every one who was admitted to her presence. Herself oppressed by a sense
of personal indignity, she seemed for a moment to identify herself with
the cause of the oppressed provinces. She seemed to imagine herself the
champion of their liberties, and the Netherlanders, for a moments seemed
to participate in the delusion. Because she was indignant at the
insolence of the Duke of Alva to her self, the honest citizens began to
give her credit for a sympathy with their own wrongs. She expressed
herself determined to move about from one city to another, until the
answer to her demand for dismissal should arrive. She allowed her
immediate attendants to abuse the Spaniards in good set terms upon every
occasion. Even her private chaplain permitted himself, in preaching
before her in the palace chapel, to denounce the whole nation as a race
of traitors and ravishers, and for this offence was only reprimanded,
much against her will, by the Duchess, and ordered to retire for a season
to his convent. She did not attempt to disguise her dissatisfaction at
every step which had been taken by the Duke. In all this there was much
petulance, but very little dignity, while there was neither a spark of
real sympathy for the oppressed millions, nor a throb of genuine womanly
emotion for the impending fate of the two nobles. Her principal grief
was that she had pacified the provinces, and that another had now arrived
to reap the glory; but it was difficult, while the unburied bones of many
heretics were still hanging, by her decree, on the rafters of their own
dismantled churches, for her successfully to enact the part of a
benignant and merciful Regent. But it is very true that the horrors of
the Duke's administration have been propitious to the fame of Margaret,
and perhaps more so to that of Cardinal Granvelle. The faint and
struggling rays of humanity which occasionally illumined the course of
their government, were destined to be extinguished in a chaos so profound
and dark, that these last beams of light seemed clearer and more
bountiful by the contrast.