But Orange, hearing all this, made up his mind. His purpose was fixed, and as soon as possible he got permission to visit the Netherlands, where he was determined to persuade the people to show opposition to the presence of the Spanish troops and to get them out of the country. They were put there by Philip for the one and only purpose of crushing independence and stamping on Protestantism. Orange found that an Inquisition had been decided upon, more terrible than anything that had gone before.
We have seen that already under Philip's father the Netherlands had been treated with great cruelty, and the Papal Inquisition had been used to put a stop to Lutheranism. The spirit of the great Reformer had taken a firm hold in this country, and Luther's work, combined with the work of Calvin in France, had made the country keenly Protestant and determined to resist any sort of Catholic domination. The Netherlands character itself was marked by one great quality which, in the words of the historian Motley, was "the love of liberty and the instinct of self-government." The country was composed of brave and hardy races who for centuries had been fighting for their liberty against great odds. Divided as their country was into provinces, they had had no king of their own, but had been governed by feudal lords and treated as slaves and dependents, with no power or voice in their own government. From this wretched position they emerged by their
