envoy. This refusal can excite but little surprise, when Philip's wrath
at their parting interview is recalled, and when it is also remembered
that the new mission would necessarily lay bare fresh complaints against
the Cardinal, still more extensive than those which had produced the
former explosion of royal indignation. Montigny, likewise, would have
preferred to remain at home, but he was overruled. It had been written
in his destiny that he should go twice into the angry lion's den, and
that he should come forth once, alive.

Thus it has been shown that there was an open, avowed hostility on the
part of the grand seignors and most of the lesser nobility to the
Cardinal and his measures. The people fully and enthusiastically
sustained the Prince of Orange in his course. There was nothing
underhand in the opposition made to the government. The Netherlands did
not constitute an absolute monarchy. They did not even constitute a
monarchy. There was no king in the provinces. Philip was King of Spain,
Naples, Jerusalem, but he was only Duke of Brabant, Count of Flanders,
Lord of Friesland, hereditary chief, in short, under various titles, of
seventeen states, each one of which, although not republican, possessed
constitutions as sacred as, and much more ancient than, the Crown. The
resistance to the absolutism of Granvelle and Philip was, therefore,
logical, legal, constitutional. It was no cabal, no secret league,
as the Cardinal had the effrontery to term it, but a legitimate exercise
of powers which belonged of old to those who wielded them, and which only
an unrighteous innovation could destroy.

Granvelle's course was secret and subtle. During the whole course of the
proceedings which have just been described, he was; in daily confidential
correspondence with the King, besides being the actual author of the
multitudinous despatches which were sent with the signature of the