Prologue

“Beggars!” exclaimed Count Horn. “They called us beggars for requiring what is ours by right of law and custom!”

The Prince of Orange said nothing.

“The King will set all in order,” Count Egmont said, on the Prince’s left. “It’s these Spanish fools advising the King’s sister who think they can remake the Low Countries to their new fashions. They had to accept the petition, after all—that’s what matters. Once it reaches the King, he will restore our place here, and chastise these schemers and plotters.”

Still the Prince of Orange said nothing. The fresh breezes of early spring in his face, he rode with his friends beneath the elms and linden trees of Brussels, his mind heavy with doubts. He had heard about the petition, although he had kept himself out of it—out of the writing of it, out of the delivery—knowing the Governess mistrusted him already. Margaret would have damned the whole enterprise, had he been attached to it—that gaudy, innocent parade of noblemen and youth who had ridden to the Palais-Royal with their request that the King honor their ancient habits and refrain from installing the Inquisition in the Low Countries.

“If only the Emperor were still alive!” Egmont said, with a gusty sigh.

As well pray that all good men might live forever. The Emperor Charles V had been dead for ten years. Egmont and Horn and probably thousands of others in the Low Countries looked back on his reign as a golden age of harmony and prosperity. The Prince of Orange knew they were yielding to delusions when they did.

Did the past always seem better to men than the present? That was the core of the petition, the request that the King of Spain restore the past of the Netherlands—a past when her rulers had lived here, when the counts of Holland and Flanders, the dukes of Brabant and Burgundy had centered their policy on the good of these provinces, when they had not tried to fit them into some corner of a huge mosaic of states reaching very nearly around the world and having no commonality save the man who governed them all, the King of Spain. So they had ridden to the Palais, the Dutch nobles, with their bit of paper, asking: Please make things as they were before.

The Governess, the King’s sister, had resorted to tears, her customary refuge in times of stress. Which led one of her advisers to say, “Madame, are you afraid of these beggars?”

“When the King has our petition,” Egmont said, “we shall see who the beggars are.”

There was danger in such optimism. The Governess had promised to hold off the persecution of heretics in the Low Countries until the King gave her fresh instructions. To take for granted that the King would do as the nobles asked …

Horn’s gloved hand fell roughly on Orange’s sleeve. “Come, William. Why so quiet? You look as if you’re riding in a funeral train. Seem happier—there are people watching.”

The Prince of Orange pulled on his smiling public face. “Forgive me, friend.” Turning his hand over, he caught the older man’s brocaded wrist in a brief intimate grasp. “You know I have much on my mind of late.”

“Well, get her off your mind,” Egmont said, and laughed.

They were riding abreast down the broad, tree-shaded street; on either side stood the homes of wealthy men, the glass windows shining like gold in the late light of the sun. From an upper story a woman leaned and waved her handkerchief.

“Vive le Prince! Messieurs les comtes!”

Egmont and Horn swept off their caps and waved them, and Orange lifted up his hand, smiling. At the shout, half a dozen other doors popped open, and a small crowd poured forth into the street to watch the lords ride by.

“Vive le Prince!”

Orange saluted them; his spirits rose at this boisterous greeting. He turned his mind from his gray inward thoughts to the outer world. It was spring, and Brussels, with its palaces and gardens, its courtly people, was dressed in new bloom; fresh young flowers everywhere danced in the sunlight; the leaves of the trees were uncurling like pale green flags. He waved and smiled to the people who called his name, and resolved to be less gloomy.

After all, the Governess had agreed to cease attacking the Protestants. The King was notoriously slow in his deliberations: it would be months before his answer reached Brussels, perhaps years. And now the street before them was filled with noisy people, in celebration costume, cheering.

“Vive les gueux! Long live the beggars!”

To the left of the Prince of Orange, Count Horn murmured, “That word again.”

“What are they doing?” Orange asked. He twisted in his saddle to look around him at the jubilant crowds; clearly they were celebrating the Governess’s decision to make no more decisions. Many of them had drunk too much, explaining the high degree of their excitement. Their cheers resounded with the French word for beggar. That put him off—to seize on an insult for a rallying cry divided them emphatically from the government. With his friends and their troops of retainers he rode on through the thick and noisy crowd toward the palace where they had been invited to dine.

The gate was clogged with people, and circles of dancers wheeled and dipped in the courtyard between the two wings of the house. Music boomed forth from the balconies, where musicians sat struggling to keep tune in the wash of echoes from the high walls around them. When Horn and Egmont and Orange rode in, the cheering doubled, and Orange had difficulty dismounting his horse and walking into the great hall of the house.

There a great banquet was laid out on long tables, and seated all around them the men who had delivered the petition drank and sang and cheered themselves and their friends.

“Vive les gueux!”

At the sight of the three newcomers the cry went up like a peal of thunder. “Vive les gueux!” In a single leap, the revelers rose to their feet, hoisting their cups in greeting.

They were wooden cups—beggars’ cups. Orange frowned, his sense of proper value overturned by such impudence. Around their necks these men wore beggars’ chains. They had taken the insult as an accolade—as a common bond.

“Long live the beggars!”

Orange stopped, unready to join this—unwilling to have this salutation pressed on him. It was too late. Forth they rushed, his hosts and friends, his fellows in opposition to the Crown, and carried to him chains and a wooden cup. “Vive les gueux!” The roar shook the rafters. Like a bobbing bit of cork on an ocean wave, he felt himself lifted up and carried away with the rest, his will made nothing. Laughing, they surrounded him, these beggars, and hung the chains around his neck, and pushed the wooden cup into his hand. He knew it was the cup of fate. “Long live the beggars!” they cried, and swelled by their ardor his courage like a rushing wave ran on beyond his reason.

“Vive les gueux!”

He raised the cup and drank it to the lees.