Cardinal Granvelle, who had never taken his eyes or thoughts from the provinces during his residence at Rome, now expressed himself with exultation.  He had predicted, with cold malice, the immediate results of the campaign, and was sanguine enough to believe the contest over, and the Prince for ever crushed.  In his letters to Philip he had taken due notice of the compliments paid to him by Orange in his Justification, in his Declaration, and in his letter to the Emperor.  He had declined to make any answer to the charges, in order to enrage the Prince the more.  He had expressed the opinion, however, that this publication of writings was not the business of brave soldiers, but of cowards.  He made the same reflection upon the alleged intrigues by Orange to procure an embassy on his own behalf from the Emperor to Philip—­a mission which was sure to end in smoke, while it would cost the Prince all credit, not only in Germany but the Netherlands.  He felt sure, he said, of the results of the impending campaign.  The Duke of Alva was a man upon whose administrative prudence and military skill his sovereign could implicitly rely, nor was there a person in the ranks of the rebels capable of, conducting an enterprise of such moment.  Least of all had the Prince of Orange sufficient brains for carrying on such weighty affairs, according to the opinion which he had formed of him during their long intercourse in former days.

When the campaign had been decided, and the Prince had again become an exile, Granvelle observed that it was now proved how incompetent he and all his companions were to contend in military skill with the Duke of Alva.  With a cold sneer at motives which he assumed, as a matter of course, to be purely selfish, he said that the Prince had not taken the proper road to recover his property, and that he would now be much embarrassed to satisfy his creditors.  Thus must those ever fall, he moralized, who would fly higher than they ought; adding, that henceforth the Prince would have enough to do in taking care of madam his wife, if she did not change soon in humor and character.

Meantime the Duke of Alva, having despatched from Cateau Cambresis a brief account of the victorious termination of the campaign, returned in triumph to Brussels.  He had certainly amply vindicated his claim to be considered the first warrior of the age.  By his lieutenants he had summarily and rapidly destroyed two of the armies sent against him; he had annihilated in person the third, by a brilliantly successful battle, in which he had lost seven men, and his enemies seven thousand; and he had now, by consummate strategy, foiled the fourth and last under the idolized champion of the Netherlands, and this so decisively that, without losing a man, he had destroyed eight thousand rebels, and scattered to the four winds the remaining twenty thousand.  Such signal results might well make even a meeker nature proud.  Such vast and fortunate