ever estranged.  As early as April of this year, secret emissaries of Parma, dealing with Champagny in his nominal prison, and with the disaffected burghers at large, had been on the point of effecting an arrangement with the royal governor.  The negotiation had been suddenly brought to a close by the discovery of a flagrant attempt by Imbue, one of the secret adherents of the King, to sell the city of Dendermonde, of which he was governor, to Parma.  For this crime he had been brought to Ghent for trial, and then publicly beheaded.  The incident came in aid of the eloquence of Orange, who, up to the latest moment of his life, had been most urgent in his appeals to the patriotic hearts of Ghent, not to abandon the great cause of the union and of liberty.  William the Silent knew full well, that after the withdrawal of the great keystone-city of Ghent, the chasm between the Celtic-Catholic and the Flemish-Calvinist Netherlands could hardly be bridged again.  Orange was now dead.  The negotiations with France, too, on which those of the Ghenters who still held true to the national cause had fastened their hopes, had previously been brought to a stand-still by the death of Anjou; and Champagny, notwithstanding the disaster to Imbize, became more active than ever.  A private agent, whom the municipal government had despatched to the French court for assistance, was not more successful than his character and course of conduct would have seemed to warrant; for during his residence in Paris, he had been always drunk, and generally abusive.  This was not good diplomacy, particularly on the part of an agent from a weak municipality to a haughty and most undecided government.

“They found at this court,” wrote Stafford to Walsingham, “great fault with his manner of dealing that was sent from Gaunt.  He was scarce sober from one end of the week to the other, and stood so much on his tiptoes to have present answer within three days, or else that they of Gaunt could tell where to bestow themselves.  They sent him away after keeping him three weeks, and he went off in great dudgeon, swearing by yea and nay that he will make report thereafter.”

Accordingly, they of Ghent did bestow themselves very soon thereafter upon the King of Spain.  The terms were considered liberal, but there was, of course, no thought of conceding the great object for which the patriots were contending—­religious liberty.  The municipal privileges—­such as they might prove to be worth under the interpretation of a royal governor and beneath the guns of a citadel filled with Spanish troops—­were to be guaranteed; those of the inhabitants who did not choose to go to mass were allowed two years to wind up their affairs before going into perpetual exile, provided they behaved themselves “without scandal;” while on the other hand, the King’s authority as Count of Flanders was to be fully recognised, and all the dispossessed monks and abbots to be restored to their property.