the very bosom of the state council,
Granvelle, in his confidential letters to secretary Perez, asserted
warmly that all reports of a want of harmony between himself and the
other seignors and councillors were false, and that the best relations
existed among them all. It was not his intention, before it should be
necessary, to let the King doubt his ability to govern the counsel
according to the secret commission with which he had been invested.

His relations with Orange were longer in changing from friendship to open
hostility. In the Prince the Cardinal met his match. He found himself
confronted by an intellect as subtle, an experience as fertile in
expedients, a temper as even, and a disposition sometimes as haughty as
his own. He never affected to undervalue the mind of Orange. "'Tis a man
of profound genius, vast ambition--dangerous, acute, politic," he wrote
to the King at a very early period. The original relations between
himself and the Prince bad been very amicable. It hardly needed the
prelate's great penetration to be aware that the friendship of so exalted
a personage as the youthful heir to the principality of Orange, and to
the vast possessions of the Chalons-Nassau house in Burgundy and the
Netherlands, would be advantageous to the ambitious son of the Burgundian
Councillor Granvelle. The young man was the favorite of the Emperor from
boyhood; his high rank, and his remarkable talents marked him
indisputably for one of the foremost men of the coming reign. Therefore
it was politic in Perrenot to seize every opportunity of making himself
useful to the Prince. He busied himself with securing, so far as it might
be necessary to secure, the succession of William to his cousin's
principality. It seems somewhat ludicrous for a merit to be made not only
for Granvelle but for the Emperor, that the Prince should have been
allowed to take an inheritance which the will of Rene de Nassau most
unequivocally conferred, and which no living creature disputed. Yet,
because some of the crown lawyers had propounded the dogma that "the son
Of a heretic ought not to succeed," it was gravely stated as an immense
act of clemency upon the part of Charles the Fifth that he had not
confiscated the whole of the young Prince's heritage. In return
Granvelle's brother Jerome had obtained the governorship of the youth,
upon whose majority he had received an honorable military appointment
from his attached pupil. The prelate had after