"Yea, Master Saint Philip, yea, Lord God, were I to be forced to make of the Low Countries a common grave and throw into it all the inhabitants, they shall come back to you, my blessed patron, and to you, Madame Virgin Mary, and to you, all ye Saints of Paradise."
And he sought to do even as he said, and thus he was more Roman than the Pope and more Catholic than the councils.
And Ulenspiegel and Lamme, and the people of Flanders and the Low Countries, full of anguish, imagined that they could see from far within the gloomy haunt of the Escurial, that crowned spider, with long legs and open claws, spreading out his web to entangle them around and suck the best of their heart's blood.
Although the Papal Inquisition had, under the reign of Charles, killed at the stake, by burying alive, and by the rope, a hundred thousand Christians; though the goods of the poor condemned folk had found their way into the coffers of the Emperor and the King, as the rain flows into the drain, Philip deemed that it was insufficient; he imposed new bishops upon the country and proposed to introduce into it the Spanish Inquisition.
And the town heralds everywhere read out to the sound of trump and tambourine proclamations decreeing to all heretics, men and women and girls, death by fire to those who did not abjure their error, by the rope to those who should abjure. Women and girls would be buried alive, and the executioner should dance upon their bodies.
And the flame of resistance ran throughout the whole land.
The fifth of April, before Easter Day, the lords Count Louis of Nassau, Culembourg, and Brederode, the Drinking Hercules, entered with three hundred other gentlemen of birth into the Court of Brussels, to the Duchess of Parma, the Lady Governor. Going in ordered ranks of four, they went in this way up the great stair of the palace.
Being in the chamber where Madame was they presented to her a request in which they asked her to seek to obtain from King Philip the rescinding of the proclamations touching upon religion and also of the Spanish Inquisition, declaring that within our roused and discontented country there could result from it only troubles, ruins, and universal distress.
And this request was termed The Compromise.