This answer was embodied in a paper which Louis of Nassau and twelve other young nobles carried to Brussels and put before the Regent herself.
Their boldness and plain speaking inflamed Margaret to fury.
She retorted by a cold and ambiguous rebuke; and Louis, going further in his audacity, replied that the Confederacy were not without friends, either at home or abroad, and that if the Duchess still refused to convoke the States-General, as she had been often implored to do, and if, as many imagined, a Spanish invasion was preparing, they, "the beggars," would know what to do.
Soon after, the gathering at St. Trond broke up and Brederode went to Antwerp, then perhaps the most troublous spot in the Netherlands.
Duprès accompanied the train of landlopers, gentlemen, refugee Reformers, and ruined merchants who followed Brederode, and made his living by selling charms, telling fortunes, and reading the portents the fearful saw nightly in the sky.
Meghem and Aremberg, the two chief Cardinalists, were already in the city, and when Brederode arrived the situation became almost impossible. There were riots daily, and a civil war, between Papists, Calvinists, Lutherans, and Anabaptists, was considered as inevitable.
Brederode fanned the zeal of the Reformers into fury, while Aremberg and Meghem supported the loyal, or Spanish, party.
The Senate, the Council, and the Corporation implored the presence of the Prince of Orange, who was Burgrave of the city; and being further urged by the Regent, he took up the impossible task of pacification, and arrived in the city in the midst of a tumultuous scene of welcome, Brederode and his "beggars" meeting him beyond the walls with deafening shouts and hurrahs.
William had not placed himself on the side of the people, and he was acting for the Government; but there was a general confidence in him as the one man likely, or able, to bring about concord and an understanding between the King and his subjects.
In Antwerp he at once devoted himself to the task of restoring order, and spent laborious days and nights consulting with the Senate, the Council of Ancients, and even the trade guilds and the chambers of rhetoric, in inducing Brederode to keep quiet, and in reasoning with Meghem and Aremberg to suspend their bitterness against the Reformers.