vast rents of St. Armand and Afflighem, he could seize the abbey of
Trulle from the expectant hands of poor dependents, and accept tapestries
and hogsheads of wine from Jacques Lequien and others, as a tax on the
benefices which he procured for them. Yet the man who, like his father
before him, had so long fattened on the public money, who at an early
day had incurred the Emperor's sharp reproof for his covetousness,
whose family, beside all these salaries and personal property, possessed
already fragments of the royal domain, in the shape of nineteen baronies
and seigniories in Burgundy, besides the county of Cantecroix and other
estates in the Netherlands, had the effrontery to affirm, "We have always
rather regarded the service of the master than our own particular
profit."

In estimating the conduct of the minister, in relation to the provinces,
we are met upon the threshold by a swarm of vague assertions which are of
a nature to blind or distract the judgment. His character must be judged
as a whole, and by its general results, with a careful allowance for
contradictions and equivocations. Truth is clear and single, but the
lights are parti-colored and refracted in the prism of hypocrisy. The
great feature of his administration was a prolonged conflict between
himself and the leading seigniors of the Netherlands. The ground of the
combat was the religious question. Let the quarrel be turned or tortured
in any manner that human ingenuity can devise, it still remains
unquestionable that Granvelle's main object was to strengthen and to
extend the inquisition, that of his adversaries to overthrow the
institution. It followed, necessarily, that the ancient charters were to
be trampled in the dust before that tribunal could be triumphant. The
nobles, although all Catholics, defended the cause of the poor religious
martyrs, the privileges of the nation and the rights of their order.
They were conservatives, battling for the existence of certain great