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202 Thus the codification of a real "Religious Peace," coming on the top of the outrages at Ghent, actually conduced to fresh religious divergence. In the Walloon Provinces abutting on France, there arose a new party of "Malcontents"—a Catholic revolt against the religious compromise or "Pacification of Ghent." By the Treaty of Arras (January 1579) the Southern Provinces bound themselves "to maintain the Roman Catholic religion," and practically to submit to Philip. And in the same month the Northern Provinces—Guelderland, Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht, and its districts—formed the Union of Utrecht, which bound them to promote the Protestant creed, and practically to abjure allegiance to the King. Here were shattered the Pacification of Ghent, the Perpetual Edict, and the Union of Brussels, and all the other laborious efforts to unite Catholic and Protestant in a national league. The Catholics of the South pledged themselves to the old Church; the Reformers of the North pledged themselves to the Protestant cause; and both to the exclusion of the other. Yet here too, in the dissolution of the larger confederation, lay the germs of the future history of the Netherlands, that contrast of race, religion, language, and institutions which to-day we see in Belgium and Holland.

The Union of Utrecht was essentially the work of John of Nassau, now Governor of Guelderland, and was cast in the mould of his dogged Protestantism and anti-French prejudices. In one sense it was a blow to the Prince's policy, for, professing Calvinist as he was, he never encouraged any attempt to establish a Calvinist ascendency, and for a whole year he had abstained from joining in any public worship, in order to prove his