History of the United Netherlands, 1595-96 | Page 2

they did their best. That
mythological conqueror and demigod had sunk into an unhonoured
grave, despite the loud hosannaha sung to him on his arrival in Belgica,
and the same nobles, pedants, and burghers were now ready and happy
to grovel at the feet of Albert. But as it proved as impossible to surpass
the glories of the holiday which had been culled out for his brother, so
it would be superfluous now to recall the pageant which thus again
delighted the capital.
But there was one personage who graced this joyous entrance whose
presence excited perhaps more interest than did that of the archduke
himself. The procession was headed by three grandees riding abreast.
There was the Duke of Aumale, pensionary of Philip, and one of the
last of the Leaguers, who had just been condemned to death and
executed in effigy at Paris, as a traitor to his king and country; there
was the Prince of Chimay, now since the recent death of his father at
Venice become Duke of Arschot; and between the two rode a
gentleman forty-two years of age, whose grave; melancholy
features--although wearing a painful expression of habitual restraint
and distrust suggested, more than did those of the rest of his family, the
physiognomy of William the Silent to all who remembered that
illustrious rebel.
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?
Yet there is no doubt that the prince had a sincere respect for his father,
and had bitterly sorrowed at his death. When a Spanish officer, playing
chess with him, in prison, had ventured to speak lightly of that father,
Philip William had seized him bodily, thrown him from the window,
and thus killed him on the spot. And when on his arrival in Brussels it
was suggested to him by President Riehardat that it was the king's
intention to reinstate him in the possession of his estates, but that a
rent-charge of eighteen thousand florins a year was