He had faith unfaltering in God.

He had also faith in man and love for his brethren.

It was no wonder that in that age of religious bigotry he should have been assaulted on both sides.

While the Pope excommunicated him as a heretic, and the King set a price upon his head as a rebel, the fanatics of the new religion denounced him as a godless man.

Peter Dathenus, the unfrocked monk of Poperingen, shrieked out in his pulpit that the "Prince of Orange cared nothing either for God or for religion." The death of Requesens had offered the first opening through which the watchful Prince could hope to inflict a wound in the vital part of Spanish authority in the Netherlands.