"Well, you do it without my sanction," remarked Vanderlinden, who knew he could not control his unruly assistant, and, drawing his robes about him, he retired to his turret.
Before he set out for the Counts' house, Duprès, after his wont, looked up the careers of the personages who had called upon him in a great notebook which was always with him, and in which he had gathered details of all the notable people of Europe.
Of three of the brothers there was little to be said; they were too young to have had any career, and were merely great nobles, born and bred in the Reformed Faith, all unmarried, and residing in the ancestral castle at Dillenburg together with the youngest brother, Henry, and seven sisters, of whom one, Catherine, had recently married the Count of Schwartzenburg, who had been Louis's joint envoy at Dresden.
Louis himself had lived largely at Brussels under the protection of his brother, and in an official position (despite his faith) under Philip's government.
This was all there was to be said of these three, but William of Orange occupied a conspicuous and unique position, and had already had a career of exceptional brilliance.
There was much about him in Duprès' notebooks.
He seemed indeed Fortune's favourite.
Through the Nassaus he came of a family that was one of the most illustrious in Europe. One of their members had worn the Imperial crown; others, as Dukes of Guelders, had been sovereigns in the Netherlands hundreds of years before the House of Burgundy, to whom Philip owed his throne, had ruled there; Engelbert of Nassau had been one of the councillors of Charles the Bold; his eldest son had been the confidential friend of the great Emperor Charles V, and had largely helped to place the Imperial crown on the head of his master.
He had further increased the splendour of his house by a marriage with Claude de Chalons, heiress of her brother, Philibert, Prince of Orange; his son, René de Nassau Chalons, succeeded to the united possessions of Nassau and Orange, and, dying young and childless in the Emperor's arms at the battle of St. Dizier, bequeathed all these honours to his boy cousin William, the present Prince, and eldest son of Count William, younger brother of René's father Henry, head of the branch of Nassau Dillenburg and of Juliana of Stolberg, his wife.
The price of Charles's consent to René's will was that the young heir to such power should be brought up a Papist under his own eyes, and to this, his father, though now a Protestant, had, in the interests of his son, consented, and the young Lutheran, at the age of eleven, was sent to the Imperial Court to be educated and trained.