nature; almost a lunatic from the beginning.  The dislike which succeeded to her fantastic fondness for the Prince, as well as her general eccentricity, had soon become the talk of all the court at Brussels.  She would pass week after week without emerging from her chamber, keeping the shutters closed and candles burning, day and night.  She quarrelled violently, with Countess Egmont for precedence, so that the ludicrous contentions of the two ladies in antechambers and doorways were the theme and the amusement of society.  Her insolence, not only in private but in public, towards her husband became intolerable:  “I could not do otherwise than bear it with sadness and patience,” said the Prince, with great magnanimity, “hoping that with age would come improvement.”  Nevertheless, upon one occasion, at a supper party, she had used such language in the presence of Count Horn and many other nobles, “that all wondered that he could endure the abusive terms which she applied to him.”

When the clouds gathered about him, when he had become an exile and a wanderer, her reproaches and her violence increased.  The sacrifice of their wealth, the mortgages and sales which he effected of his estates, plate, jewels, and furniture, to raise money for the struggling country, excited her bitter resentment.  She separated herself from him by degrees, and at last abandoned him altogether.  Her temper became violent to ferocity.  She beat her servants with her hands and with clubs; she threatened the lives of herself, of her attendants, of Count John of Nassau, with knives and daggers, and indulged in habitual profanity and blasphemy, uttering frightful curses upon all around.  Her original tendency to intemperance had so much increased, that she was often unable to stand on her feet.  A bottle of wine, holding more than a quart, in the morning, and another in the evening, together with a pound of sugar, was her usual allowance.  She addressed letters to Alva complaining that her husband had impoverished himself “in his good-for-nothing Beggar war,” and begging the Duke to furnish her with a little ready money and with the means of arriving at the possession of her dower.

An illicit connexion with a certain John Rubens, an exiled magistrate of Antwerp, and father of the celebrated painter, completed the list of her delinquencies, and justified the marriage of the Prince with Charlotte de Bourbon.  It was therefore determined by the Elector of Saxony and the Landgrave William to remove her from the custody of the Nassaus.  This took place with infinite difficulty, at the close of the year 1575.  Already, in 1572; Augustus had proposed to the Landgrave that she should be kept in solitary confinement, and that a minister should preach to her daily through the grated aperture by which her, food was to be admitted.  The Landgrave remonstrated at so inhuman a proposition, which was, however, carried into effect.  The wretched Princess, now completely a lunatic, was imprisoned in the electoral palace, in a chamber where the windows were walled up and a small grating let into the upper part of the door.  Through this wicket came her food, as well as the words of the holy man appointed to preach daily for her edification.