That agreement had been made by the Duchess only to be broken.  She had already received money and the permission to make levies, and was fast assuming a tone very different from the abject demeanor which had characterized her in August.  Count Horn had been used even as Egmont, Orange and Hoogstraaten had been employed, in order that their personal influence with the Reformers might be turned to account.  The tools and the work accomplished by them were to be thrown away at the most convenient opportunity.

The Admiral was placed in a most intolerable position.  An honest, common-place, sullen kind of man, he had come to a city full of heretics, to enforce concessions just made by the government to heresy.  He soon found himself watched, paltered with, suspected by the administration at Brussels.  Governor Moulbais in the citadel, who was nominally under his authority, refused obedience to his orders, was evidently receiving secret instructions from the Regent, and was determined to cannonade the city into submission at a very early day.  Horn required him to pledge himself that no fresh troops should enter the castle.  Moulbais swore he would make no such promise to a living soul.  The Admiral stormed with his usual violence, expressed his regret that his brother Montigny had so bad a lieutenant in the citadel, but could make no impression upon the determined veteran, who knew, better than Horn, the game which was preparing.  Small reinforcements were daily arriving at the castle; the soldiers of the garrison had been heard to boast “that they would soon carve and eat the townsmen’s flesh on their dressers,” and all the good effect from the Admiral’s proclamation on arriving, had completely vanished.

Horn complained bitterly of the situation in which he was placed.  He knew himself the mark of incessant and calumnious misrepresentation both at Brussels and Madrid.  He had been doing his best, at a momentous crisis, to serve the government without violating its engagements, but he declared himself to be neither theologian nor jurist, and incapable, while suspected and unassisted, of performing a task which the most learned doctors of the council would find impracticable.  He would rather, he bitterly exclaimed, endure a siege in any fortress by the Turks, than be placed in such a position.  He was doing all that he was capable of doing, yet whatever he did was wrong.  There was a great difference, he said, between being in a place and talking about it at a distance.

In the middle of October he was recalled by the Duchess, whose letters had been uniformly so ambiguous that he confessed he was quite unable to divine their meaning.  Before he left the city, he committed his most unpardonable crime.  Urged by the leaders of the reformed congregations to permit their exercises in the Clothiers’ Hall until their temples should be finished, the Count accorded his consent provisionally, and subject to revocation by the Regent, to whom the arrangement was immediately to be communicated.