discouraged. He felt that the last hope of saving Antwerp was gone, and
with it all possibility of maintaining the existence of a United
Netherland commonwealth. The Walloon Provinces were lost already; Ghent,
Brussels, Mechlin, had also capitulated, and, with the fall of Antwerp,
Flanders and Brabant must fall. There would be no barrier left even to
save Holland itself. Despair entered the heart of the burgomaster, and
he listened too soon to its treacherous voice. Yet while he thought a
free national state no longer a possibility, he imagined it practicable
to secure religious liberty by negotiation with Philip II. He abandoned
with a sigh one of the two great objects for which he had struggled side
by side with Orange for twenty years, but he thought it possible to
secure the other. His purpose was now to obtain a favourable
capitulation for Antwerp, and at the same time to bring about the
submission of Holland, Zeeland, and the other United Provinces, to the
King of Spain. Here certainly was a great change of face on the part of
one so conspicuous, and hitherto so consistent, in the ranks of
Netherland patriots, and it is therefore necessary, in order thoroughly
to estimate both the man and the crisis, to follow carefully his steps
through the secret path of negotiation into which he now entered, and in
which the Antwerp drama was to find its conclusion. In these
transactions, the chief actors are, on the one side, the Prince of Parma,
as representative of absolutism and the Papacy; on the other, Sainte
Aldegonde, who had passed his life as the champion of the Reformation.

No doubt the pressure upon the burgomaster was very great. Tumults were
of daily occurrence. Crowds of rioters beset his door with cries of
denunciations and demands for bread. A large and turbulent mob upon one
occasion took possession of the horse-market, and treated him with
personal indignity and violence, when be undertook to disperse them.
On the other hand, Parma had been holding out hopes of pardon with more