the states-general on his projects of a double alliance between himself and his sister with the son and daughter of Ferdinand, king of Aragon, and Isabella, queen of Castile; and from this wise precaution the project soon became one of national partiality instead of private or personal interest.  In this manner complete harmony was established between the young prince and the inhabitants of the Netherlands.  All the ills produced by civil war disappeared with immense rapidity in Flanders and Brabant, as soon as peace was thus consolidated.  Even Holland, though it had particularly felt the scourge of these dissensions, and suffered severely from repeated inundations, began to recover.  Yet for all this, Philip can be scarcely called a good prince:  his merits were negative rather than real.  But that sufficed for the nation; which found in the nullity of its sovereign no obstacle to the resumption of that prosperous career which had been checked by the despotism of the House of Burgundy, and the attempts of Maximilian to continue the same system.

The reign of Philip, unfortunately a short one was rendered remarkable by two intestine quarrels; one in Friesland, the other in Guelders.  The Frisons, who had been so isolated from the more important affairs of Europe that they were in a manner lost sight of by history for several centuries, had nevertheless their full share of domestic disputes; too long, too multifarious, and too minute, to allow us to give more than this brief notice of their existence.  But finally, about the period of Philip’s accession, eastern Friesland had chosen for its count a gentleman of the country surnamed Edzart, who fixed the headquarters of his military government at Embden.  The sight of such an elevation in an individual whose pretensions he thought far inferior to his own induced Albert of Saxony, who had well served Maximilian against the refractory Flemings, to demand as his reward the title of stadtholder or hereditary governor of Friesland.  But it was far easier for the emperor to accede to this request than for his favorite to put the grant into effect.  The Frisons, true to their old character, held firm to their privileges, and fought for their maintenance with heroic courage.  Albert, furious at this resistance, had the horrid barbarity to cause to be impaled the chief burghers of the town of Leuwaarden, which he had taken by assault.  But he himself died in the year 1500, without succeeding in his projects of an ambition unjust in its principle and atrocious in its practice.

The war of Guelders was of a totally different nature.  In this case it was not a question of popular resistance to a tyrannical nomination, but of patriotic fidelity to the reigning family.  Adolphus, the duke who had dethroned his father, had died in Flanders, leaving a son who had been brought up almost a captive as long as Maximilian governed the states of his inheritance.  This young man, called Charles of Egmont, and who is