It was a gorgeous life, an extravagant life, a life in every way reckless and opulent that these seigneurs led on the edge of revolution, on the edge of the King's wrath, on the edge perhaps of worse things than any of them dreamed.
There were hunts, falcon parties, entertainments at their magnificent country seats, balls, feasts, dinners, masks in the great palaces in Brussels; even the Cardinalists Aremberg, Aerschot, and Barlaymont mingled in this joyous and spendthrift society. But it was the party headed by Orange, Egmont, and Hoorne which went the furthest in splendour, display, and open defiance of the Cardinal and the edicts of the Inquisition—edicts which two Stadtholders at least, Berghen and Montigny, resolutely refused to enforce in their provinces.
Granvelle smiled and wrote his long dispatches to the King, carefully giving instances of the pride and insolence of the grandees, and declaring that not only were they set against himself, but against the authority of His Majesty. Margaret raged and wept and grew daily more confused; all had forsaken her council board save the Cardinal and his creatures, and her pride began to revolt against Granvelle's obvious treatment of her as a puppet. Her secretary Armenteros, one of the sly Spaniards bred in the school of Madrid, urged her to assert herself, and she could not but see that Granvelle's policy, however acceptable to the King, was most likely to raise a religious war in the Netherlands, which she, a foreigner in fact, though nominally a Fleming, dared not attempt to coerce without the aid of the Stadtholders with their immense local influence.
Early in the new year it became secretly known to the grandees that Margaret had lately sent a letter to the King representing the desperate financial state of the country, the firm hold heresy had, the immense feeling against the Inquisition, the impossibility of counting on the nobility while Granvelle remained in power, and the advisability of recalling the Cardinal for a while.
This news was received as a triumph, and Egmont, with his usual recklessness, gave a great feast, where the toast "to the departure of the man in red" was enthusiastically drunk.
It was past midnight when a party of young nobles—Adolphus of Nassau, Hoogstraaten, Montigny, and Brederode—left Egmont's mansion and turned homewards through the moonlit streets of Brussels.