Necessity for retaining the Spanish troops to enforce the policy of
persecution.

Margaret of Parma, newly appointed Regent of the Netherlands, was the
natural daughter of Charles the Fifth, and his eldest born child. Her
mother, of a respectable family called Van der Genst, in Oudenarde, had
been adopted and brought up by the distinguished house of Hoogstraaten.
Peculiar circumstances, not necessary to relate at length, had palliated
the fault to which Margaret owed her imperial origin, and gave the child
almost a legitimate claim upon its father's protection. The claim was
honorably acknowledged. Margaret was in her infancy placed by the
Emperor in the charge of his paternal aunt, Margaret of Savoy, then
Regent of the provinces. Upon the death of that princess, the child was
entrusted to the care of the Emperor's sister, Mary, Queen Dowager of
Hungary, who had succeeded to the government, and who occupied it until
the abdication. The huntress-queen communicated her tastes to her
youthful niece, and Margaret soon outrivalled her instructress. The
ardor with which she pursued the stag, and the courageous horsemanship
which she always displayed, proved her, too, no degenerate descendant of
Mary of Burgundy. Her education for the distinguished position in which
she had somewhat surreptitiously been placed was at least not neglected
in this particular. When, soon after the memorable sack of Rome, the
Pope and the Emperor had been reconciled, and it had been decided that
the Medici family should be elevated upon the ruins of Florentine
liberty, Margaret's hand was conferred in marriage upon the pontiff's
nephew Alexander. The wretched profligate who was thus selected to mate
with the Emperor's eldest born child and to appropriate the fair demesnes
of the Tuscan republic was nominally the offspring of Lorenzo de Medici
by a Moorish slave, although generally reputed a bastard of the Pope
himself. The nuptials were celebrated with great pomp at Naples, where