Order was still far away. It was in the year 1573 that Requesens came to reverse the policy of Alva, and not until the Peace of Utrecht in 1715, when Spanish rule was finally terminated, that there was any rest or relief for the tortured and ruined provinces of Flanders and Brabant. Requesens died; the Spanish troops mutinied, were joined by the German mercenaries, and began a war on their own account, burning and sacking Antwerp, butchering 6,000 of the population, and harrying the country right and left. Then came Don John of Austria, Philip’s new governor-general, the victor of Lepanto, and a figure out of the pages of mediæval romance. He came too late; anarchy was firmly fixed in the saddle, riding rough-shod over the desolated garden of Europe. Abandoning his original policy of pacification, he turned to war and was successful, but only to find about every power in Europe represented in the roaring inferno. Orange was fighting from Antwerp as his headquarters, the provincial representatives, with Brussels as their centre, were howling for help from any source; the Protestant faction called John Casimir, Count Palatine, to their assistance, while the Catholics appealed to the Duke d’Alençon, and both put in an appearance, the latter seizing Maubeuge and working thence into the interior, while the former defeated Don John in a pitched battle and drove him back to Namur, where in a few months he died of chagrin and a broken heart, after making his nephew Alexander Farnese, Prince of Parma, his successor in the field. Hell is the only name that can be applied to the unhappy land, the condition of which was not unlike that of Mexico in this year of enlightenment, 1915. The Renaissance and the Reformation together had extinguished both civilisation and culture over the greater part of Europe; war was everywhere and incessant, all principle had been abandoned and the ethical standards of society had disappeared. Slaughter, civil war, assassination, treason, and sacrilege howled through an ever-widening desolation and the end of the world seemed at hand. Fortunately, in a way, the outrageous career of the Protestants served as an impulse to union; their savagery in Ghent and Brussels somehow pulled the people of Belgium together and enabled Parma to win some small order out of the insane chaos. He began a new campaign, drove out the French, laid siege to the Calvinists in Ghent, and at last (the Prince of Orange having been assassinated at the instigation of Philip) broke down the last Protestant resistance in Brussels and Antwerp and for the moment restored peace over a deserted, ruined, and blood-stained land. And then Philip II died and dying abandoned the country he had received as the richest in Europe and left as the most miserable and poverty-stricken, handing it over to new rulers in the persons of his daughter Isabella and her husband, the Archduke Albert of Austria.