leaving all the estates and titles of the family to his brother.
Lamoral, born in 1522, was in early youth a page of the Emperor. When
old enough to bear arms he demanded and obtained permission to follow the
career of his adventurous sovereign. He served his apprenticeship as a
soldier in the stormy expedition to Barbary, where, in his nineteenth
year, he commanded a troop of light horse, and distinguished himself
under the Emperor's eye for his courage and devotion, doing the duty not
only of a gallant commander but of a hardy soldier. Returning, unscathed
by the war, flood, or tempest of that memorable enterprise, he reached
his country by the way of Corsica, Genoa, and Lorraine, and was three
years afterwards united (in the year 1545) to Sabina of Bavaria, sister
of Frederick, Elector Palatine. The nuptials had taken place at Spiers,
and few royal weddings could have been more brilliant. The Emperor, his
brother Ferdinand King of the Romans, with the Archduke Maximilian, all
the imperial electors, and a concourse of the principal nobles of the
empire, were present on the occasion been at the Emperor's side during
the unlucky siege of Metz; in 1554 he had been sent at the head of a
splendid embassy to England, to solicit for Philip the hand of Mary
Tudor, and had witnessed the marriage in Winchester Cathedral, the same
year. Although one branch of his house had, in past times, arrived at
the sovereignty of Gueldres, and another had acquired the great estates
and titles of Buren, which had recently passed, by intermarriage with the
heiress, into the possession of the Prince of Orange, yet the Prince of
Gavere, Count of Egmont, was the chief of a race which yielded to none of
the great Batavian or Flemish families in antiquity, wealth, or power.
Personally, he was distinguished for his bravery, and although he was not
yet the idol of the camp, which he was destined to become, nor had yet
commanded in chief on any important occasion, he was accounted one of the
five principal generals in the Spanish service. Eager for general
admiration, he was at the same time haughty and presumptuous, attempting