In both cases she had not remained quiet and, at the second audience which the duke gave her, her hot blood, though it had grown so much cooler, played her a trick, and she became involved in a vehement argument with him. In the course of this he had been compelled to be frank, and she now knew that Alba had persuaded her to change her residence at the King’s desire, and why it was done.
She afterward learned from acquaintances that the duke had said one was apt to be the loser in a dispute with her; yet she had yielded, though solely and entirely to benefit her John, but she could not help confessing to herself that her residence in the capital could not be agreeable to him. The highest Spanish officials and military commanders lived there, as well as the ambassadors of foreign powers, and it was not desirable to remind them of the maternal descent of the general who now belonged to the King’s family.
The case was somewhat similar, as Alba himself had confessed to her, with regard to her son Conrad’s promotion to the rank of an officer; for if he attained that position he might, as the brother of Don John of Austria, make pretensions which threatened to place the hero of Lepanto in a false, nay, perhaps unpleasant position. This, too, she did not desire. But in removing from Brussels she had possibly rendered Don John a greater service than she admitted to herself, for, since her son’s brilliant successes had made her happy and her external circumstances had permitted it, she had emerged from the miserable seclusion of former years.
Her dress, too, she now suited to the position which she arrogated to herself. But in doing so she had become a personage who could scarcely be overlooked, and she rarely failed to be present on the very occasions which brought together the most aristocratic Spanish society in Brussels.
So, after a fresh dispute with Alba, in which the victor on many a battlefield was forced to yield, she had obtained his consent to retire to Ghent instead of Mons.
True, the duke would have preferred to induce her to go to Spain, and tried to persuade her to do so by the assurance that the King himself desired to receive her there.
But she had been warned.
Through Hannibal Melas and other members of her own party she had learned that Philip intended, if she came to Spain, to remove her from the eyes of the world by placing her in a convent, and never had she felt less inclination to take the veil.
Her departure from Brussels had done Alba and his functionaries a service, for she had constantly forced herself into the government building to obtain news of her son.
The great and opulent city of Ghent, the birthplace of the Emperor Charles, of which he had once said to Francis I, the King of France, that Paris would go into his glove (Gant), had been chosen by Barbara for several reasons. The principal one was that she would find there several old friends of former days, one of whom, her singing-master Feys, had promised to accept her voice and enable her to serve her art again with full pleasure.