It was insulting even to Philip’s intelligence to insinuate that the Prince would shrink before danger, or die of fear.  Had Orange ever been inclined to bombast, he might have answered the churchman’s calumny, as Caesar the soothsayer’s warning:—­

“-----------------Danger knows full well
That Caesar is more dangerous than he—­”

and in truth, Philip had long trembled on his throne before the genius of the man who had foiled Spain’s boldest generals and wiliest statesmen.  The King, accepting the priest’s advice, resolved to fulminate a ban against the Prince, and to set a price upon his head.  “It will be well,” wrote Philip to Parma, “to offer thirty thousand crowns or so to any one who will deliver him dead or alive.  Thus the country may be rid of a man so pernicious; or at any rate he will be held in perpetual fear, and therefore prevented from executing leisurely his designs.”

In accordance with these suggestions and these hopes, the famous ban was accordingly drawn up, and dated on the 15th of March, 1580.  It was, however, not formally published in the Netherlands until the month of June of the same year.

This edict will remain the most lasting monument to the memory of Cardinal Granvelle.  It will be read when all his other state-papers and epistles—­able as they incontestably are—­shall have passed into oblivion.  No panegyric of friend, no palliating magnanimity of foe, can roll away this rock of infamy from his tomb.  It was by Cardinal Granvelle and by Philip that a price was set upon the head of the foremost man of his age, as if he had been a savage beast, and that admission into the ranks of Spain’s haughty nobility was made the additional bribe to tempt the assassin.

The ban consisted of a preliminary narrative to justify the penalty with which it was concluded.  It referred to the favors conferred by Philip and his father upon the Prince; to his-signal ingratitude and dissimulation.  It accused him of originating the Request, the image-breaking, and the public preaching.  It censured his marriage with an abbess—­even during the lifetime of his wife; alluded to his campaigns against Alva, to his rebellion in Holland, and to the horrible massacres committed by Spaniards in that province—­the necessary consequences of his treason.  It accused him of introducing liberty of conscience, of procuring his own appointment as Ruward, of violating the Ghent treaty, of foiling the, efforts of Don John, and of frustrating the counsels of the Cologne commissioners by his perpetual distrust.  It charged him with a newly-organized conspiracy, in the erection of the Utrecht Union; and for these and similar crimes—­set forth, with involutions, slow, spiral, and cautious as the head and front of the indictment was direct and deadly—­it denounced the chastisement due to the “wretched hypocrite” who had committed such offences.