While these feelings were spreading among the people the influence of the minister at the court of the regent began to totter. The repeated complaints against the extent of his power must at last have made her sensible how little faith was placed in her own; perhaps, too, she began to fear that the universal abhorrence which attached to him would soon include herself also, or that his longer stay would inevitably provoke the menaced revolt. Long intercourse with him, his instruction and example, had qualified her to govern without him. His dignity began to be more oppressive to her as he became less necessary, and his faults, to which her friendship had hitherto lent a veil, became visible as it was withdrawn. She was now as much disposed to search out and enumerate these faults as she formerly had been to conceal them. In this unfavorable state of her feelings towards the cardinal the urgent and accumulated representations of the nobles began at last to find access to her mind, and the more easily, as they contrived to mix up her own fears with their own. "It was matter of great astonishment," said Count Egmont to her, "that to gratify a man who was not even a Fleming, and of whom, therefore, it must be well known that his happiness could not be dependent on the prosperity of this country, the king could be content to see all his Netherlandish subjects suffer, and this to please a foreigner, who if his birth made him a subject of the Emperor, the purple had made a creature of the court of Rome." "To the king alone," added the count, "was Granvella indebted for his being still among the living; for the future, however, he would leave that care of him to the regent, and he hereby gave her warning." As the majority of the nobles, disgusted with the contemptuous treatment which they met with in the council of state, gradually withdrew from it, the arbitrary proceedings of the minister lost the last semblance of republican deliberation which had hitherto softened the odious aspect, and the empty desolation of the council chamber made his domineering rule appear in all its obnoxiousness. The regent now felt that she had a master over her, and from that moment the banishment of the minister was decided upon.