of his father at Venice
become Duke of Arschot; and between the two rode a gentleman forty-two
years of age, whose grave; melancholy features--although wearing a
painful expression of habitual restraint and distrust suggested, more
than did those of the rest of his family, the physiognomy of William the
Silent to all who remembered that illustrious rebel.

It was the eldest son of the great founder of the Dutch republic. Philip
William, Prince of Orange, had at last, after twenty-eight years of
captivity in Spain, returned to the Netherlands, whence he had been
kidnapped while a school boy at Louvain, by order of the Duke of Alva.
Rarely has there been a more dreary fate, a more broken existence than
his. His almost life-long confinement, not close nor cruel, but strict
and inexorable, together with the devilish arts of the Jesuits, had
produced nearly as blighting an effect upon his moral nature as a closer
dungeon might have done on his physical constitution. Although under
perpetual arrest in Madrid, he had been allowed to ride and to hunt, to
go to mass, and to enjoy many of the pleasures of youth. But he had been
always a prisoner, and his soul--a hopeless captive--could no longer be
liberated now that the tyrant, in order to further his own secret
purposes; had at last released his body from gaol. Although the
eldest-born of his father, and the inheritor of the great estates of
Orange and of Buren, he was no longer a Nassau except in name. The change
wrought by the pressure of the Spanish atmosphere was complete. All that
was left of his youthful self was a passionate reverence for his father's
memory, strangely combined with a total indifference to all that his
father held dear, all for which his father had laboured his whole
lifetime, and for which his heart's blood had been shed. On being at last
set free from bondage he had been taken to the Escorial, and permitted to
kiss the hand of the king--that hand still reeking with his father's
murder. He had been well received by the Infante and the Infanta, and by
the empress-mother, daughter of Charles V., while the artistic treasures
of the palace and cloister were benignantly pointed out to him. It was
also signified to him that he was to receive the order of the Golden
Fleece, and to enter into possession of his paternal and maternal
estates. And Philip William had accepted these conditions as if a born
loyal subject of his Most Catholic Majesty.

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