The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1560-61 | Page 7

At the same time, while
scenes like these were occurring in the very bosom of the state council,
Granvelle, in his confidential letters to secretary Perez, asserted warmly
that all reports of a want of harmony between himself and the other
seignors and councillors were false, and that the best relations existed
among them all. It was not his intention, before it should be necessary,
to let the King doubt his ability to govern the counsel according to the
secret commission with which he had been invested.
His relations with Orange were longer in changing from friendship to
open hostility. In the Prince the Cardinal met his match. He found
himself confronted by an intellect as subtle, an experience as fertile in

expedients, a temper as even, and a disposition sometimes as haughty
as his own. He never affected to undervalue the mind of Orange. "'Tis a
man of profound genius, vast ambition--dangerous, acute, politic," he
wrote to the King at a very early period. The original relations between
himself and the Prince bad been very amicable. It hardly needed the
prelate's great penetration to be aware that the friendship of so exalted a
personage as the youthful heir to the principality of Orange, and to the
vast possessions of the Chalons-Nassau house in Burgundy and the
Netherlands, would be advantageous to the ambitious son of the
Burgundian Councillor Granvelle. The young man was the favorite of
the Emperor from boyhood; his high rank, and his remarkable talents
marked him indisputably for one of the foremost men of the coming
reign. Therefore it was politic in Perrenot to seize every opportunity of
making himself useful to the Prince. He busied himself with securing,
so far as it might be necessary to secure, the succession of William to
his cousin's principality. It seems somewhat ludicrous for a merit to be
made not only for Granvelle but for the Emperor, that the Prince should
have been allowed to take an inheritance which the will of Rene de
Nassau most unequivocally conferred, and which no living creature
disputed. Yet, because some of the crown lawyers had propounded the
dogma that "the son Of a heretic ought not to succeed," it was gravely
stated as an immense act of clemency upon the part of Charles the Fifth
that he had not confiscated the whole of the young Prince's heritage. In
return Granvelle's brother Jerome had obtained the governorship of the
youth, upon whose majority he had received an honorable military
appointment from his attached pupil. The prelate had afterwards
recommended the marriage with the Count de Buren's heiress, and had
used his influence with the Emperor to overcome certain objections
entertained by Charles, that the Prince, by this great accession of wealth,
might be growing too powerful. On the other hand, there were always
many poor relations and dependents of Granvelle, eager to be
benefitted by Orange's patronage, who lived in the Prince's household,
or received handsome appointments from his generosity. Thus, there
had been great intimacy, founded upon various benefits mutually
conferred; for it could hardly be asserted that the debt of friendship was
wholly upon one side.
When Orange arrived in Brussels from a journey, he would go to the

bishop's before alighting at his own house. When the churchman visited
the Prince, he entered his bed-chamber without ceremony before he had
risen; for it was William's custom, through life, to receive intimate
acquaintances, and even to attend to important negotiations of state,
while still in bed.
The show of this intimacy had lasted longer than its substance.
Granvelle was the most politic of men, and the Prince had not served
his apprenticeship at the court of Charles the Fifth to lay himself bare
prematurely to the criticism or the animosity of the Cardinal with the
recklessness of Horn and Egmont. An explosion came at last, however,
and very soon after an exceedingly amicable correspondence between
the two upon the subject of an edict of religious amnesty which Orange
was preparing for his principality, and which Granvelle had
recommended him not to make too lenient. A few weeks after this, the
Antwerp magistracy was to be renewed. The Prince, as hereditary
burgrave of that city, was entitled to a large share of the appointing
power in these political arrangements, which at the moment were of
great importance. The citizens of Antwerp were in a state of excitement
on the subject of the new bishops. They openly, and in the event,
successfully resisted the installation of the new prelate for whom their
city had been constituted a diocese. The Prince was known to be
opposed to the measure, and to the whole system of ecclesiastical
persecution. When the nominations for the new magistracy came before
the Regent, she disposed of the whole matter in the