In the midst of the carnage, the Emperor sent for his son Philip, that he might receive the fealty of the Netherlands as their future lord and master.
Contemporaneously, a new edict was published at Brussels (29th April, 1549), confirming and reenacting all previous decrees in their most severe provisions.

Thus stood religious matters in the Netherlands at the epoch of the imperial abdication.
XIII.
The civil institutions of the country had assumed their last provincial form, in the Burgundo-Austrian epoch.

As already stated, their tendency, at a later period a vicious one, was to substitute fictitious personages for men.

A chain of corporations was wound about the liberty of the Netherlands; yet that liberty had been originally sustained by the system in which it, one day, might be strangled.

The spirit of local self-government, always the life-blood of liberty, was often excessive in its manifestations.