He was a soldier, courageous, untiring, prompt in action, useful in
council, and had distinguished himself in many a hard-fought field.
Taken prisoner in the sanguinary skirmish at Maaslandssluys, he had been
confined a year, and, for more than three months, had never laid his
head, as he declared, upon the pillow without commending his soul as for
the last time to his Maker, expecting daily the order for his immediate
execution, and escaping his doom only because William the Silent
proclaimed that the proudest head among the Spanish prisoners should fall
to avenge his death; so that he was ultimately exchanged against the
veteran Mondragon.

From the incipient stages of the revolt he had been foremost among the
patriots. He was supposed to be the author of the famous "Compromise of
the Nobles," that earliest and most conspicuous of the state-papers of
the republic, and of many other important political documents; and he had
contributed to general literature many works of European celebrity, of
which the 'Roman Bee-Hive' was the most universally known.

Scholar, theologian, diplomatist, swordsman, orator, poet, pamphleteer,
he had genius for all things, and was eminent in all. He was even famous
for his dancing, and had composed an intelligent and philosophical
treatise upon the value of that amusement, as an agent of civilisation,
and as a counteractor of the grosser pleasures of the table to which
Upper and Nether Germans were too much addicted.

Of ancient Savoyard extraction, and something of a southern nature, he
had been born in Brussels, and was national to the heart's core.

A man of interesting, sympathetic presence; of a physiognomy where many
of the attaching and attractive qualities of his nature revealed