262

DEATH OF REQUESENS.

[Book III. ancient state of a waste of waters; a thought, however, which he probably never seriously entertained, though he may have given utterance to it in a moment of irritation or despondency. On June 12th 1575, William had married Charlotte de Bourbon, daughter of the Duke of Montpensier. The Prince's second wife, Anne of Saxony, had turned out a drunken, violent character, and at length an intrigue which she formed with John Rubens, an exiled magistrate of Antwerp, and father of the celebrated painter, justified William in divorcing her. She subsequently became insane. Charlotte de Bourbon had been brought up a Calvinist, but at a later period her father having joined the party of the persecutors, Charlotte took refuge with the Elector Palatine; and it was under these circumstances that she received the addresses of the Prince of Orange.

The unexpected death of Requesens, who expired of a fever, March 5th 1576, after a few days' illness, threw the government into confusion. Philip II. had given Requesens a carte blanche to name his successor, but the nature of his illness had prevented him from filling it up. The government therefore devolved to the

Council of State, the members of which were at variance with one another; but Philip found himself obliged to intrust it ad interim with the administration, till a successor to Requesens could be appointed. Count Mansfeld was made commander-in-chief, but was totally unable to restrain the licentious soldiery. The Spaniards, whose pay was in arrear, had now lost all discipline. After the raising of the siege of Leyden they had beset Utrecht and pillaged and maltreated the inhabitants, till Valdez contrived to furnish their pay. No sooner had Requesens expired than they broke into open mutiny, and acted as if they were entire masters of the country. After wandering about some time and threatening Brussels, they seized and plundered Alost, where they established themselves; and they were soon afterwards joined by the Walloon and German troops. To repress their violence, the Council of State restored to the Netherlanders the arms of which they had been deprived, and called upon them by a proclamation to repress force by force; but these citizen-soldiers were dispersed with great slaughter by the disciplined troops in various rencounters. Ghent, Utrecht, Valenciennes, Maestricht were taken and plundered by the mutineers; and at last the storm fell upon Antwerp, which the Spaniards entered early in November, and sacked during three days. More than 1000 houses were burnt, 8000 citizens are said to have been slain, and enormous sums in ready money were plundered. The whole damage was estimated at 24,000,000 florins.

CHAP. VII.]

PACIFICATION OF GHENT.

263

The horrible excesses committed in this sack procured for it the name of the "Spanish Fury."

The government was at this period conducted in the name of the States of Brabant. On the 5th of September, De Hèze, a young Brabant gentleman who was in secret intelligence with the Prince of Orange, had, at the head of 500 soldiers, entered the palace where the Council of State was assembled, and seized and imprisoned the members. William, taking advantage of the alarm created at Brussels by the sack of Antwerp, persuaded the provisional government to summon the States-General, although such a course was at direct variance with the commands of the King. To this assembly all the provinces except Luxemburg sent deputies. The nobles of the southern provinces, although they viewed the Prince of Orange with suspicion, feeling that there was no security for them so long as the Spanish troops remained in possession of Ghent, sought his assistance in expelling them; which William consented to grant only on condition that an alliance should be effected between the northern and the southern, or Catholic provinces of the Netherlands. This proposal was agreed to, and towards the end of September Orange sent several thousand men from Zealand to Ghent, at whose approach the Spaniards, who had valorously defended themselves for two months under the conduct of the wife of their absent general Mondragon, surrendered, and evacuated the citadel. The proposed alliance was now converted into a formal union by the treaty called the PACIFICATION OF GHENT, signed November 8th 1576; by which it was agreed, without waiting for the sanction of Philip, whose authority however was nominally recognised, to renew the edict of banishment against the Spanish troops, to procure the suspension of the decrees against the Protestant religion, to summon the States-General of the northern and southern provinces, according to the model of the assembly which had received the abdication of Charles V., to provide for the toleration and practice of the Protestant religion in Holland and Zealand, together with other provisions of a similar character. About the same time with the Pacification of Ghent, all Zealand, with the exception of the island of Tholen, was recovered from the Spaniards.

At this point we leave for awhile the affairs of the Netherlands, to return in another chapter to those of France; but we shall first direct our attention to the reign of the Emperor Maximilian II., who expired this year (1576). Under his pacific sway the history of Germany affords but few materials of European importance, and we shall therefore here only briefly advert to some of the more remarkable events of his reign. His wars in Hungary and

264

AFFAIRS OF THE EMPIRE.

[Book III. with the Turks, the only occurrences not of a domestic nature, have been already related.59 The grand feature of Maximilian's reign is his wise moderation in religious matters. To him belongs the honour of being the first European sovereign to adopt toleration not from policy, but as a principle. The Diet assembled at Augsburg in 1566 would have excluded the Calvinists from the religious peace, and recognised only Papists and Lutherans; but when the Elector Palatine, Frederick III., surnamed the Pious, the only Calvinist prince in Germany, protested, Maximilian procured for him a tacit toleration. As King of Bohemia, Maximilian annulled the Compactata in the first diet which he held at Prague; in consequence of which step the middling and lower classes of the Bohemians, who were mostly Calixtines, and had hitherto enjoyed their religion only by sufferance, openly professed Lutheranism, whilst other sects also publicly displayed their dissent from the Roman Church. This is the first example of unlimited toleration given by any monarch. In the following year he relaxed the religious despotism in Austria; but he was arrested by political considerations from carrying out these concessions so far as he might otherwise have done, though he did not withdraw those already granted. His Spanish wife, Mary of Castile, a daughter of Charles V., was led by the Jesuits, against whose arts Maximilian himself was proof. The marriage of his eldest daughter Anne to Philip II. of Spain, in November 1570, strengthened the Roman Catholic party in Austria. Maximilian's eldest son Rodolph, through the influence of his mother Mary, and her brother Philip II., was educated in Spain in the strictest principles of the Roman Catholic faith.

The early part of Maximilian's reign was disturbed by a foolish and abortive conspiracy on the part of John Frederick II. of SaxeGotha, who ruled, conjointly with his three brothers, the dominions of ducal Saxony. The Duke, who was weak and credulous, was haunted with the idea of recovering the paternal Electorate; and William of Grumsbach, a Franconian knight, who had taken refuge at his court after procuring the assassination of the Bishop of Würzburg, by working on this fancy, made him the tool of his plots. A necromancer was employed, who, after many magical rites and incantations, by means of an optical illusion exhibited to John Frederick his own figure, clothed in the Electoral cap and robes. Infatuated with this delusion he was persuaded to consent to the assassination of his cousin the Elector Augustus; after which

30 Above, p. 191 sqq.

CHAP. VII.]

CONSPIRACY OF DUKE OF SAXE-GOTHA.

265

the knights and nobility were to rise and not only to recover the Electorate, but even place John Frederick on the Imperial throne. These projects being discovered, and the Duke having refused to dismiss Grumsbach, both were included in the Imperial ban published by the Diet of Augsburg, 1566. The execution of the sentence was intrusted to the Elector Augustus, who laid siege to Gotha, then a fortified town. After a blockade of three or four months, the garrison revolted for want of pay, seized Grumsbach and the leaders of his party, and delivered them and the town to Augustus by capitulation (April 1567). The Elector on entering Gotha caused his cousin to be apprehended and sent to Vienna, where he spent twenty-eight years, the remainder of his life, a prisoner in the castle of the Neustadt. Grumsbach and his principal adherents were executed.

Maximilian, after his treaty with the Porte in 1567, continued the war in Hungary; till at length, John Sigismund growing weary of the Turkish insolence, concluded a secret treaty with the Emperor in 1570, by which he agreed to resign the title of King elect of Hungary. It was also arranged that he should marry Maximilian's niece, Anne, daughter of Albert, Duke of Bavaria; but the Bavarian princess was persuaded by the Jesuits to withhold her consent because Sigismund was a Socinian. That prince, however, died in the following year (March 1571), when all his possessions reverted by the treaty to the Emperor, except Transylvania, which, on the death of Sigismund without issue, was to be considered as an elective principality dependent on Hungary. The Transylvanian diet elected Stephen Bathori for their voyvode; and their choice was confirmed both by Maximilian and the Turks. In the last year of his life, Maximilian, by letters patent (January 1576), confirmed the title of Cosmo de' Medici as Grand Duke of Tuscany, in consideration of Cosmo paying a large sum of money and marrying the Emperor's sister Jane. This affair had excited a strong contest between the Emperor and Rome. Maximilian had annulled the act of Pius V. in erecting the duchy, and in 1572 he had recalled his ambassador from Rome, because Gregory XIII. refused to annul the bull of Pius for that purpose.

Maximilian II., after the deposition of the Duke of Anjou 60 (Henry III.) in Poland, had become a competitor for the crown of that kingdom, and had obtained the suffrages of the Polish senate; but Stephen Bathori, by consenting to marry Anne Jagellon, sister of the late King Sigismund II., though she was fifty

60 See below, p. 277 sqq.

266

DEATH OF MAXIMILIAN II.

[BOOK III. years of age, had been elected by the Palatine and nobles. Maxiwas preparing to contest the crown with Stephen, when he was surprised by death, October 12th 1576, aged forty-nine. One of his last acts was the confirmation of the Turkish truce with Amurath III., the successor of Selim II. Maximilian was one of the most amiable and enlightened princes that ever occupied the Imperial throne.

Both Philip II. and Charles IX. had entered into secret negociations with the German Princes in 1573, with a view to obtain the Imperial crown after the death of Maximilian; and although Philip had made it the business of his life to extirpate heresy, yet he pledged himself, in case of his being elected, to withdraw the Spaniards from the Netherlands, to recognise the union of those provinces with Germany, and consequently their claim to the benefits conferred upon Protestants by the treaty of Passau, to restore the Prince of Orange, and his "accomplices" to their dignities, &c.61 So much for Philip's sincere religious conviction, the only plea urged in extenuation of his ruthless bigotry! But Maximilian was succeeded by his son Rodolph II., who had been elected King of the Romans in October 1575, and had previously received the crowns of Hungary and Bohemia.

61 Letter of Gaspar de Schomberg to the Duke of Anjou, Paris, Feb. 10, 1573,

in Groen van Prinsterer, Archives, &c. t. iv. p. 30.