"It would raise a tumult at once," he writes, "should we venture to arrest a man without the clearest evidence. No man can be proceeded against without legal proof."[549] But an insurmountable obstacle in the way of enforcing the cruel edicts lay in the feelings of the nation. No law repugnant to such feelings can long be executed. "I accuse none of the nobles of being heretics," writes the regent to her brother; "but they show little zeal in the cause of religion, while the magistrates shrink from their duty from fear of the people."[550] "How absurd is it," exclaims Granvelle, "for depositions to be taken before the Inquisition in Spain, in order to search out heretics in Antwerp, where thousands are every day walking about whom no one meddles with!"[551] "It is more than a year," he says, "since a single arrest on a charge of heresy has taken place in that city."[552] Yet whatever may have been the state of persecution at the present time, the vague dread of the future must have taken strong hold of people's minds, if, as a contemporary writes, there were no less than eighteen or twenty thousand refugees then in England, who had fled from Flanders for the sake of their religion.[553] The odium of this persecution all fell on the head of Granvelle. He was the tool of Spain. Spain was under the yoke of the Inquisition. Therefore it was clearly the minister's design to establish the Spanish Inquisition over the Netherlands. Such was the concise logic by which people connected the name of Granvelle with that of the most dreaded of tribunals.[554] He was held responsible for the contrivance of the most unpopular measures of government, as well as for their execution. A thousand extravagant stories were circulated both of his private and his political life, which it is probably doing no injustice to the nobles to suppose they did not take much pains to correct. The favorite of the prince is rarely the favorite of the people. But no minister had ever been so unpopular as Granvelle in the Netherlands. He was hated by the nobles for his sudden elevation to power, and for the servile means, as they thought, by which he had risen to it. The people hated him, because he used that power for the ruin of their liberties. No administration--none certainly, if we except that of the iron Alva--was more odious to the nation. [Sidenote: LEAGUE AGAINST GRANVELLE.]