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 the 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.

The dying Ernest consented, and upon his death Fuentes was declared governor-general until the king’s further pleasure should be known.

Pedro de Guzman, Count of Fuentes, a Spaniard of the hard and antique type, was now in his sixty-fourth year.  The pupil and near relative of the Duke of Alva, he was already as odious to the Netherlanders as might have been inferred from such education and such kin.  A dark, grizzled, baldish man, with high steep forehead, long, haggard, leathern visage, sweeping beard, and large, stern, commanding, menacing eyes, with his Brussels ruff of point lace and his Milan coat of proof, he was in personal appearance not unlike the terrible duke whom men never named without a shudder, although a quarter of a century had passed since he had ceased to curse the Netherlands with his presence.  Elizabeth of England was accustomed to sneer at Fuentes because he had retreated before Essex in that daring commander’s famous foray into Portugal.  The queen called the Spanish general a timid old woman.  If her gibe were true, it was fortunate for her, for Henry of France, and for the republic, that there were not many more such old women to come from Spain to take the place of the veteran chieftains who were destined to disappear so rapidly during this year in Flanders.  He was a soldier of fortune, loved fighting, not only for the fighting’s sake, but for the prize-money which was to be accumulated by campaigning, and he was wont to say that he meant to enter Paradise sword in hand.

Meantime his appointment excited the wrath of the provincial magnates.  The Duke of Arschot was beside himself with frenzy, and swore that he would never serve under Fuentes nor sit at his council-board.  The duke’s brother, Marquis Havre, and his son-in-law, Count Arenberg, shared in the hatred, although they tried to mitigate the vehemence of its expression.  But Arschot swore that no man had the right to take precedence of him in the council of state, and that