Meantime the Duke of Alva, having despatched from Cateau Cambresis a brief account of the victorious termination of the campaign, returned in triumph to Brussels. He had certainly amply vindicated his claim to be considered the first warrior of the age. By his lieutenants he had summarily and rapidly destroyed two of the armies sent against him; he had annihilated in person the third, by a brilliantly successful battle, in which he had lost seven men, and his enemies seven thousand; and he had now, by consummate strategy, foiled the fourth and last under the idolized champion of the Netherlands, and this so decisively that, without losing a man, he had destroyed eight thousand rebels, and scattered to the four winds the remaining twenty thousand. Such signal results might well make even a meeker nature proud. Such vast and fortunate efforts to fix for ever an impregnable military tyranny upon a constitutional country, might cause a more modest despot to exult. It was not wonderful that the haughty, and now apparently omnipotent Alva, should almost assume the god. On his return to Brussels he instituted a succession of triumphant festivals. The people were called upon to rejoice and to be exceeding glad, to strew flowers in his path, to sing Hosannas in his praise who came to them covered with the blood of those who had striven in their defence. The holiday was duly called forth; houses, where funeral hatchments for murdered inmates had been perpetually suspended, were decked with garlands; the bells, which had hardly once omitted their daily knell for the victims of an incredible cruelty, now rang their merriest peals; and in the very square where so lately Egmont and Horn, besides many other less distinguished martyrs, had suffered an ignominious death, a gay tournament was held, day after day, with all the insolent pomp which could make the exhibition most galling.