Their stuffs were celebrated everywhere, and their ships visited all the ports in the world. This happy, brave little people were to be crushed and persecuted for their valor. But they were to find a deliverer—a leader who was to be the source of their inspiration and courage in the awful days to come—one who was willing, though he could gain nothing by it, to throw in his lot with theirs, to suffer and endure the same as they.
Orange had not much sympathy with the Reformers. He was an aristocrat and a Catholic, and had never thought of being anything but completely loyal to kings—after all he was one of them: he had what is considered the privilege of addressing crowned heads as "cousin." But his sense of justice was one of the strongest things in his character, and he was quite determined to protect the harmless multitudes in the Netherlands from the horrible punishments and deaths which were in store for them, and these people were all his inferiors by birth—what are termed "the masses." Dyers, tanners, and trades-people were the only Protestants in those days, so it was a more tremendous thing than one thinks for an aristocrat to take up the cause of the people as Orange was about to do. It is generally some remarkable man among the people who fights for justice for his own class, and it was, as I have said, the more wonderful for William to have taken up the cause of the people as his sympathy did not come from his agreement
