That afternoon the Duke sent for the Bishop of Ypres, The prelate arrived at dusk.  As soon as he presented himself, Alva informed him of the sentence which had just been pronounced, and ordered him to convey the intelligence to the prisoners.  He further charged him with the duty of shriving the victims, and preparing their souls for death.  The bishop fell on his knees, aghast at the terrible decree.  He implored the Governor-General to have mercy upon the two unfortunate nobles.  If their lives could not be spared, he prayed him at any rate to grant delay.  With tears and earnest supplications the prelate endeavored to avert or to postpone the doom which had been pronounced.  It was in vain.  The sentence, inflexible as destiny, had been long before ordained.  Its execution had been but hastened by the temporary triumph of rebellion in Friesland.  Alva told the Bishop roughly that he had not been summoned to give advice.  Delay or pardon was alike impossible.  He was to act as confessor to the criminals, not as councillor to the Viceroy.  The Bishop, thus rebuked, withdrew to accomplish his melancholy mission.  Meanwhile, on the same evening, the miserable Countess of Egmont had been appalled by rumors, too vague for belief, too terrible to be slighted.  She was in the chamber of Countess Aremberg, with whom she had come to condole for the death of the Count, when the order for the immediate execution of her own husband was announced to her.  She hastened to the presence of the Governor-General.  The Princess Palatine, whose ancestors had been emperors, remembered only that she was a wife and a mother.  She fell at the feet of the man who controlled the fate of her husband, and implored his mercy in humble and submissive terms.  The Duke, with calm and almost incredible irony, reassured the Countess by the information that, on the morrow, her husband was certainly to be released.  With this ambiguous phrase, worthy the paltering oracles of antiquity, the wretched woman was obliged to withdraw.  Too soon afterward the horrible truth of the words was revealed to her—­words of doom, which she had mistaken for consolation.

An hour before midnight the Bishop of Ypres reached Egmont’s prison.  The Count was confined in a chamber on the second story of the Brood-huis, the mansion of the crossbowmen’s guild, in that corner of the building which rests on a narrow street running back from the great square.  He was aroused from his sleep by the approach of his visitor.  Unable to speak, but indicating by the expression of his features the occurrence of a great misfortune, the Bishop, soon after his entrance, placed the paper given to him by Alva in Egmont’s hands.  The unfortunate noble thus suddenly received the information that his death-sentence had been pronounced, and that its execution was fixed for the next morning.  He read the paper through without flinching, and expressed astonishment rather than dismay at its tidings.  Exceedingly sanguine by nature, he had never believed,