The articles of union having been agreed upon, the Prince, desiring an unfettered expression of the national will, wished the ordinance to be laid before the people in their primary assemblies.  The estates, however, were opposed to this democratic proceeding.  They represented that it had been customary to consult; after the city magistracies, only the captains of companies and the deans of guilds on matters of government.  The Prince, yielding the point, the captains of companies and deans of guilds accordingly alone united with the aristocratic boards in ratifying the instrument by which his authority over the two united provinces was established.  On the 4th of June this first union was solemnized.

Upon the 11th of July, the Prince formally accepted the government.  He, however, made an essential change in a very important clause of the ordinance.  In place of the words, the “Roman religion,” he insisted that the words, “religion at variance with the Gospel,” should be substituted in the article by which he was enjoined to prohibit the exercise of such religion.  This alteration rebuked the bigotry which had already grown out of the successful resistance to bigotry, and left the door open for a general religious toleration.

Early in this year the Prince had despatched Saint Aldegonde on a private mission to the Elector Palatine.  During some of his visits to that potentate he had seen at Heidelberg the Princess Charlotte of Bourbon.  That lady was daughter of the Due de Montpensier, the most ardent of the Catholic Princes of France, and the one who at the conferences of Bayonne had been most indignant at the Queen Dowager’s hesitation to unite heartily with the, schemes of Alva and Philip for the extermination of the Huguenots.  His daughter, a woman of beauty, intelligence, and virtue, forced before the canonical age to take the religious vows, had been placed in the convent of Joliarrs, of which she had become Abbess.  Always secretly inclined to the Reformed religion, she had fled secretly from her cloister, in the year of horrors 1572, and had found refuge at the court of the Elector Palatine, after which step her father refused to receive her letters, to contribute a farthing to her support, or even to acknowledge her claims upon him by a single line or message of affection.

Under these circumstances the outcast princess, who had arrived at the years of maturity, might be considered her own mistress, and she was neither morally nor legally bound, when her hand was sought in marriage by the great champion of the Reformation, to ask the consent of a parent who loathed her religion and denied her existence.  The legality of the divorce from Anne of Saxony had been settled by a full expression of the ecclesiastical authority which she most respected;

   [Acte de, cinq Ministres du St. Evangile par lequel ils declarent le
   mariage du Prince d’Orange etre legitime.—­Archives, etc., v. 216-
   226.]