to be distributed to all her adherents, and then called a council to deliberate on the measures to be adopted.  A compromise with the confederates and the reformers was unanimously agreed to.  The Prince of Orange and Counts Egmont and Horn were once more appointed to this arduous arbitration between the court and the people.  Necessity now extorted almost every concession which had been so long denied to justice and prudence.  The confederates were declared absolved from all responsibility relative to their proceedings.  The suppression of the Inquisition, the abolition of the edicts against heresy, and a permission for the preachings, were simultaneously published.

The confederates on their side undertook to remain faithful to the service of the king, to do their best for the establishment of order, and to punish the iconoclasts.  A regular treaty to this effect was drawn up and executed by the respective plenipotentiaries, and formally approved by the stadtholderess, who affixed her sign-manual to the instrument.  She only consented to this measure after a long struggle, and with tears in her eyes; and it was with a trembling hand that she wrote an account of these transactions to the king.

Soon after this the several governors repaired to their respective provinces, and their efforts for the re-establishment of tranquillity were attended with various degrees of success.  Several of the ringleaders in the late excesses were executed; and this severity was not confined to the partisans of the Catholic Church.  The Prince of Orange and Count Egmont, with others of the patriot lords, set the example of this just severity.  John Casambrot, lord of Beckerzeel, Egmont’s secretary, and a leading member of the confederation, put himself at the head of some others of the associated gentlemen, fell upon a refractory band of iconoclasts near Gramont, in Flanders, and took thirty prisoners, of whom he ordered twenty-eight to be hanged on the spot.

CHAPTER IX

TO THE ADMINISTRATION OF REQUESENS

A.D. 1566—­1573

All the services just related in the common cause of the country and the king produced no effect on the vindictive spirit of the latter.  Neither the lapse of time, the proofs of repentance, nor the fulfilment of their duty, could efface the hatred excited by a conscientious opposition to even one design of despotism.

Philip was ill at Segovia when he received accounts of the excesses of the image-breakers, and of the convention concluded with the heretics.  Despatches from the stadtholderess, with private advice from Viglius, Egmont, Mansfield, Meghem, De Berlaimont, and others, gave him ample information as to the real state of things, and they thus strove to palliate their having acceded to the convention.  The emperor even wrote to his royal nephew, imploring him to treat