The appointment was, however, bestowed, through Granvelle’s influence, upon the Seigneur d’Helfault, a gentleman of mediocre station and character, who was thought to possess no claims whatever to the office.  Egmont, moreover, desired the abbey of Trulle for a poor relation of his own; but the Cardinal, to whom nothing in this way ever came amiss, had already obtained the King’s permission to, appropriate the abbey to himself Egmont was now furious against the prelate, and omitted no opportunity of expressing his aversion, both in his presence and behind his back.  On one occasion, at least, his wrath exploded in something more than words.  Exasperated by Granvelle’s polished insolence in reply to his own violent language, he drew his dagger upon him in the presence of the Regent herself, “and,” says a contemporary, “would certainly have sent the Cardinal into the next world had he not been forcibly restrained by the Prince of Orange and other persons present, who warmly represented to him that such griefs were to be settled by deliberate advice, not by choler.”  At the same time, while scenes like these were occurring in the very bosom of the state council, Granvelle, in his confidential letters to secretary Perez, asserted warmly that all reports of a want of harmony between himself and the other seignors and councillors were false, and that the best relations existed among them all.  It was not his intention, before it should be necessary, to let the King doubt his ability to govern the counsel according to the secret commission with which he had been invested.

His relations with Orange were longer in changing from friendship to open hostility.  In the Prince the Cardinal met his match.  He found himself confronted by an intellect as subtle, an experience as fertile in expedients, a temper as even, and a disposition sometimes as haughty as his own.  He never affected to undervalue the mind of Orange. “’Tis a man of profound genius, vast ambition—­dangerous, acute, politic,” he wrote to the King at a very early period.  The original relations between himself and the Prince bad been very amicable.  It hardly needed the prelate’s great penetration to be aware that the friendship of so exalted a personage as the youthful heir to the principality of Orange, and to the vast possessions of the Chalons-Nassau house in Burgundy and the Netherlands, would be advantageous to the ambitious son of the Burgundian Councillor Granvelle.  The young man was the favorite of the Emperor from boyhood; his high rank, and his remarkable talents marked him indisputably for one of the foremost men of the coming reign.  Therefore it was politic in Perrenot to seize every opportunity of making himself useful to the Prince.  He busied himself with securing, so far as it might be necessary to secure, the succession of William to his cousin’s principality.  It seems somewhat ludicrous for a merit to be made not only for Granvelle but for the Emperor, that the Prince should have been allowed to take an inheritance