Others were attached to the gates of Orange and Egmont, calling on them to come forth and save their country.[683] Margaret was filled with alarm at these signs of disaffection throughout the land. She felt the ground trembling beneath her. She wrote again and again to Philip, giving full particulars of the state of the public sentiment, and the seditious spirit which seemed on the verge of insurrection. She intimated her wish to resign the government.[684] She besought him to allow the states-general to be summoned, and, at all events, to come in person and take the reins from her hands, too weak to hold them.--Philip coolly replied, that "he was sorry the despatches from Segovia had given such offence. They had been designed only for the service of God and the good of the country."[685] In this general fermentation, a new class of men came on the stage, important by their numbers, though they had taken no part as yet in political affairs. These were the lower nobility of the country; men of honorable descent, and many of them allied by blood or marriage with the highest nobles of the land. They were too often men of dilapidated fortunes, fallen into decay through their own prodigality, or that of their progenitors. Many had received their education abroad, some in Geneva, the home of Calvin, where they naturally imbibed the doctrines of the great Reformer. In needy circumstances, with no better possession than the inheritance of honorable traditions, or the memory of better days, they were urged by a craving, impatient spirit, which naturally made them prefer any change to the existing order of things. They were, for the most part, bred to arms; and, in the days of Charles the Fifth, had found an ample career opened to their ambition under the imperial banners. But Philip, with less policy than his father, had neglected to court this class of his subjects, who, without fixed principles or settled motives of action, seemed to float on the surface of events, prepared to throw their weight, at any moment, into the scale of revolution. [Sidenote: THE COMPROMISE.] Some twenty of these cavaliers, for the most part young men, met together in the month of November, in Brussels, at the house of Count Culemborg, a nobleman attached to the Protestant opinions. Their avowed purpose was to listen to the teachings of a Flemish divine, named Junius, a man of parts and learning, who had been educated in the school of Calvin, and who, having returned to the Netherlands, exercised, under the very eye of the regent, the dangerous calling of the missionary. At this meeting of the discontented nobles, the talk naturally turned on the evils of the land, and the best means of remedying them. The result of the conferences was the formation of a league, the principal objects of which are elaborately set forth in a paper known as the "Compromise."[686]