The rapid change of their point of attraction could not be met by the courtiers so composedly and imperturbably but that the duchess observed the alteration, and bitterly felt it. Even the few who, like State Counsellor Viglius, still firmly adhered to her, did so less from attachment to her person than from vexation at being displaced by novices and foreigners, and from being too proud to serve a fresh apprenticeship under a new viceroy. But far the greater number, with all their endeavors to keep an exact mean, could not help making a difference between the homage they paid to the rising sun and that which they bestowed on the setting luminary. The royal palace in Brussels became more and more deserted, while the throng at Kuilemberg house daily increased. But what wounded the sensitiveness of the duchess most acutely was the arrest of Horn and Egmont, which was planned and executed by the duke without her knowledge or consent, just as if there had been no such person as herself in existence. Alva did, indeed, after the act was done, endeavor to appease her by declaring that the design had been purposely kept secret from her in order to spare her name from being mixed up in so odious a transaction; but no such considerations of delicacy could close the wound which had been inflicted on her pride. In order at once to escape all risk of similar insults, of which the present was probably only a forerunner, she despatched her private secretary, Macchiavell, to the court of her brother, there to solicit earnestly for permission to resign the regency. The request was granted without difficulty by the king, who accompanied his consent with every mark of his highest esteem. He would put aside (so the king expressed himself) his own advantage and that of the provinces in order to oblige his sister. He sent a present of thirty thousand dollars, and allotted to her a yearly pension of twenty thousand. [Which, however, does not appear to have been very punctually paid, if a pamphlet maybe trusted which was printed during her lifetime. (It bears the title: Discours sur la Blessure de Monseigneur Prince d'Orange, 1582, without notice of the place where it was printed, and is to be found in the Elector's library at Dresden.) She languished, it is there stated, at Namur in poverty, and so ill- supported by her son (the then governor of the Netherlands), that her own secretary, Aldrobandin, called her sojourn there an exile. But the writer goes on to ask what better treatment could she expect from a son who, when still very young, being on a visit to her at Brussels, snapped his fingers at her behind her back.] At the same time a diploma was forwarded to the Duke of Alva, constituting him, in her stead, viceroy of all the Netherlands, with unlimited powers.