s perfidy by being torn in pieces
by four horses; yet bribery of employees was common then, and was a
practice of every potentate, and was what Philip did in every court in
Christendom. Absolute fealty was all but unknown. Each man was
believed to have his price, and the belief, in most instances, was not
erroneous. Besides, William was in a state of perpetual war with
Philip, and war makes its own code, and justifies the otherwise
unjustifiable, and but for this subtle surveillance of the king's
intention, no stand could have been made against his treachery and
encroachments; for he was the sum of duplicities, deceiving everybody,
those nearest to him and most intimately in his counsels no less than
his foes. Duplicity was native to him as respiration. Granvelle, who
in treacherous diplomacy was not inferior to Macchiavelli, him Philip
deceived. Such a king, William met by finesse and deception against
finesse and deception. To judge a statesman of the sixteenth century
by the ethics of the nineteenth century is studied injustice. He is
accused of evasion in his marriage with Anne of Saxony, and the
accusation is, in my conviction, just; but probably at that juncture in
his career his religious notions were in a state of ferment, himself as
yet knowing not what he would be. In any case, however, to use the
words of Putnam, "From the expediency of his youth he grew gradually to
a high standard of honor." In the stress of the battle for liberty,
when he was reduced to counting his very garments, his luxurious habits
slipped from him, and disinterestedness grew upon him. Cromwell was
formed when first we saw him; Orange grows before our eyes, as we have
watched the blooming of some sacred flower. Orange was no saint. Who
so thinks him, thinks amiss. He had manifold faults, as what man has
not? But that the growing purpose of his life was heroic and single,
and that he devoted a laborious manhood to the enfranchisement of his
country and religion, no fair historian can deny. His career naturally
oscillated between the general and the statesman, the statesman being
in the ascendant. Some men are primarily soldiers; secondarily,
statesmen; as was Sulla or Marlborough. In others, the statesman
stands first, the soldier in them being second, as in Julius Caesar,
whose widest achievements always spring out of his statesmanship as
naturally as a plant out of the soil. At this point, Caesar and
William the Silen