n Brussels. On the 20th February, the governor-general of
the obedient Netherlands, Archduke Ernest, breathed his last. His career
had not been so illustrious as the promises of the Spanish king and the
allegories of schoolmaster Houwaerts had led him to expect. He had not
espoused the Infanta nor been crowned King of France. He had not blasted
the rebellious Netherlands with Cyclopean thunderbolts, nor unbound the
Belgic Andromeda from the rock of doom. His brief year of government had
really been as dismal as, according to the announcement of his
sycophants, it should have been amazing. He had accomplished nothing, and
all that was left him was to die at the age of forty-two, over head and
ears in debt, a disappointed, melancholy man. He was very indolent,
enormously fat, very chaste, very expensive, fond of fine liveries and
fine clothes, so solemn and stately as never to be known to laugh, but
utterly without capacity either as a statesman or a soldier. He would
have shone as a portly abbot ruling over peaceful friars, but he was not
born to ride a revolutionary whirlwind, nor to evoke order out of chaos.
Past and Present were contending with each other in fierce elemental
strife within his domain. A world was in dying agony, another world was
coming, full-armed, into existence within the hand-breadth of time and of
space where he played his little part, but he dreamed not of it. He
passed away like a shadow, and was soon forgotten.

An effort was made, during the last illness of Ernest, to procure from
him the appointment of the elector of Cologne as temporary successor to
the government, but Count Fuentes was on the spot and was a man of
action. He produced a power in the French language from Philip, with a
blank for the name. This had been intended for the case of Peter Ernest
Mansfeld's possible death during his provisional administration, and
Fuentes now claimed the right of inserting his own name.

The dying Ernest consented, and upon his death Fuentes was declared
governor-general until the king's further pleasure should be known.

Pedro de Guzman, Count of Fuentes, a Spaniard of the hard and antique
type, was now in his sixty-fourth year. The pupil and near relative of
the Duke of Alva, he was already as odious to the Netherlanders as might
have been inferred from such education and such kin. A dark, grizzled,
baldish man, with high steep forehead, long, haggard, leathern visage,
sweeping beard, and large,