If they thought that he had reason on account of the past, to feel offended, he begged them to believe that he had forgotten it all, and that he had buried the past in its ashes, even as if it had never been." He furthermore begged them--and this seemed the greatest insult of all--"in future to trust to his word, and to believe that if any thing should be attempted to their disadvantage, he would be the very first to offer himself for their protection." It will be observed that in his first letters the Duke had not affected to deny his agency in the outrage--an agency so flagrant that all subterfuge seemed superfluous.

He in fact avowed that the attempt had been made by his command, but sought to palliate the crime on the ground that it had been the result of the ill-treatment which he had experienced from the states.

"The affronts which I have received," said he, both to the magistrates of Antwerp and to Orange, "have engendered the present calamity." So also, in a letter written at the same time to his brother, Henry the Third, he observed that "the indignities which were put upon him, and the manifest intention of the states to make a Matthias of him, had been the cause of the catastrophe." He now, however, ventured a step farther.

Presuming upon the indulgence which he had already experienced; and bravely assuming the tone of injured innocence, he ascribed the enterprise partly to accident, and partly to the insubordination of his troops.

This was the ground which he adopted in his interviews with the states' commissioners.