of a brewer; having dared to raise their eyes for a chief, to the most illustrious warrior of his ages." No doubt, had Egmont ever listened to these aspirations, he might have taken the field against the government with an invincible force, seized the capital, imprisoned the Regent, and mastered the whole country, which was entirely defenceless, before Philip would have had time to write more than ten despatches upon the subject.
These hopes of the Reformers, if hopes they could be called, were now destined to be most bitterly disappointed. Egmont entered Flanders, not as a chief of rebels—not as a wise pacificator, but as an unscrupulous partisan of government, disposed to take summary vengeance on all suspected persons who should fall in his way. He ordered numerous executions of image-breakers and of other heretics. The whole province was in a state of alarm; for, although he had not been furnished by the Regent with a strong body of troops, yet the name of the conqueror at Saint Quentin and Gravelines was worth many regiments. His severity was excessive. His sanguinary exertions were ably seconded also by his secretary Bakkerzeel, a man who exercised the greatest influence over his chief, and who was now fiercely atoning for having signed the Compromise by persecuting those whom that league had been formed to protect. "Amid all the perplexities of the Duchess Regent," Says a Walloon historian, "this virtuous princess was consoled by the exploits of Bakkerzeel, gentleman in Count Egmont's service. On one occasion he hanged twenty heretics, including a minister, at a single heat."
Such achievements as these by the hands or the orders of the distinguished general who had been most absurdly held up as a possible protector of the civil and religious liberties of the country, created profound sensation. Flanders and Artois were filled with the wives and children of suspected I thousands who had fled the country to escape the wrath of Egmont. The cries and piteous lamentations of these unfortunate creatures were heard on every side. Count Louis was earnestly implored to intercede for the persecuted Reformers. "You who have been so nobly gifted by Heaven, you who have good will and singular bounty written upon your face," said Utenhove to Louis, "have the power to save these poor victims from the throats of the ravenous wolves." The Count responded to the appeal, and strove to soften the severity of Egmont, without, however, producing any very signal effect. Flanders was soon pacified, nor was that important province permitted to enjoy the benefits of the agreement which had been extorted, from the Duchess. The preachings were forbidden, and the ministers and congregations arrested and chastised, even in places where the custom had been established previously to the 23d August. Certainly such vigorous exertions upon the part both of master and man did not savor of treason to Philip, and hardly seemed to indicate the final doom of Egmont and Bakkerzeel.
The course of Orange at Antwerp was consistent with his whole career. He honestly came to arrange a pacification, but he knew that this end could be gained only by loyally maintaining the Accord which had been signed between the confederates and the Regent. He came back to the city on the 26th August, and found order partially re-established. The burghers having at last become thoroughly alarmed, and the fury of the image-breakers entirely appeased, it had been comparatively easy to restore tranquillity. The tranquillity, however, rather restored itself, and when the calm had succeeded to the tempest, the placid heads of the burgomasters once, more emerged from the waves.
Three image-breakers, who had been taken in the act, were hanged by order of the magistrates upon the 28th of August. The presence of Orange gave them courage to achieve these executions which he could not prevent, as the fifth article of the Accord enjoined the chastisement of the rioters. The magistrates chose that the "chastisement" on this occasion should be exemplary, and it was not in the power of Orange to interfere with the regular government of the city when acting according to its laws. The deed was not his, however, and he hastened, in order to obviate the necessity of further violence, to prepare articles of agreement, upon the basis of Margaret's concessions. Public preaching, according to the Reformed religion, had already taken place within the city. Upon the 22d, possession had been taken of at least three churches. The senate had deputed pensionary Wesenbeck to expostulate with the ministers, for the magistrates were at that moment not able to command. Taffin, the Walloon preacher, had been tractable, and had agreed to postpone his exercises. He furthermore had accompanied the pensionary to the cathedral, in order to persuade Herman Modet that it would be better for him likewise to defer his intended ministrations. They had found that eloquent enthusiast already in the great church, burning with impatience to ascend upon the ruins, and quite unable to resist the temptation of setting a Flemish psalm and preaching a Flemish sermon within the walls which had for so many centuries been vocal only to the Roman tongue and the Roman ritual. All that he would concede to the entreaties of his colleague and of the magistrate, was that his sermon should be short. In this, however, he had overrated his powers of retention, for the sermon not only became a long one, but he had preached another upon the afternoon of the same day. The city of Antwerp, therefore, was clearly within the seventh clause of the treaty of the 24th August, for preaching had taken place in the cathedral, previously to the signing of that Accord.
Upon the 2d September, therefore, after many protracted interview with the heads of the Reformed religion, the Prince drew up sixteen articles of agreement between them, the magistrates and the government, which were duly signed and exchanged. They were conceived in the true spirit of statesmanship, and could the rulers of the land have elevated themselves to the mental height of William de Nassau, had Philip been able of comprehending such a mind, the Prince, who alone possessed the power in those distracted times of governing the wills of all men, would have enabled the monarch to transmit that beautiful cluster of provinces, without the lose of a single jewel, to the inheritors of his crown.
If the Prince were playing a game, he played it honorably. To have conceived the thought of religious toleration in an age of universal dogmatism; to have labored to produce mutual respect among conflicting opinions, at a period when many Dissenters were as bigoted as the orthodox, and when most Reformers fiercely proclaimed not liberty for every Christian doctrine, but only a new creed in place of all the rest—to have admitted the possibility of several roads, to heaven, when zealots of all creeds would shut up all pathways but their own; if such sentiments and purposes were sins, they would have been ill-exchanged for the best virtues of the age. Yet, no doubt, this was his crying offence in the opinion of many contemporaries. He was now becoming apostate from the ancient Church, but he had long thought that Emperors, Kings, and Popes had taken altogether too much care of men's souls in times past, and had sent too many of them prematurely to their great account. He was equally indisposed to grant full-powers for the same purpose to Calvinists, Lutherans, or Anabaptists. "He censured the severity of our theologians," said a Catholic contemporary, accumulating all the religious offences of the Prince in a single paragraph, "because they keep strictly the constitutions of the Church without conceding a single point to their adversaries; he blamed the Calvinists as seditious and unruly people, yet nevertheless had a horror for the imperial edicts which condemned them to death; he said it was a cruel thing to take a man's life for sustaining an erroneous opinion; in short, he fantasied in his imagination a kind of religion, half Catholic, half Reformed, in order to content all persons; a system which would have been adopted could he have had his way." This picture, drawn by one of his most brilliant and bitter enemies, excites our admiration while intended to inspire aversion.
The articles of agreement at Antwerp thus promulgated assigned three churches to the different sects of reformers, stipulated that no attempt should be made by Catholics or Protestants to disturb the religious worship of each other, and provided that neither by mutual taunts in their sermons, nor by singing street ballads, together with improper allusions and overt acts of hostility, should the good-fellowship which ought to reign between brethren and fellow-citizens, even although entertaining different opinions as to religious rites and doctrines, be for the future interrupted.
This was the basis upon which the very brief religious peace, broken almost as soon as established, was concluded by William of Orange, not only at Antwerp, but at Utrecht, Amsterdam, and other principal cities within his government. The Prince, however, notwithstanding his unwearied exertions, had slender hopes of a peaceful result. He felt that the last step taken by the Reformation had been off a precipice. He liked not such rapid progress. He knew that the King would never forgive the image-breaking. He felt that he would never recognize the Accord of the 24th August. Sir Thomas Gresham, who, as the representative of the Protestant Queen of