conclusive defeat. A small, melancholy man, accomplished, religious,
learned, "very poor but very wise," comely, but of mean stature,
altogether an unlucky and forlorn individual, he was not, after all,
in very much inferior plight to that in which his rival, the Bavarian
bishop, had found himself. Prince Ernest, archbishop of Liege and
Cologne, a hangeron of his brother, who sought to shake him off, and a
stipendiary of Philip, who was a worse paymaster than Elizabeth, had a
sorry life of it, notwithstanding his nominal possession of the see. He
was forced to go, disguised and in secret, to the Prince of Parma at
Brussels, to ask for assistance, and to mention, with lacrymose
vehemence, that both his brother and himself had determined to renounce
the episcopate, unless the forces of the Spanish King could be employed
to recover the cities on the Rhine. If Neusz and Rheinberg were not
wrested from the rebels; Cologne itself would soon be gone. Ernest
represented most eloquently to Alexander, that if the protestant
archbishop were reinstated in the ancient see, it would be a most
perilous result for the ancient church throughout all northern Europe.
Parma kept the wandering prelate for a few days in his palace in
Brussels, and then dismissed him, disguised and on foot, in the dusk of
the evening, through the park-gate. He encouraged him with hopes of
assistance, he represented to his sovereign the importance of preserving
the Rhenish territory to Bishop Ernest and to Catholicism, but hinted
that the declared intention of the Bavarian to resign the dignity, was
probably a trick, because the archi-episcopate was no such very bad thing
after all.

The archi-episcopate might be no very bad thing, but it was a most
uncomfortable place of residence, at the moment, for prince or peasant.
Overrun by hordes of brigands, and crushed almost out of existence by
that most deadly of all systems of taxations, the 'brandschatzung,' it