o posterity. When, in the year 1548, the connection of the
Netherlands with the German empire was to be settled at the Diet of
Augsburg, Charles V. sent hither this statesman to manage the interests
of the provinces; and his ability principally succeeded in turning the
negotiations to the advantage of the Netherlands. After the death of
the Emperor, Viglius was one of the many eminent ministers bequeathed to
Philip by his father, and one of the few in whom he honored his memory.
The fortune of the minister, Granvella, with whom he was united by the
ties of an early acquaintance, raised him likewise to greatness; but he
did not share the fall of his patron, because he had not participated in
his lust of power; nor, consequently, the hatred which attached to him.
A residence of twenty years in the provinces, where the most important
affairs were entrusted to him, approved loyalty to his king, and zealous
attachment to the Roman Catholic tenets, made him one of the most
distinguished instruments of royalty in the Netherlands.

Viglius was a man of learning, but no thinker; an experienced statesman,
but without an enlightened mind; of an intellect not sufficiently
powerful to break, like his friend Erasmus, the fetters of error, yet
not sufficiently bad to employ it, like his predecessor, Granvella, in
the service of his own passions. Too weak and timid to follow boldly
the guidance of his reason, he preferred trusting to the more convenient
path of conscience; a thing was just so soon as it became his duty; he
belonged to those honest men who are indispensable to bad ones; fraud
reckoned on his honesty. Half a century later he would have received
his immortality from the freedom which he now helped to subvert.
In the privy council at Brussels he was the servant of tyranny; in the
parliament in London, or in the senate at Amsterdam, he would have died,
perhaps, like Thomas More or Olden Barneveldt.

In the Count Barlaimont, the president of the council of finance,
the opposition had a no less formidable antagonist than in Viglius.
Historians have transmitted but little information regarding the
services and the opinions of this man. In the first part of his career
the dazzling greatness of Cardinal Granvella seems to have cast a shade
over him; after the latter had disappeared from the stage the
superiority of the opposite party kept him down, but still the little
that we do find respecting him throws a favorable light over