served that it was now proved how incompetent he and
all his companions were to contend in military skill with the Duke of
Alva. With a cold sneer at motives which he assumed, as a matter of
course, to be purely selfish, he said that the Prince had not taken the
proper road to recover his property, and that he would now be much
embarrassed to satisfy his creditors. Thus must those ever fall, he
moralized, who would fly higher than they ought; adding, that henceforth
the Prince would have enough to do in taking care of madam his wife, if
she did not change soon in humor and character.

Meantime the Duke of Alva, having despatched from Cateau Cambresis a
brief account of the victorious termination of the campaign, returned in
triumph to Brussels. He had certainly amply vindicated his claim to be
considered the first warrior of the age. By his lieutenants he had
summarily and rapidly destroyed two of the armies sent against him; he
had annihilated in person the third, by a brilliantly successful battle,
in which he had lost seven men, and his enemies seven thousand; and he
had now, by consummate strategy, foiled the fourth and last under the
idolized champion of the Netherlands, and this so decisively that,
without losing a man, he had destroyed eight thousand rebels, and
scattered to the four winds the remaining twenty thousand. Such signal
results might well make even a meeker nature proud. Such vast and
fortunate efforts to fix for ever an impregnable military tyranny upon a
constitutional country, might cause a more modest despot to exult. It was
not wonderful that the haughty, and now apparently omnipotent Alva,
should almost assume the god. On his return to Brussels he instituted a
succession of triumphant festivals. The people were called upon to
rejoice and to be exceeding glad, to strew flowers in his path, to sing
Hosannas in his praise who came to them covered with the blood of those
who had striven in their defence. The holiday was duly called forth;
houses, where funeral hatchments for murdered inmates had been
perpetually suspended, were decked with garlands; the bells, which had
hardly once omitted their daily knell for the victims of an incredible
cruelty, now rang their merriest peals; and in the very square where so
lately Egmont and Horn, besides many other less distinguished martyrs,
had suffered an ignominious death, a gay tournament was held, day after
day, with all the insolent pomp which could make t