With this answer the deputies are said to have been well pleased.
If they were so, it must be confessed that they were thankful for small
favors. They had asked to have the Catholic religion introduced into
Holland and Zealand. The Prince had simply referred them to the estates
of these provinces. They had asked him to guarantee that the exercise of
the Reformed religion should not be "procured" in the rest of the
country. He had merely promised that the Catholic worship should not be
prevented. The difference between the terms of the request and the reply
was sufficiently wide.

The consent to his journey was with difficulty accorded by the estates
of Holland and Zealand, and his wife, with many tears and anxious
forebodings, beheld him depart for a capital where the heads of his
brave and powerful friends had fallen, and where still lurked so many of
his deadly foes. During his absence, prayers were offered daily for his
safety in all the churches of Holland and Zealand, by command of the
estates.

He arrived at Antwerp on the 17th of September, and was received with
extraordinary enthusiasm. The Prince, who had gone forth alone, without
even a bodyguard, had the whole population of the great city for his
buckler. Here he spent five days, observing, with many a sigh, the
melancholy changes which had taken place in the long interval of his
absence. The recent traces of the horrible "Fury," the blackened walls
of the Hotel de Ville, the prostrate ruins of the marble streets, which
he had known as the most imposing in Europe, could be hardly atoned for
in his eyes even by the more grateful spectacle of the dismantled
fortress.

On the 23rd of September he was attended by a vast concourse of citizens