labor to no repose but death. On the contrary, his foot was hardly on
the first step of that difficult ascent which was to rise before him all
his lifetime. He was still among the primrose paths. He was rich,
powerful, of sovereign rank. He had only the germs within him of what
was thereafter to expand into moral and intellectual greatness. He had
small sympathy for the religious reformation, of which he was to be one
of the most distinguished champions. He was a Catholic, nominally, and
in outward observance. With doctrines he troubled himself but little.
He had given orders to enforce conformity to the ancient Church, not with
bloodshed, yet with comparative strictness, in his principality of
Orange. Beyond the compliance with rites and forms, thought
indispensable in those days to a personage of such high degree, he did
not occupy himself with theology. He was a Catholic, as Egmont and Horn,
Berlaymont and Mansfeld, Montigny and even Brederode, were Catholic. It
was only tanners, dyers and apostate priests who were Protestants at that
day in the Netherlands. His determination to protect a multitude of his
harmless inferiors from horrible deaths did not proceed from sympathy
with their religious sentiments, but merely from a generous and manly
detestation of murder. He carefully averted his mind from sacred
matters. If indeed the seed implanted by his pious parents were really
the germ of his future conversion to Protestantism, it must be confessed
that it lay dormant a long time. But his mind was in other pursuits.
He was disposed for an easy, joyous, luxurious, princely life. Banquets,
masquerades, tournaments, the chase, interspersed with the routine of
official duties, civil and military, seemed likely to fill out his life.
His hospitality, like his fortune, was almost regal. While the King and
the foreign envoys were still in the Netherlands, his house, the splendid
Nassau palace of Brussels, was ever open. He entertained for the
monarch, who was, or who imagined himself to be, too poor to discharge
his own duties in this respect, but he entertained at his own expense.