on so many sides, that many must consider me already dead. Nevertheless,
I will endeavor, with God's help, to live as long as I can, and if they
kill me, I hope they will not gain every thing." Yet, with
characteristic Jesuitism, the Cardinal could not refrain, even in the
very letter in which he detailed the rebellious demonstrations of
Berghen, and the murderous schemes of Horn, to protest that he did not
say these things "to prejudice his Majesty against any one, but only that
it might be known to what a height the impudence was rising." Certainly
the King and the ecclesiastic, like the Roman soothsayers, would have
laughed in each other's face, could they have met, over the hollowness of
such demonstrations. Granvelle's letters were filled, for the greater
part, with pictures of treason, stratagem, and bloody intentions,
fabricated mostly out of reports, table-talk, disjointed chat in the
careless freedom of domestic intercourse, while at the same time a margin
was always left to express his own wounded sense of the injurious
suspicions uttered against him by the various subjects of his letters.
"God knows," said he to Perez, "that I always speak of them with respect,
which is more than they do of me. But God forgive them all. In times
like these, one must hold one's tongue. One must keep still, in order
not to stir up a hornet's nest."

In short, the Cardinal, little by little, during the last year of his
residence in the Netherlands, was enabled to spread a canvas before his
sovereign's eye, in which certain prominent figures, highly colored by
patiently accumulated touches, were represented as driving a whole
nation, against its own will, into manifest revolt. The estates and the
people, he said, were already tired of the proceedings of the nobles, and
those personages would find themselves very much mistaken in thinking
that men who had any thing to lose would follow them, when they began a
rebellion against his Majesty. On the whole, he was not desirous of