History of the United Netherlands, 1586-89 — CompleteMotley, John Lothrop
History
History of the United Netherlands, 1586-89 — Complete
Motley, John Lothrop
Netherlands -- History -- Eighty Years' War, 1568-1648
At Godesberg--the romantic ruins of which stronghold the traveller still
regards with interest, placed as it is in the midst of that enchanting
region where Drachenfels looks down on the crumbling tower of Roland and
the convent of Nonnenwerth--the unfortunate Gebhard had sustained a
conclusive defeat. A small, melancholy man, accomplished, religious,
learned, "very poor but very wise," comely, but of mean stature,
altogether an unlucky and forlorn individual, he was not, after all, in
very much inferior plight to that in which his rival, the Bavarian
bishop, had found himself. Prince Ernest, archbishop of Liege and
Cologne, a hangeron of his brother, who sought to shake him off, and a
stipendiary of Philip, who was a worse paymaster than Elizabeth, had a
sorry life of it, notwithstanding his nominal possession of the see. He
was forced to go, disguised and in secret, to the Prince of Parma at
Brussels, to ask for assistance, and to mention, with lacrymose
vehemence, that both his brother and himself had determined to renounce
the episcopate, unless the forces of the Spanish King could be employed
to recover the cities on the Rhine. If Neusz and Rheinberg were not
wrested from the rebels; Cologne itself would soon be gone. Ernest
represented most eloquently to Alexander, that if the protestant
archbishop were reinstated in the ancient see, it would be a most
perilous result for the ancient church throughout all northern Europe.
Parma kept the wandering prelate for a few days in his palace in
Brussels, and then dismissed him, disguised and on foot, in the dusk of
the evening, through the park-gate. He encouraged him with hopes of
assistance, he represented to his sovereign the importance of preserving
the Rhenish territory to Bishop Ernest and to Catholicism, but hinted
that the declared intention of the Bavarian to resign the dignity, was
probably a trick, because the archi-episcopate was no such very bad thing
after all.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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