It was the eldest son of the great founder of the Dutch republic.  Philip William, Prince of Orange, had at last, after twenty-eight years of captivity in Spain, returned to the Netherlands, whence he had been kidnapped while a school boy at Louvain, by order of the Duke of Alva.  Rarely has there been a more dreary fate, a more broken existence than his.  His almost life-long confinement, not close nor cruel, but strict and inexorable, together with the devilish arts of the Jesuits, had produced nearly as blighting an effect upon his moral nature as a closer dungeon might have done on his physical constitution.  Although under perpetual arrest in Madrid, he had been allowed to ride and to hunt, to go to mass, and to enjoy many of the pleasures of youth.  But he had been always a prisoner, and his soul—­a hopeless captive—­could no longer be liberated now that the tyrant, in order to further his own secret purposes; had at last released his body from gaol.  Although the eldest-born of his father, and the inheritor of the great estates of Orange and of Buren, he was no longer a Nassau except in name.  The change wrought by the pressure of the Spanish atmosphere was complete.  All that was left of his youthful self was a passionate reverence for his father’s memory, strangely combined with a total indifference to all that his father held dear, all for which his father had laboured his whole lifetime, and for which his heart’s blood had been shed.  On being at last set free from bondage he had been taken to the Escorial, and permitted to kiss the hand of the king—­that hand still reeking with his father’s murder.  He had been well received by the Infante and the Infanta, and by the empress-mother, daughter of Charles V., while the artistic treasures of the palace and cloister were benignantly pointed out to him.  It was also signified to him that he was to receive the order of the Golden Fleece, and to enter into possession of his paternal and maternal estates.  And Philip William had accepted these conditions as if a born loyal subject of his Most Catholic Majesty.

Could better proof be wanting that in that age religion was the only fatherland, and that a true papist could sustain no injury at the hands of his Most Catholic Majesty.  If to be kidnapped in boyhood, to be imprisoned during a whole generation of mankind, to be deprived of vast estates, and to be made orphan by the foulest of assassinations, could not engender resentment against, the royal, perpetrator of these crimes in the bosom of his victim, was it strange that Philip should deem himself, something far, more than man, and should placidly accept the worship rendered to him by inferior beings, as to the holy impersonation of Almighty Wrath?