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Barbara Blomberg — Volume 10 by Georg Ebers
page 6 of 84 (07%)
that the Emperor, as it were, had made him his own with a kiss, she had
grown confident in the hope that Charles would bestow upon him the
grandeur, honours, and splendour which she had anticipated when she
resigned him at Landshut, and to which his birth gave him a claim.
But her early experience that what she expected with specially joyful
security rarely happened,--constantly forced upon her mind the, fear that
the dead man's will would consign John to the cloister.

So the next weeks passed in a constant alternation of oppressive fears
and aspiring hopes, the nights in torturing terrors.

All the women of the upper classes wore mourning, and with double reason;
for, soon after the news of the Emperor's death reached Brussels, King
Philip's second wife, Mary Tudor, of England, also died. Therefore no
one noticed that Barbara wore widow's weeds, and she was glad that she
could do so without wounding Pyramus.

A part of the elaborate funeral rites which King Philip arranged in
Brussels during the latter part of December in honour of his dead father
was the procession which afforded the authorities of the Brabant capital
an opportunity to display the inventive faculty, the love of splendour,
the learning, and the wit which, as members of flourishing literary
societies, they constantly exercised. In the pageant was a ship with
black sails, at whose keel, mast, and helm stood Hope with her anchor,
Faith with her chalice, and Love with the burning heart. Other similar
scenic pieces made the sincerity of the grief for the dead questionable,
and yet many real tears were shed for him. True, the wind which swelled
the sails of the sable ship bore also many an accusation and curse; among
the spectators of the procession there were only too many whose mourning
robes were worn not for the dead monarch, but their own nearest
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