his pay, and, that they might serve with
the more zeal, to pay them their long-standing arrears. He commanded
the regent in a private letter to prepare secretly for war; three
thousand horse and ten thousand infantry were to be assembled by her in
Germany, to which end he furnished her with the necessary letters and
transmitted to her a sum of three hundred thousand gold florins. He
also accompanied this resolution with several autograph letters to some
private individuals and towns, in which he thanked them in the most
gracious terms for the zeal which they had already displayed in his
service and called upon them to manifest the same for the future.
Notwithstanding that he was inexorable on the most important point,
and the very one on which the nation most particularly insisted--the
convocation of the states, notwithstanding that his limited and
ambiguous pardon was as good as none, and depended too much on arbitrary
will to calm the public mind; notwithstanding, in fine, that he
rejected, as too lenient, the proposed "moderation," but which, on the
part of the people, was complained of as too severe; still he had this
time made an unwonted step in the favor of the nation; he had sacrificed
to it the papal Inquisition and left only the episcopal, to which it was
accustomed. The nation had found more equitable judges in the Spanish
council than they could reasonably have hoped for. Whether at another
time and under other circumstances this wise concession would have had
the desired effect we will not pretend to say. It came too late; when
(1566) the royal letters reached Brussels the attack on images had
already commenced.

BOOK IV.

THE ICONOCLASTS.

The springs of this extraordinary occurrence are plainly not to be
sought for so far back as many historians affect to trace them. It is
certainly possible, and very probable, that the French Protestants did
industriously exert themselves to raise in the Netherlands a nursery for
their religion, and to prevent by all means in their power an amicable
adjustment of differences between their brethren in the faith in that
quarter and the King of Spain, in order to give that implacable foe of
their party enough to do in his own country. It is natural, therefore,
to suppose that their agents in the provinces left nothing undone to
encourage their oppressed brethren with daring hopes, to nourish their
animosity against the ruli