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History of the United Netherlands, 1590-99 — Complete

by John Lothrop Motley · English · Gutenberg #4872 · 1,169,485 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: History of the United Netherlands, 1590-99 — Complete

Author: John Lothrop Motley


        
Release date: November 8, 2004 [eBook #4872]
                Most recently updated: December 28, 2020

Language: English

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Produced by David Widger





HISTORY OF THE UNITED NETHERLANDS

From the Death of William the Silent to the Twelve Year's Truce--1609

Volume III.

By John Lothrop Motley




CHAPTER XXI.

   Effect of the Assassination of Henry III.--Concentration of forces
   for the invasion of France--The Netherlands determine on striking a
   blow for freedom--Organization of a Dutch army--Stratagem to
   surprise the castle of Breda--Intrepidity and success of the
   enterprise.

The dagger of Jacques Clement had done much, and was likely to do more,
to change the face of Europe. Another proof was afforded that
assassination had become a regular and recognised factor in the political
problems of the sixteenth century. Another illustration was exhibited of
the importance of the individual--even although that individual was in
himself utterly despicable--to the working out of great historical
results. It seemed that the murder of Henry III.--that forlorn caricature
of kingship and of manhood--was likely to prove eminently beneficial to
the cause of the Netherland commonwealth. Five years earlier, the murder
of William the Silent had seemed to threaten its very existence.

For Philip the Prudent, now that France was deprived of a head, conceived
that the time had arrived when he might himself assume the sovereignty of
that kingdom. While a thing of straw, under the name of Charles X. and
shape of a Cardinal Bourbon, was set up to do battle with that living
sovereign and soldier, the heretic Bearnese, the Duke of Parma was
privately ordered to bend all his energies towards the conquest of the
realm in dispute, under pretence of assisting the Holy League.

Accordingly, early in the year 1590, Alexander concentrated a
considerable force on the French frontier in Artois and Hainault,
apparently threatening Bergen-op-Zoom and other cities in South Holland,
but in reality preparing to invade France. The Duke of Mayenne, who had
assumed the title of lieutenant-general of that kingdom, had already
visited him at Brussels in order to arrange the plan of the campaign.

While these measures were in preparation, an opportunity was likely to be
afforded to the Netherlanders of striking a blow or two for liberty and
independence; now that all the force that possibly could be spared was to
be withdrawn by their oppressors and to be used for the subjugation of
their neighbours. The question was whether there would be a statesman and
a soldier ready to make use of this golden opportunity.

There was a statesman ripe and able who, since the death of the Taciturn,
had been growing steadily in the estimation of his countrymen and who
already was paramount in the councils of the States-General. There was a
soldier, still very young, who was possessed of the strongest hereditary
claims to the confidence and affection of the United Provinces and who
had been passing a studious youth in making himself worthy of his father
and his country. Fortunately, too, the statesman and the soldier were
working most harmoniously together. John of Olden-Barneveld, with his
great experience and vast and steady intellect, stood side by side with
young Maurice of Nassau at this important crisis in the history of the
new commonwealth.

At length the twig was becoming the tree--'tandem fit surculus
arbor'--according to the device assumed by the son of William the Silent
after his father's death.

The Netherlands had sore need of a practical soldier to contend with the
scientific and professional tyrants against whom they had so long been
struggling, and Maurice, although so young, was pre-eminently a practical
man. He was no enthusiast; he was no poet. He was at that period
certainly no politician. Not often at the age of twenty has a man devoted
himself for years to pure mathematics for the purpose of saving his
country. Yet this was Maurice's scheme. Four years long and more, when
most other youths in his position and at that epoch would have been
alternating between frivolous pleasures and brilliant exploits in the
field, the young prince had spent laborious days and nights with the
learned Simon Stevinus of Bruges. The scientific work which they composed
in common, the credit of which the master assigned to the pupil, might
have been more justly attributed perhaps to the professor than to the
prince, but it is certain that Maurice was an apt scholar.

In that country, ever held in existence by main human force against the
elements, the arts of engineering, hydrostatics and kindred branches were
of necessity much cultivated. It was reserved for the young mathematician
to make them as potent against a human foe.

Moreover, there were symptoms that the military discipline, learning and
practical skill, which had almost made Spain the mistress of the world,
were sinking into decay. Farnese, although still in the prime of life,
was broken in health, and there seemed no one fit to take the place of
himself and his lieutenants when they should be removed from the scene
where they had played their parts so consummately. The army of the
Netherlands was still to be created. Thus far the contest had been mainly
carried on by domestic militia and foreign volunteers or hirelings. The
train-bands of the cities were aided in their struggles against Spanish
pikemen and artillerists, Italian and Albanian cavalry by the German
riders, whom every little potentate was anxious to sell to either
combatant according to the highest bid, and by English mercenaries, whom
the love of adventure or the hope of plunder sent forth under such
well-seasoned captains as Williams and Morgan, Vere and the Norrises,
Baskerville and Willoughby.

But a Dutch army there was none and Maurice had determined that at last a
national force should be created. In this enterprise he was aided and
guided by his cousin Lewis William, Stadtholder of Friesland--the quaint,
rugged little hero, young in years but almost a veteran in the wars of
freedom, who was as genial and intellectual in council as he was reckless
and impulsive in the field.

Lewis William had felt that the old military art was dying out and
that--there was nothing to take its place. He was a diligent student of
antiquity. He had revived in the swamps of Friesland the old manoeuvres,
the quickness of wheeling, the strengthening, without breaking ranks or
columns, by which the ancient Romans had performed so much excellent work
in their day, and which seemed to have passed entirely into oblivion. Old
colonels and rittmasters, who had never heard of Leo the Thracian nor the
Macedonian phalanx, smiled and shrugged their shoulders, as they listened
to the questions of the young count, or gazed with profound astonishment
at the eccentric evolutions to which he was accustoming his troops. From
the heights of superior wisdom they looked down with pity upon these
innovations on the good old battle order. They were accustomed to great
solid squares of troops wheeling in one way, steadily, deliberately, all
together, by one impulse and as one man. It was true that in narrow
fields, and when the enemy was pressing, such stately evolutions often
became impossible or ensured defeat; but when the little Stadtholder
drilled his soldiers in small bodies of various shapes, teaching them to
turn, advance; retreat; wheel in a variety of ways, sometimes in
considerable masses, sometimes man by man, sending the foremost suddenly
to the rear, or bringing the hindmost ranks to the front, and began to
attempt all this in narrow fields as well as in wide ones, and when the
enemy was in sight, men stood aghast at his want of reverence, or laughed
at him as a pedant. But there came a day when they did not laugh, neither
friends nor enemies. Meantime the two cousins, who directed all the
military operations in the provinces, understood each other thoroughly
and proceeded to perfect their new system, to be adopted at a later
period by all civilized nations.

The regular army of the Netherlands was small in number at that
moment--not more than twenty thousand foot with two thousand horse--but
it was well disciplined, well equipped, and, what was of great
importance, regularly paid. Old campaigners complained that in the
halcyon days of paper enrolments, a captain could earn more out of his
company than a colonel now received for his whole regiment. The days when
a thousand men were paid for, with a couple of hundred in the field, were
passing away for the United Provinces and existed only for Italians and
Spaniards. While, therefore, mutiny on an organised and extensive scale
seemed almost the normal condition of the unpaid legions of Philip, the
little army of Maurice was becoming the model for Europe to imitate.

The United Provinces were as yet very far from being masters of their own
territory. Many of their most important cities still held for the king.
In Brabant, such towns as Breda with its many dependencies and
Gertruydenberg; on the Waal, the strong and wealthy Nymegen which Martin
Schenk had perished in attempting to surprise; on the Yssel, the thriving
city of Zutphen, whose fort had been surrendered by the traitor York, and
the stately Deventer, which had been placed in Philip's possession by the
treachery of Sir William Stanley; on the borders of Drenthe, the almost
impregnable Koevorden, key to the whole Zwollian country; and in the very
heart of ancient Netherland, Groningen, capital of the province of the
same name, which the treason of Renneberg had sold to the Spanish tyrant;
all these flourishing cities and indispensable strongholds were
garrisoned by foreign troops, making the idea of Dutch independence a
delusion.

While Alexander of Parma, sorely against his will and in obedience to
what, he deemed the insane suggestions of his master, was turning his
back on the Netherlands in order to relieve Paris, now hard pressed by
the Bearnese, an opportunity offered itself of making at least a
beginning in the great enterprise of recovering these most valuable
possessions.

The fair and pleasant city of Breda lies on the Merk, a slender stream,
navigable for small vessels, which finds its way to the sea through the
great canal of the Dintel. It had been the property of the Princes of
Orange, Barons of Breda, and had passed with the other possessions of the
family to the house of Chalons-Nassau. Henry of Nassau had, half a
century before, adorned and strengthened it by a splendid palace-fortress
which, surrounded by a deep and double moat, thoroughly commanded the
town. A garrison of five companies of Italian infantry and one of cavalry
lay in this castle, which was under the command of Edward Lanzavecchia,
governor both of Breda and of the neighbouring Gertruydenberg.

Breda was an important strategical position. It was moreover the feudal
superior of a large number of adjacent villages as well as of the cities
Osterhout, Steenberg and Rosendaal. It was obviously not more desirable
for Maurice of Nassau to recover his patrimonial city than it was for the
States-General to drive the Spaniards from so important a position!

In the month of February, 1590, Maurice, being then at the castle of
Voorn in Zeeland, received a secret visit from a boatman, Adrian van der
Berg by name, who lived at the village of Leur, eight or ten miles from
Breda, and who had long been in the habit of supplying the castle with
turf. In the absence of woods and coal mines, the habitual fuel of the
country was furnished by those vast relics of the antediluvian forests
which abounded in the still partially submerged soil. The skipper
represented that his vessel had passed so often into and out of the
castle as to be hardly liable to search by the guard on its entrance. He
suggested a stratagem by which it might be possible to surprise the
stronghold.

The prince approved of the scheme and immediately consulted with
Barneveld. That statesman at once proposed, as a suitable man to carry
out the daring venture, Captain Charles de Heraugiere, a nobleman of
Cambray, who had been long in the service of the States, had
distinguished himself at Sluys and on other occasions, but who had been
implicated in Leicester's nefarious plot to gain possession of the city
of Leyden a few years before. The Advocate expressed confidence that he
would be grateful for so signal an opportunity of retrieving a somewhat
damaged reputation. Heraugiere, who was with his company in Voorn at the
moment, eagerly signified his desire to attempt the enterprise as soon as
the matter was communicated to him; avowing the deepest devotion to the
house of William the Silent and perfect willingness to sacrifice his
life, if necessary, in its cause and that of the country. Philip Nassau,
cousin of Prince Maurice and brother of Lewis William, governor of
Gorcum, Dorcum, and Lowenstein Castle and colonel of a regiment of
cavalry, was also taken into the secret, as well as Count Hohenlo,
President Van der Myle and a few others; but a mystery was carefully
spread and maintained over the undertaking.

Heraugiere selected sixty-eight men, on whose personal daring and
patience he knew that he could rely, from the regiments of Philip Nassau
and of Famars, governor of the neighbouring city of Heusden, and from his
own company. Besides himself, the officers to command the party were
captains Logier and Fervet, and lieutenant Matthew Held. The names of
such devoted soldiers deserve to be commemorated and are still freshly
remembered by their countrymen.

On the 25th of February, Maurice and his staff went to Willemstad on the
Isle of Klundert, it having been given out on his departure from the
Hague that his destination was Dort. On the same night at about eleven
o'clock, by the feeble light of a waning moon, Heraugiere and his band
came to the Swertsenburg ferry, as agreed upon, to meet the boatman. They
found neither him nor his vessel, and they wandered about half the night,
very cold, very indignant, much perplexed. At last, on their way back,
they came upon the skipper at the village of Terheyde, who made the
extraordinary excuse that he had overslept himself and that he feared the
plot had been discovered. It being too late to make any attempt that
night, a meeting was arranged for the following evening. No suspicion of
treachery occurred to any of the party, although it became obvious that
the skipper had grown faint-hearted. He did not come on the next night to
the appointed place but he sent two nephews, boatmen like himself, whom
he described as dare-devils.

On Monday night, the 26th of February, the seventy went on board the
vessel, which was apparently filled with blocks of turf, and packed
themselves closely in the hold. They moved slowly during a little time on
their perilous voyage; for the winter wind, thick with fog and sleet,
blew directly down the river, bringing along with it huge blocks of ice
and scooping the water out of the dangerous shallows, so as to render the
vessel at any moment liable to be stranded. At last the navigation became
impossible and they came to a standstill. From Monday night till Thursday
morning those seventy Hollanders lay packed like herrings in the hold of
their little vessel, suffering from hunger, thirst, and deadly cold; yet
not one of them attempted to escape or murmured a wish to abandon the
enterprise. Even when the third morning dawned there was no better
prospect of proceeding; for the remorseless east wind still blew a gale
against them, and the shoals which beset their path had become more
dangerous than ever. It was, however, absolutely necessary to recruit
exhausted nature, unless the adventurers were to drop powerless on the
threshold when they should at last arrive at their destination. In all
secrecy they went ashore at a lonely castle called Nordam, where they
remained to refresh themselves until about eleven at night, when one of
the boatmen came to them with the intelligence that the wind had changed
and was now blowing freshly in from the sea. Yet the voyage of a few
leagues, on which they were embarked, lasted nearly two whole days
longer. On Saturday afternoon they passed through the last sluice, and at
about three o'clock the last boom was shut behind them. There was no
retreat possible for them now. The seventy were to take the strong castle
and city of Breda or to lay down their lives, every man of them. No
quarter and short shrift--such was their certain destiny, should that
half-crippled, half-frozen little band not succeed in their task before
another sunrise.

They were now in the outer harbour and not far from the Watergate which
led into the inner castle-haven. Presently an officer of the guard put
off in a skiff and came on board the vessel. He held a little
conversation with the two boatmen, observed that the castle was--much in
want of full, took a survey of the turf with which the ship was
apparently laden, and then lounged into the little cabin. Here he was
only separated by a sliding trap-door from the interior of the vessel.
Those inside could hear and see his every movement. Had there been a
single cough or sneeze from within, the true character of the cargo, then
making its way into the castle, would have been discovered and every man
would within ten minutes have been butchered. But the officer,
unsuspecting, soon took his departure, saying that he would send some men
to warp the vessel into the castle dock.

Meantime, as the adventurers were making their way slowly towards the
Watergate, they struck upon a hidden obstruction in the river and the
deeply laden vessel sprang a leak. In a few minutes those inside were
sitting up to their knees in water--a circumstance which scarcely
improved their already sufficiently dismal condition. The boatmen
vigorously plied the pumps to save the vessel from sinking outright; a
party of Italian soldiers soon arrived on the shore, and in the course of
a couple of hours they had laboriously dragged the concealed Hollanders
into the inner harbour and made their vessel fast, close to the
guard-house of the castle.

And now a crowd of all sorts came on board. The winter nights had been
long and fearfully cold, and there was almost a dearth of fuel both in
town and fortress. A gang of labourers set to work discharging the turf
from the vessel with such rapidity that the departing daylight began to
shine in upon the prisoners much sooner than they wished. Moreover, the
thorough wetting, to which after all their other inconveniences they had
just been exposed in their narrow escape from foundering, had set the
whole party sneezing and coughing. Never was a catarrh so sudden, so
universal, or so ill-timed. Lieutenant Held, unable to control the
violence of his cough, drew his dagger and eagerly implored his next
neighbour to stab him to the heart, lest his infirmity should lead to the
discovery of the whole party. But the calm and wary skipper who stood on
the deck instantly commanded his companion to work at the pump with as
much clatter as possible, assuring the persons present that the hold was
nearly full of water. By this means the noise of the coughing was
effectually drowned. Most thoroughly did the bold boatman deserve the
title of dare-devil, bestowed by his more fainthearted uncle. Calmly
looking death in the face, he stood there quite at his ease, exchanging
jokes with his old acquaintances, chaffering with the eager purchasers of
peat shouting most noisy and superfluous orders to the one man who
composed his crew, doing his utmost, in short, to get rid of his
customers and to keep enough of the turf on board to conceal the
conspirators.

At last, when the case seemed almost desperate, he loudly declared that
sufficient had been unladen for that evening and that it was too dark and
he too tired for further work. So, giving a handful of stivers among the
workmen, he bade them go ashore at once and have some beer and come next
morning for the rest of the cargo. Fortunately, they accepted his
hospitable proposition and took their departure. Only the servant of the
captain of the guard lingered behind, complaining that the turf was not
as good as usual and that his master would never be satisfied with it.

"Ah!" returned the cool skipper, "the best part of the cargo is
underneath. This is expressly reserved for the captain. He is sure to get
enough of it to-morrow."

Thus admonished, the servant departed and the boatman was left to
himself. His companion had gone on shore with secret orders to make the
best of his way to Prince Maurice, to inform him of the arrival of the
ship within the fortress, and of the important fact which they had just
learned, that Governor Lanzavecchia, who had heard rumours of some
projected enterprise and who suspected that the object aimed at was
Gertruydenberg, had suddenly taken his departure for that city, leaving
as his lieutenant his nephew Paolo, a raw lad quite incompetent to
provide for the safety of Breda.

A little before midnight, Captain Heraugiere made a brief address to his
comrades in the vessel, telling them that the hour for carrying out their
undertaking had at length arrived. Retreat was impossible, defeat was
certain death, only in complete victory lay their own safety and a great
advantage for the commonwealth. It was an honor to them to be selected
for such an enterprise. To show cowardice now would be an eternal shame
for them, and he would be the man to strike dead with his own hand any
traitor or poltroon. But if, as he doubted not, every one was prepared to
do his duty, their success was assured, and he was himself ready to take
the lead in confronting every danger.

He then divided the little band into two companies, one under himself to
attack the main guard-house, the other under Fervet to seize the arsenal
of the fortress.

Noiselessly they stole out of the ship where they had so long been
confined, and stood at last on the ground within the precincts of the
castle. Heraugiere marched straight to the guard-house.

"Who goes there?" cried a sentinel, hearing some movement in the
darkness.

"A friend," replied the captain, seizing him, by the throat, and
commanding him, if he valued his life, to keep silence except when
addressed and then to speak in a whisper.

"How many are there in the garrison?" muttered Heraugiere.

"Three hundred and fifty," whispered the sentinel.

"How many?" eagerly demanded the nearest followers, not hearing the
reply.

"He says there are but fifty of them," said Heraugiere, prudently
suppressing the three hundred, in order to encourage his comrades.

Quietly as they had made their approach, there was nevertheless a stir in
the guard-house. The captain of the watch sprang into the courtyard.

"Who goes there?" he demanded in his turn.

"A friend," again replied Heraugiere, striking him dead with a single
blow as he spoke.

Others emerged with torches. Heraugiere was slightly wounded, but
succeeded, after a brief struggle, in killing a second assailant. His
followers set upon the watch who retreated into the guard-house.
Heraugiere commanded his men to fire through the doors and windows, and
in a few minutes every one of the enemy lay dead.

It was not a moment for making prisoners or speaking of quarter. Meantime
Fervet and his band had not been idle. The magazine-house of the castle
was seized, its defenders slain. Young Lanzavecchia made a sally from the
palace, was wounded and driven back together with a few of his adherents.

The rest of the garrison fled helter-skelter into the town. Never had the
musketeers of Italy--for they all belonged to Spinola's famous Sicilian
Legion--behaved so badly. They did not even take the precaution to
destroy the bridge between the castle and the town as they fled
panic-stricken before seventy Hollanders. Instead of encouraging the
burghers to their support they spread dismay, as they ran, through every
street.

Young Lanzavecchia, penned into a corner of the castle; began to parley;
hoping for a rally before a surrender should be necessary. In the midst
of the negotiation and a couple of hours before dawn, Hohenlo; duly
apprised by the boatman, arrived with the vanguard of Maurice's troops
before the field-gate of the fort. A vain attempt was made to force this
portal open, but the winter's ice had fixed it fast. Hohenlo was obliged
to batter down the palisade near the water-gate and enter by the same
road through which the fatal turf-boat had passed.

Soon after he had marched into the town at the head of a strong
detachment, Prince Maurice himself arrived in great haste, attended by
Philip Nassau, the Admiral Justinus Nassau, Count Solms, Peter van der
Does, and Sir Francis Vere, and followed by another body of picked
troops; the musicians playing merrily that national air, then as now so
dear to Netherlanders--

          "Wilhelmus van Nassouwen
          Ben ick van Duytaem bloed."

The fight was over. Some forty of the garrison had been killed, but not a
man of the attacking party. The burgomaster sent a trumpet to the prince
asking permission to come to the castle to arrange a capitulation; and
before sunrise, the city and fortress of Breda had surrendered to the
authority of the States-General and of his Excellency.

The terms were moderate. The plundering was commuted for the payment of
two months' wages to every soldier engaged in the affair. Burghers who
might prefer to leave the city were allowed to do so with protection to
life, and property. Those who were willing to remain loyal citizens were
not to be molested, in their consciences or their households, in regard
to religion. The public exercise of Catholic rites was however suspended
until the States-General should make some universal provision on this
subject.

Subsequently, it must be allowed, the bargain of commutation proved a bad
one for the burghers. Seventy men had in reality done the whole work, but
so many soldiers, belonging to the detachments who marched in after the
fortress had been taken, came forward to claim their months' wages as to
bring the whole amount required above one hundred thousand florins. The
Spaniards accordingly reproached Prince Maurice with having fined his own
patrimonial city more heavily than Alexander Farnese had mulcted Antwerp,
which had been made to pay but four hundred thousand florins, a far less
sum in proportion to the wealth and importance of the place.

Already the Prince of Parma, in the taking of Breda, saw verified his
predictions of the disasters about to fall on the Spanish interests in
the Netherlands, by reason of Philip's obstinate determination to
concentrate all his energies on the invasion of France. Alexander had
been unable, in the midst of preparations for his French campaign, to
arrest this sudden capture, but his Italian blood was on fire at the
ignominy which had come upon the soldiership of his countrymen. Five
companies of foot and one of horse-picked troops of Spain and Italy--had
surrendered a wealthy, populous town and a well-fortified castle to a
mud-scow, and had fled shrieking in dismay from the onset of seventy
frost-bitten Hollanders.

It was too late to save the town, but he could punish, as it deserved,
the pusillanimity of the garrison.

Three captains--one of them rejoicing in the martial name of Cesar
Guerra--were publicly beheaded in Brussels. A fourth, Ventimiglia, was
degraded but allowed to escape with life, on account of his near
relationship to the Duke of Terranova, while Governor Lanzavecchia was
obliged to resign the command of Gertruydenberg. The great commander knew
better than to encourage the yielding up of cities and fortresses by a
mistaken lenity to their unlucky defenders.

Prince Maurice sent off letters the same night announcing his success to
the States-General. Hohenlo wrote pithily to Olden-Barneveld--"The castle
and town of Breda are ours, without a single man dead on our side. The
garrison made no resistance but ran distracted out of the town."

The church bells rang and bonfires blazed and cannon thundered in every
city in the United Provinces to commemorate this auspicious event.
Olden-Barneveld, too, whose part in arranging the scheme was known to
have been so valuable, received from the States-General a magnificent
gilded vase with sculptured representations of the various scenes in the
drama, and it is probable that not more unmingled satisfaction had been
caused by any one event of the war than by this surprise of Breda.

The capture of a single town, not of first-rate importance either, would
hardly seem too merit so minute a description as has been given in the
preceding pages. But the event, with all its details, has been preserved
with singular vividness in Netherland story. As an example of daring,
patience, and complete success, it has served to encourage the bold
spirits of every generation and will always inspire emulation in
patriotic hearts of every age and clime, while, as the first of a series
of audacious enterprises by which Dutch victories were to take the place
of a long procession of Spanish triumphs on the blood-stained soil of the
provinces, it merits, from its chronological position, a more than
ordinary attention.

In the course of the summer Prince Maurice, carrying out into practice
the lessons which he had so steadily been pondering, reduced the towns
and strong places of Heyl, Flemert, Elshout, Crevecoeur, Hayden,
Steenberg, Rosendaal, and Osterhout. But his time, during the remainder
of the year 1590, was occupied with preparations for a campaign on an
extended scale and with certain foreign negotiations to which it will
soon be necessary to direct the reader's attention.




CHAPTER XXII.

   Struggle of the United Provinces against Philip of Spain--Progress
   of the Republic--Influence of Geographical position on the fate of
   the Netherlands--Contrast offered by America--Miserable state of the
   so--called "obedient" provinces--Prosperity of the Commonwealth--Its
   internal government--Tendency to provincialism--Quibbles of the
   English Members of the Council, Wilkes and Bodley--Exclusion of
   Olden-Barneveld from the State Council--Proposals of Philip for
   mediation with the United Provinces--The Provinces resolutely
   decline all proffers of intervention.

The United Provinces had now been engaged in unbroken civil war for a
quarter of a century. It is, however, inaccurate to designate this great
struggle with tyranny as a civil war. It was a war for independence,
maintained by almost the whole population of the United Provinces against
a foreigner, a despot, alien to their blood, ignorant of their language,
a hater of their race, a scorner of their religion, a trampler upon their
liberties, their laws, and institutions--a man who had publicly declared
that he would rather the whole nation were exterminated than permitted to
escape from subjection to the Church of Rome. Liberty of speech, liberty
of the press, liberty of thought on political, religious, and social
questions existed within those Dutch pastures and Frisian swamps to a far
greater degree than in any other part of the world at that day; than in
very many regions of Christendom in our own time. Personal slavery was
unknown. In a large portion of their territory it had never existed. The
free Frisians, nearest blood-relations of, in this respect, the less
favoured Anglo-Saxons, had never bowed the knee to the feudal system, nor
worn nor caused to be worn the collar of the serf. In the battles for
human liberty no nation has stood with cleaner hands before the great
tribunal, nor offered more spotless examples of patriotism to be emulated
in all succeeding ages, than the Netherlanders in their gigantic struggle
with Philip of Spain. It was not a class struggling for their own
privileges, but trampling on their fellow-men in a lower scale of
humanity. Kings and aristocrats sneered at the vulgar republic where Hans
Miller, Hans Baker, and Hans Brewer enjoyed political rights end prated
of a sovereignty other than that of long-descended races and of anointed
heads. Yet the pikemen of Spain and the splendid cavalry and musketeers
of Italy and Burgundy, who were now beginning to show their backs both
behind entrenchments and in the open field to their republican foes,
could not deny the valour with which the battles of liberty were fought;
while Elizabeth of England, maintainer, if such ever were, of hereditary
sovereignty and hater of popular freedom, acknowledged that for wisdom in
council, dignity and adroitness in diplomatic debate, there were none to
surpass the plain burgher statesmen of the new republic.

And at least these Netherlanders were consistent with themselves. They
had come to disbelieve in the mystery of kingcraft, in the divine
speciality of a few transitory mortals to direct the world's events and
to dictate laws to their fellow-creatures. What they achieved was for the
common good of all. They chose to live in an atmosphere of blood and fire
for generation after generation rather than flinch from their struggle
with despotism, for they knew that, cruel as the sea, it would swallow
them all at last in one common destruction if they faltered or paused.
They fought for the liberty of all. And it is for this reason that the
history of this great conflict deserved to be deeply pondered by those
who have the instinct of human freedom. Had the Hollanders basely sunk
before the power of Spain, the proud history of England, France, and
Germany would have been written in far different terms. The blood and
tears which the Netherlanders caused to flow in their own stormy days
have turned to blessings for remotest climes and ages. A pusillanimous
peace, always possible at any period of their war, would have been hailed
with rapture by contemporary statesmen, whose names have vanished from
the world's memory; but would have sown with curses and misery the soil
of Europe for succeeding ages. The territory of the Netherlands is narrow
and meagre. It is but a slender kingdom now among the powers of the
earth. The political grandeur of nations is determined by physical causes
almost as much as by moral ones. Had the cataclysm which separated the
fortunate British islands from the mainland happened to occur, instead,
at a neighbouring point of the earth's crust; had the Belgian, Dutch,
German and Danish Netherland floated off as one island into the sea,
while that famous channel between two great rival nations remained dry
land, there would have been a different history of the world.

But in the 16th century the history of one country was not an isolated
chapter of personages and events. The history of the Netherlands is
history of liberty. It was now combined with the English, now with
French, with German struggles for political and religious freedom, but it
is impossible to separate it from the one great complex which makes up
the last half of the sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth
centuries.

At that day the Netherland republic was already becoming a power of
importance in the political family of Christendom. If, in spite of her
geographical disadvantages, she achieved so much, how much vaster might
her power have grown, how much stronger through her example might popular
institutions throughout the world have become, and how much more pacific
the relations of European tribes, had nature been less niggard in her
gifts to the young commonwealth. On the sea she was strong, for the ocean
is the best of frontiers; but on land her natural boundaries faded
vaguely away, without strong physical demarcations and with no sharply
defined limits of tongue, history or race. Accident or human caprice
seemed to have divided German Highland from German Netherland; Belgic
Gaul from the rest of the Gallic realm. And even from the slender body,
which an arbitrary destiny had set off for centuries into a separate
organism, tyranny and religious bigotry had just hewn another portion
away. But the commonwealth was already too highly vitalized to permit
peaceful dismemberment. Only the low organisms can live in all their
parts after violent separations. The trunk remained, bleeding but alive
and vigorous, while the amputated portion lay for centuries in fossilized
impotence.

Never more plainly than in the history of this commonwealth was the
geographical law manifested by which the fate of nations is so deeply
influenced. Courage, enterprise amounting almost to audacity, and a
determined will confronted for a long lapse of time the inexorable, and
permitted a great empire to germinate out of a few sand-banks held in
defiance of the ocean, and protected from human encroachments on the
interior only by the artificial barrier of custom-house and fort.

Thus foredoomed at birth, it must increase our admiration of human energy
and of the sustaining influence of municipal liberty that the republic,
even if transitory, should yet have girdled the earth with its
possessions and held for a considerable period so vast a portion of the
world in fee.

What a lesson to our transatlantic commonwealth, whom bountiful nature
had blessed at her birth beyond all the nations of history and seemed to
speed upon an unlimited career of freedom and peaceful prosperity, should
she be capable at the first alarm on her track to throw away her
inestimable advantages! If all history is not a mockery and a fable, she
may be sure that the nation which deliberately carves itself in pieces
and, substitutes artificial boundaries for the natural and historic ones,
condemns itself either to extinction or to the lower life of political
insignificance and petty warfare, with the certain loss of liberty and
national independence at last. Better a terrible struggle, better the
sacrifice of prosperity and happiness for years, than the eternal setting
of that great popular hope, the United American Republic.

I speak in this digression only of the relations of physical nature to
liberty and nationality, making no allusion to the equally stringent
moral laws which no people can violate and yet remain in health and
vigour.

Despite a quarter of a century of what is commonly termed civil war, the
United Netherlands were prosperous and full of life. It was in the
provinces which had seceded from the union of Utrecht that there was
silence as of the grave, destitution, slavery, abject submission to a
foreign foe. The leaders in the movement which had brought about the
scission of 1579--commonly called the 'Reconciliation'--enjoyed military
and civil posts under a foreign tyrant, but were poorly rewarded for
subserviency in fighting against their own brethren by contumely on the
part of their masters. As for the mass of the people it would be
difficult to find a desolation more complete than that recorded of the
"obedient" provinces. Even as six years before, wolves littered their
whelps in deserted farmhouses, cane-brake and thicket usurped the place
of cornfield and, orchard, robbers swarmed on the highways once thronged
by a most thriving population, nobles begged their bread in the streets
of cities whose merchants once entertained emperors and whose wealth and
traffic were the wonder of the world, while the Spanish viceroy formally
permitted the land in the agricultural districts to be occupied and
farmed by the first comer for his own benefit, until the vanished
proprietors of the soil should make their re-appearance.

"Administered without justice or policy," said a Netherlander who was
intensely loyal to the king and a most uncompromising Catholic, "eaten up
and abandoned for that purpose to the arbitrary will of foreigners who
suck the substance and marrow of the land without benefit to the king,
gnaw the obedient cities to the bones, and plunder the open defenceless
country at their pleasure, it may be imagined how much satisfaction these
provinces take in their condition. Commerce and trade have ceased in a
country which traffic alone has peopled, for without it no human
habitation could be more miserable and poor than our land."--[Discours du
Seigneur de Champagny sur les affaires des Pays Bas, 21 Dec. 1589. Bibl.
de Bourgogne, MS. No. 12,962.]

Nothing could be more gloomy than the evils thus described by the
Netherland statesman and soldier, except the remedy which he suggested.
The obedient provinces, thus scourged and blasted for their obedience,
were not advised to improve their condition by joining hands with their
sister States, who had just constituted themselves by their noble
resistance to royal and ecclesiastical tyranny into a free and powerful
commonwealth. On the contrary, two great sources of regeneration and
prosperity were indicated, but very different ones from those in which
the republic had sought and found her strength. In the first place, it
was suggested as indispensable that the obedient provinces should have
more Jesuits and more Friars. The mendicant orders should be summoned to
renewed exertions, and the king should be requested to send seminary
priests to every village in numbers proportionate to the population, who
should go about from house to house, counting the children, and seeing
that they learned their catechism if their parents did not teach them,
and, even in case they did, examining whether it was done thoroughly and
without deception.

In the second place it was laid down as important that the bishops should
confirm no one who had not been sufficiently catechized. "And if the
mendicant orders," said Champagny, "are not numerous enough for these
catechizations, the Jesuits might charge themselves therewith, not more
and not less than the said mendicants, some of each being deputed to each
parish. To this end it would be well if his Majesty should obtain from
the Pope a command to the Jesuits to this effect, since otherwise they
might not be willing to comply. It should also be ordered that all
Jesuits, natives of these provinces, should return hither, instead of
wandering about in other regions as if their help were not so necessary
here."--[Ibid.]

It was also recommended that the mendicant friars should turn their
particular attention to Antwerp, and that one of them should preach in
French, another in German, another in English, every day at the opening
of the Exchange.

With these appliances it was thought that Antwerp would revive out of its
ruins and, despite the blockade of its river, renew its ancient
commercial glories. Founded on the substantial rocks of mendicancy and
jesuitism, it might again triumph over its rapidly rising rival, the
heretic Amsterdam, which had no better basis for its grandeur than
religious and political liberty, and uncontrolled access to the ocean.

Such were the aspirations of a distinguished and loyal Netherlander for
the regeneration of his country. Such were his opinions as to the true
sources of the wealth and greatness of nations. Can we wonder that the
country fell to decay, or that this experienced, statesman and brave
soldier should himself, after not many years, seek to hide his
dishonoured head under the cowl of a monk?

The coast of the obedient provinces was thoroughly blockaded. The United
Provinces commanded the sea, their cruisers, large and small, keeping
diligent watch off every port and estuary of the Flemish coast, so that
not a herringboat could enter without their permission. Antwerp, when it
fell into the hands of the Spaniard, sank for ever from its proud
position. The city which Venetians but lately had confessed with a sigh
to be superior in commercial grandeur to their own magnificent capital,
had ceased to be a seaport. Shut in from the ocean by Flushing--firmly
held by an English garrison as one of the cautionary towns for the
Queen's loan--her world-wide commerce withered before men's eyes. Her
population was dwindling to not much more than half its former numbers,
while Ghent, Bruges, and other cities were diminished by two-thirds.

On the other hand, the commerce and manufactures of the United Republic
had enormously augmented. Its bitterest enemies bore witness to the
sagacity and success by which its political affairs were administered,
and to its vast superiority in this respect over the obedient provinces.
"The rebels are not ignorant of our condition," said Champagny, "they are
themselves governed with consummate wisdom, and they mock at those who
submit themselves to the Duke of Parma. They are the more confirmed in
their rebellion, when they see how many are thronging from us to them,
complaining of such bad government, and that all take refuge in flight
who can from the misery and famine which it has caused throughout these
provinces!" The industrial population had flowed from the southern
provinces into the north, in obedience to an irresistible law. The
workers in iron, paper, silk, linen, lace, the makers of brocade,
tapestry, and satin, as well as of all the coarser fabrics, had fled from
the land of oppression to the land of liberty. Never in the history of
civilisation had there been a more rapid development of human industry
than in Holland during these years of bloodiest warfare. The towns were
filled to overflowing. Amsterdam multiplied in wealth and population as
fast as Antwerp shrank. Almost as much might be said of Middelburg,
Enkhuyzen, Horn, and many other cities. It is the epoch to which the
greatest expansion of municipal architecture is traced. Warehouses,
palaces, docks, arsenals, fortifications, dykes, splendid streets and
suburbs, were constructed on every side, and still there was not room for
the constantly increasing population, large numbers of which habitually
dwelt in the shipping. For even of that narrow span of earth called the
province of Holland, one-third was then interior water, divided into five
considerable lakes, those of Harlem, Schermer, Beemster, Waert, and
Purmer. The sea was kept out by a magnificent system of dykes under the
daily superintendence of a board of officers, called dyke-graves, while
the rain-water, which might otherwise have drowned the soil thus
painfully reclaimed, was pumped up by windmills and drained off through
sluices opening and closing with the movement of the tides.

The province of Zeeland was one vast "polder." It was encircled by an
outer dyke of forty Dutch equal to one hundred and fifty English, miles
in extent, and traversed by many interior barriers. The average cost of
dyke-building was sixty florins the rod of twelve feet, or 84,000 florins
the Dutch mile. The total cost of the Zeeland dykes was estimated at
3,360,000 florins, besides the annual repairs.

But it was on the sea that the Netherlanders were really at home, and
they always felt it in their power--as their last resource against
foreign tyranny--to bury their land for ever in the ocean, and to seek a
new country at the ends of the earth. It has always been difficult to
doom to political or personal slavery a nation accustomed to maritime
pursuits. Familiarity with the boundless expanse of ocean, and the habit
of victoriously contending with the elements in their stormy strength,
would seem to inspire a consciousness in mankind of human dignity and
worth. With the exception of Spain, the chief seafaring nations of the
world were already protestant. The counter-league, which was to do battle
so strenuously with the Holy Confederacy, was essentially a maritime
league. "All the maritime heretics of the world, since heresy is best
suited to navigators, will be banded together," said Champagny, "and then
woe to the Spanish Indies, which England and Holland are already
threatening."

The Netherlanders had been noted from earliest times for a free-spoken
and independent personal demeanour. At this epoch they were taking the
lead of the whole world in marine adventure. At least three thousand
vessels of between one hundred and four hundred tons, besides innumerable
doggers, busses, cromstevens, and similar craft used on the rivers and in
fisheries, were to be found in the United Provinces, and one thousand, it
was estimated, were annually built.

They traded to the Baltic regions for honey, wax, tallow, lumber, iron,
turpentine, hemp. They brought from farthest Indies and from America all
the fabrics of ancient civilisation, all the newly discovered products of
a virgin soil, and dispensed them among the less industrious nations of
the earth. Enterprise, led on and accompanied by science, was already
planning the boldest flights into the unknown yet made by mankind, and it
will soon be necessary to direct attention to those famous arctic
voyages, made by Hollanders in pursuit of the north-west passage to
Cathay, in which as much heroism, audacity, and scientific intelligence
were displayed as in later times have made so many men belonging to both
branches of the Anglo-Saxon race illustrious. A people, engaged in
perennial conflict with a martial and sacerdotal despotism the most
powerful in the world, could yet spare enough from its superfluous
energies to confront the dangers of the polar oceans, and to bring back
treasures of science to enrich the world.

Such was the spirit of freedom. Inspired by its blessed influence this
vigorous and inventive little commonwealth triumphed over all human, all
physical obstacles in its path. It organised armies on new principles to
drive the most famous legions of history from its soil. It built navies
to help rescue, at critical moments, the cause of England, of
Protestantism, of civil liberty, and even of French nationality. More
than all, by its trade with its arch-enemy, the republic constantly
multiplied its resources for destroying his power and aggrandizing its
own.

The war navy of the United Provinces was a regular force of one hundred
ships--large at a period when a vessel of thirteen hundred tons was a
monster--together with an indefinite number of smaller craft, which could
be put into the public service on short notice? In those days of close
quarters and light artillery a merchant ship was converted into a cruiser
by a very simple, process. The navy was a self-supporting one, for it was
paid by the produce of convoy fees and licenses to trade. It must be
confessed that a portion of these revenues savoured much of black-mail to
be levied on friend and foe; for the distinctions between, freebooter,
privateer, pirate, and legitimate sea-robber were not very closely drawn
in those early days of seafaring.

Prince Maurice of Nassau was lord high admiral, but he was obliged to
listen to the counsels of various provincial boards of admiralty, which
often impeded his action and interfered with his schemes.

It cannot be denied that the inherent vice of the Netherland polity was
already a tendency to decentralisation and provincialism. The civil
institutions of the country, in their main characteristics, have been
frequently sketched in these pages. At this period they had entered
almost completely into the forms which were destined to endure until the
commonwealth fell in the great crash of the French Revolution. Their
beneficial effects were more visible now--sustained and bound together as
the nation was by the sense of a common danger, and by the consciousness
of its daily developing strength--than at a later day when prosperity and
luxury had blunted the fine instincts of patriotism.

The supreme power, after the deposition of Philip, and the refusal by
France and by England to accept the sovereignty of the provinces, was
definitely lodged in the States-General. But the States-General did not
technically represent the people. Its members were not elected by the
people. It was a body composed of, delegates from each provincial
assembly, of which there were now five: Holland, Zeeland, Friesland,
Utrecht, and Gelderland. Each provincial assembly consisted again of
delegates, not from the inhabitants of the provinces, but from the
magistracies of the cities. Those, magistracies, again, were not elected
by the citizens. They elected themselves by renewing their own vacancies,
and were, in short, immortal corporations. Thus, in final analysis, the
supreme power was distributed and localised among the mayors and aldermen
of a large number of cities, all independent alike of the people below
and of any central power above.

It is true that the nobles, as, a class, had a voice in the provincial
and, in the general assembly, both for themselves and as technical
representatives of the smaller towns and of the rural population. But, as
a matter of fact, the influence of this caste had of late years very
rapidly diminished, through its decrease in numbers, and the far more
rapid increase in wealth and power of the commercial and manufacturing
classes. Individual nobles were constantly employed in the military,
civil, and diplomatic service of the republic, but their body had ceased
to be a power. It had been the policy of William the Silent to increase
the number of cities entitled to send deputies to the States; for it was
among the cities that his resistance to the tyranny of Spain, and his
efforts to obtain complete independence for his country, had been mainly
supported. Many of the great nobles, as has been seen in these pages,
denounced the liberator and took sides with the tyrant. Lamoral Egmont
had walked to the scaffold to which Philip had condemned him, chanting a
prayer for Philip's welfare. Egmont's eldest son was now foremost in the
Spanish army, doing battle against his own country in behalf of the
tyrant who had taken his father's life. Aremberg and Ligny, Arachot,
Chimay, Croy, Caprea, Montigny, and most of the great patrician families
of the Netherlands fought on the royal side.

The revolution which had saved the country from perdition and created the
great Netherland republic was a burgher revolution, and burgher statesmen
now controlled the State. The burgher class of Europe is not the one that
has been foremost in the revolutionary movements of history, or that has
distinguished itself--especially in more modern times--by a passionate
love of liberty. It is always easy to sneer at Hans Miller and Hans
Baker, and at the country where such plebeians are powerful. Yet the
burghers played a prominent part in the great drama which forms my theme,
and there has rarely been seen a more solid or powerful type of their
class than the burgher statesman, John of Olden-Barneveld, who, since the
death of William the Silent and the departure of Lord Leicester, had
mainly guided the destinies of Holland. Certainly no soldier nor
statesman who ever measured intellects with that potent personage was apt
to treat his genius otherwise than with profound respect.

But it is difficult to form a logical theory of government except on the
fiction of divine right as a basis, unless the fact of popular
sovereignty, as expressed by a majority, be frankly accepted in spite of
philosophical objections.

In the Netherlands there was no king, and strictly speaking no people.
But this latter and fatal defect was not visible in the period of danger
and of contest. The native magistrates of that age were singularly pure,
upright, and patriotic. Of this there is no question whatever. And the
people acquiesced cheerfully in their authority, not claiming a larger
representation than such as they virtually possessed in the multiple
power exercised over them, by men moving daily among them, often of
modest fortunes and of simple lives. Two generations later, and in the
wilderness of Massachusetts, the early American colonists voluntarily
placed in the hands of their magistrates, few in number, unlimited
control of all the functions of government, and there was hardly an
instance known of an impure exercise of authority. Yet out of that simple
kernel grew the least limited and most powerful democracy ever known.

In the later days of Netherland history a different result became
visible, and with it came the ruin of the State. The governing class, of
burgher origin, gradually separated itself from the rest of the citizens,
withdrew from commercial pursuits, lived on hereditary fortunes in the
exercise of functions which were likewise virtually hereditary, and so
became an oligarchy. This result, together with the physical causes
already indicated, made the downfall of the commonwealth probable
whenever it should be attacked by an overwhelming force from without.

The States-General, however, at this epoch--although they had in a manner
usurped the sovereignty, which in the absence of a feudal lord really
belonged to the whole people, and had silently repossessed themselves of
those executive functions which they had themselves conferred upon the
state council--were at any rate without self-seeking ambition. The
Hollanders, as a race, were not office seekers, but were singularly
docile to constituted authority, while their regents--as the municipal
magistrates were commonly called--were not very far removed above the
mass by birth or habitual occupation. The republic was a social and
political fact, against which there was no violent antagonism either of
laws or manners, and the people, although not technically existing, in
reality was all in all. In Netherland story the People is ever the true
hero. It was an almost unnoticed but significant revolution--that by
which the state council was now virtually deprived of its authority.
During Leicester's rule it had been a most important college of
administration. Since his resignation it had been entrusted by the
States-General with high executive functions, especially in war matters.
It was an assembly of learned counsellors appointed from the various
provinces for wisdom and experience, usually about eighteen in number,
and sworn in all things to be faithful to the whole republic. The
allegiance of all was rendered to the nation. Each individual member was
required to "forswear his native province in order to be true to the
generality." They deliberated in common for the general good, and were
not hampered by instructions from the provincial diets, nor compelled to
refer to those diets for decision when important questions were at issue.
It was an independent executive committee for the whole republic.

But Leicester had made it unpopular. His intrigues, in the name of
democracy, to obtain possession of sovereign power, to inflame the lower
classes against the municipal magistracies, and to excite the clergy to
claim a political influence to which they were not entitled and which was
most mischievous in its effects, had exposed the state council, with
which he had been in the habit of consulting, to suspicion.

The Queen of England, by virtue of her treaty had the right to appoint
two of her subjects to be members of the council. The governor of her
auxiliary forces was also entitled to a seat there. Since the
malpractices of Leicester and the danger to which the country had been,
subjected in consequence had been discovered, it was impossible that
there should be very kindly feeling toward England in the public mind,
however necessary a sincere alliance between the two countries was known
to be for the welfare of both.

The bickering of the two English councillors, Wilkes and Bodley, and of
the governor of the English contingent with the Hollanders, was
incessant. The Englishmen went so far as to claim the right of veto upon
all measures passed by the council, but the States-General indignantly
replied that the matters deliberated and decided upon by that board were
their own affairs, not the state affairs of England. The two members and
the military officer who together represented her Majesty were entitled
to participate in the deliberations and to vote with their brother
members. For them to claim the right, however, at will to annul the
proceedings was an intolerable assumption, and could not be listened to
for a moment. Certainly it would have been strange had two Dutchmen
undertaken to veto every measure passed by the Queen's council at
Richmond or Windsor, and it was difficult to say on what article of the
contract this extraordinary privilege was claimed by Englishmen at the
Hague.

Another cause of quarrel was the inability of the Englishmen to
understand the language in which the debates of the state council were
held.

According to a custom not entirely unexampled in parliamentary history
the members of assembly and council made use of their native tongue in
discussing the state affairs of their native land. It was however
considered a grievance by the two English members that the Dutchmen
should speak Dutch, and it was demanded in the Queen's name that they
should employ some other language which a foreigner could more easily
understand.

The Hollanders however refused this request, not believing that in a
reversed case her Majesty's Council or Houses of Parliament would be
likely or competent to carry on their discussions habitually in Italian
or Latin for the benefit of a couple of strangers who might not be
familiar with English. The more natural remedy would have been for the
foreigners to take lessons in the tongue of the country, or to seek for
an interpreter among their colleagues; especially as the States, when all
the Netherlands were but provinces, had steadily refused to adopt any
language but their mother tongue, even at the demand of their sovereign
prince.

At this moment, Sir Thomas Bodley was mainly entrusted with her Majesty's
affairs at the Hague, but his overbearing demeanour, intemperate
language, and passionate style of correspondence with the States and with
the royal government, did much injury to both countries. The illustrious
Walsingham--whose death in the spring of this year England had so much
reason to deplore--had bitterly lamented, just before his death, having
recommended so unquiet a spirit for so important a place. Ortel, envoy of
the States to London, expressed his hopes that affairs would now be
handled more to the satisfaction of the States; as Bodley would be
obliged, since the death of Sir Francis, to address his letters to the
Lord High Treasurer, with whom it would be impossible for him to obtain
so much influence as he had enjoyed with the late Secretary of State.

Moreover it was exactly at this season that the Advocate of Holland,
Olden-Barneveld, was excluded from the state council. Already the
important province of Holland was dissatisfied with its influence in that
body. Bearing one-half of the whole burthen of the war it was not content
with one-quarter of the council vote, and very soon it became the custom
for the States-General to conduct all the most important affairs of the
republic.  The state council complained that even in war matters it was
not consulted, and that most important enterprises were undertaken by
Prince Maurice without its knowledge, and on advice of the Advocate
alone. Doubtless this was true, and thus, most unfortunately, the
commonwealth was degraded to a confederacy instead of becoming an
incorporate federal State. The members of the States-General--as it has
been seen were responsible only to their constituents, the separate
provinces. They avowed allegiance, each to his own province, none to the
central government. Moreover they were not representatives, but envoys,
appointed by petty provinces, bound by written orders, and obliged to
consult at every step with their sovereigns at home. The Netherland
polity was thus stamped almost at its birth with a narrow provincialism:
Delay and hesitation thus necessarily engendered were overcome in the
days of danger by patriotic fervour. The instinct of union for the sake
of the national existence was sufficiently strong, and the robust,
practical common sense of the people sufficiently enlightened to prevent
this weakness from degenerating into impotence so long as the war
pressure remained to mould them into a whole. But a day was to come for
bitterly rueing this paralysis of the imperial instincts of the people,
this indefinite decentralisation of the national strength.

For the present, the legislative and executive body was the
States-General. But the States-General were in reality the States
provincial, and the States provincial were the city municipalities, among
which the magistracies of Holland were preponderant.

Ere long it became impossible for an individual to resist the decrees of
the civic authorities. In 1591, the States-General passed a resolution by
which these arrogant corporations virtually procured their exemption from
any process at the suit of a private person to be placed on record. So
far could the principle of sovereignty be pulverized. City council boards
had become supreme.

It was naturally impossible during the long continuance of this great
struggle, that neutral nations should not be injuriously affected by it
in a variety of ways. And as a matter of course neutral nations were
disposed to counsel peace. Peace, peace; peace was the sigh of the
bystanders whose commerce was impeded, whose international relations.
were complicated, and whose own security was endangered in the course of
the bloody conflict. It was however not very much the fashion of that day
for governments to obtrude advice upon each other; or to read to each
other moral lectures. It was assumed that when the expense and sacrifice
of war had been incurred, it was for cause, and the discovery had not yet
been made that those not immediately interested in the fray were better
acquainted with its merits than, the combatants themselves, and were
moreover endued with, superhuman wisdom to see with perfect clearness
that future issue which to the parties themselves was concealed.

Cheap apothegms upon the blessings of peace and upon the expediency of
curbing the angry passions, uttered by the belligerents of yesterday to
the belligerents of to-day, did not then pass current for profound
wisdom.

Still the emperor Rudolph, abstaining for a time from his star-gazing,
had again thought proper to make a feeble attempt at intervention in
those sublunary matters which were supposed to be within his sphere.

It was perfectly well known that Philip was incapable of abating one jot
of his pretensions, and that to propose mediation to the United Provinces
was simply to request them, for the convenience of other powers, to
return to the slavery out of which, by the persistent efforts of a
quarter of a century, they had struggled. Nevertheless it was formally
proposed to re-open those lukewarm fountains of diplomatic commonplace in
which healing had been sought during the peace negotiations of Cologne in
the year 1579. But the States-General resolutely kept them sealed. They
simply answered his imperial Majesty by a communication of certain
intercepted correspondence between--the King of Spain and his ambassador
at Vienna, San Clemente, through which it was satisfactorily established
that any negotiation would prove as gigantic a comedy on the part of
Spain as had been the memorable conferences at Ostend, by which the
invasion of England had been masked.

There never was a possibility of mediation or of compromise except by
complete submission on the part of the Netherlanders to Crown and Church.
Both in this, as well as in previous and subsequent attempts at
negotiations, the secret instructions of Philip forbade any real
concessions on his side. He was always ready to negotiate, he was
especially anxious to obtain a suspension of arms from the rebels during
negotiation; but his agents were instructed to use great dexterity and
dissimulation in order that the proposal for such armistice, as well as
for negotiation at all, should appear to proceed, not from himself as was
the fact, but from the emperor as a neutral potentate. The king uniformly
proposed three points; firstly, that the rebels should reconvert
themselves to the Catholic religion; secondly, that they should return to
their obedience to himself; thirdly, that they should pay the expenses of
the war. Number three was, however, usually inserted in order that, by
conceding it subsequently, after much contestation, he might appear
conciliatory. It was a vehicle of magnanimity towards men grown insolent
with temporary success. Numbers one and two were immutable.

Especially upon number one was concession impossible. "The Catholic
religion is the first thing," said Philip, "and although the rebels do
not cease to insist that liberty of conscience should be granted them, in
order that they may preserve that which they have had during these past
years, this is never to be thought of in any event." The king always made
free use of the terrible weapon which the Protestant princes of Germany
had placed in his hands. For indeed if it were right that one man,
because possessed of hereditary power over millions of his fellow
creatures, should compel them all to accept the dogmas of Luther or of
Calvin because agreeable to himself, it was difficult to say why another
man, in a similarly elevated position, might not compel his subjects to
accept the creed of Trent, or the doctrines of Mahomet or Confucius. The
Netherlanders were fighting--even more than they knew-for liberty of
conscience, for equality of all religions; not for Moses, nor for
Melancthon; for Henry, Philip, or Pius; while Philip justly urged that no
prince in Christendom permitted license. "Let them well understand," said
his Majesty, "that since others who live in error, hold the opinion that
vassals are to conform to the religion of their master, it is
insufferable that it should be proposed to me that my vassals should have
a different religion from mine--and that too being the true religion,
proved by so many testimonies and miracles, while all others are
deception. This must be arranged with the authority of the commissioners
of the emperor, since it is well understood by them that the vassal is
never to differ from the opinion of his master." Certainly it was worth
an eighty years' war to drive such blasphemous madness as this out of
human heads, whether crowned or shaven.

There was likewise a diet held during the summer of this year, of the
circles of the empire nearest to the Netherlands--Westphalia, Cleves,
Juliers, and Saxony--from which commissioners were deputed both to
Brussels and to the Hague, to complain of the misfortunes suffered by
neutral and neighbouring nations in consequence of the civil war.

They took nothing by their mission to the Duke of Parma. At the Hague the
deputies were heard on the 22nd August, 1590. They complained to the
States-General of "brandschatting" on the border, of the holding of forts
beyond the lines, and of other invasions of neutral territory, of the
cruising of the war-vessels of the States off the shores and on the
rivers, and of their interference with lawful traders. Threats were made
of forcible intervention and reprisals.

The united States replied on the 13th September. Expressing deep regret
that neutral nations should suffer, they pronounced it to be impossible
but that some sparks from the great fire, now desolating their land,
should fly over into their neighbours' ground. The States were fighting
the battle of liberty against slavery, in which the future generations of
Germany, as well as of the Netherlands were interested. They were
combating that horrible institution, the Holy Inquisition. They were
doing their best to strike down the universal monarchy of Spain, which
they described as a bloodthirsty, insatiable, insolent, absolute dominion
of Saracenic, Moorish Christians. They warred with a system which placed
inquisitors on the seats of judges, which made it unlawful to read the
Scriptures, which violated all oaths, suppressed all civic freedom,
trampled, on all laws and customs, raised inordinate taxes by arbitrary
decree, and subjected high and low to indiscriminate murder. Spain had
sworn the destruction of the provinces and their subjugation to her
absolute dominion, in order to carry out her scheme of universal empire.

These were the deeds and designs against which the States were waging
that war, concerning some inconvenient results of which their neighbours,
now happily neutral, were complaining. But the cause of the States was
the cause of humanity itself. This Saracenic, Moorish, universal monarchy
had been seen by Germany to murder, despoil, and trample upon the
Netherlands. It had murdered millions of innocent Indians and Granadians.
It had kept Naples and Milan in abject slavery. It had seized Portugal.
It had deliberately planned and attempted an accursed invasion of England
and Ireland. It had overrun and plundered many cities of the empire. It
had spread a web of secret intrigue about Scotland. At last it was
sending great armies to conquer France and snatch its crown. Poor France
now saw the plans of this Spanish tyranny and bewailed her misery. The
subjects of her lawful king were ordered to rise against him, on account
of religion and conscience. Such holy pretexts were used by these
Saracenic Christians in order to gain possession of that kingdom.

For all these reasons, men should not reproach the inhabitants of the
Netherlands, because seeing the aims of this accursed tyranny, they had
set themselves to resist it. It was contrary to reason to consider them
as disturbers of the general peace, or to hold them guilty of violating
their oaths or their duty to the laws of the holy empire. The
States-General were sure that they had been hitherto faithful and loyal,
and they were resolved to continue in that path.

As members of the holy empire, in part--as of old they were considered to
be--they had rather the right to expect, instead of reproaches,
assistance against the enormous power and inhuman oppression of their
enemies. They had demanded it heretofore by their ambassadors, and they
still continued to claim it. They urged that, according to the laws of
the empire, all foreign soldiers, Spaniards, Saracens, and the like
should be driven out of the limits of the empire. Through these means the
German Highland and the German Netherland might be restored once more to
their old friendship and unity, and might deal with each other again in
amity and commerce.

If, however, such requests could not be granted they at least begged his
electoral highness and the other dukes, lords, and states to put on the
deeds of Netherlanders in this laborious and heavy war the best
interpretation, in order that they might, with the better courage and
resolution, bear those inevitable burthens which were becoming daily
heavier in this task of resistance and self-protection; in order that the
provinces might not be utterly conquered, and serve, with their natural
resources and advantageous situation, as 'sedes et media belli' for the
destruction of neighbouring States and the building up of the
contemplated universal, absolute monarchy.

The United Provinces had been compelled by overpowering necessity to take
up arms. That which had resulted was and remained in 'terminis
defensionis.' Their object was to protect what belonged to them, to
recover that which by force or fraud had been taken from them.

In regard to excesses committed by their troops against neutral
inhabitants on the border, they expressed a strong regret, together with
a disposition to make all proper retribution and to cause all crimes to
be punished.

They alluded to the enormous sins of this nature practised by the enemy
against neutral soil. They recalled to mind that the Spaniards paid their
troops ill or not at all, and that they allowed them to plunder the
innocent and the neutral, while the United States had paid their troops
better wages, and more punctually, than had ever been done by the
greatest potentates of Europe. It was true that the States kept many
cruisers off the coasts and upon the rivers, but these were to protect
their own citizens and friendly traders against pirates and against the
common foe. Germany derived as much benefit from this system as did the
Provinces themselves.

Thus did the States-General, respectfully but resolutely, decline all
proffers of intervention, which, as they were well aware, could only
enure to the benefit of the enemy. Thus did they avoid being entrapped
into negotiations which could only prove the most lamentable of comedies.

     ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

     A pusillanimous peace, always possible at any period
     At length the twig was becoming the tree
     Being the true religion, proved by so many testimonies
     Certainly it was worth an eighty years' war
     Chief seafaring nations of the world were already protestant
     Conceding it subsequently, after much contestation
     Fled from the land of oppression to the land of liberty
     German Highland and the German Netherland
     Little army of Maurice was becoming the model for Europe
     Luxury had blunted the fine instincts of patriotism
     Maritime heretics
     Portion of these revenues savoured much of black-mail
     The divine speciality of a few transitory mortals
     The history of the Netherlands is history of liberty
     The nation which deliberately carves itself in pieces
     They had come to disbelieve in the mystery of kingcraft
     Worn nor caused to be worn the collar of the serf




CHAPTER XXIII. 1590

   Philip's scheme of aggrandizement--Projected invasion of France--
   Internal condition of France--Character of Henry of Navarre--
   Preparation for action--Battle of Ivry--Victory of the French king
   over the League--Reluctance of the King to attack the French
   capital--Siege of Paris--The pope indisposed towards the League--
   Extraordinary demonstration of ecclesiastics--Influence of the
   priests--Extremities of the siege--Attempted negotiation--State of
   Philip's army--Difficult position of Farnese--March of the allies to
   the relief of Paris--Lagny taken and the city relieved--Desertion of
   the king's army--Siege of Corbeil--Death of Pope Sixtus V.--
   Re-capture of Lagny and Corbeil--Return of Parma to the Netherlands
  --Result of the expedition.

The scene of the narrative shifts to France. The history of the United
Netherlands at this epoch is a world-history. Were it not so, it would
have far less of moral and instruction for all time than it is really
capable of affording. The battle of liberty against despotism was now
fought in the hop-fields of Brabant or the polders of Friesland, now in
the narrow seas which encircle England, and now on the sunny plains of
Dauphiny, among the craggy inlets of Brittany, or along the high roads
and rivers which lead to the gates of Paris. But everywhere a noiseless,
secret, but ubiquitous negotiation was speeding with never an instant's
pause to accomplish the work which lansquenettes and riders, pikemen and
carabineers were contending for on a hundred battle-fields and amid a din
of arms which for a quarter of a century had been the regular hum of
human industry. For nearly a generation of mankind, Germans and
Hollanders, Englishmen, Frenchmen, Scotchmen, Irishmen, Spaniards and
Italians seemed to be born into the world mainly to fight for or against
a system of universal monarchy, conceived for his own benefit by a quiet
old man who passed his days at a writing desk in a remote corner of
Europe. It must be confessed that Philip II. gave the world work enough.
Whether--had the peoples governed themselves--their energies might not
have been exerted in a different direction, and on the whole have
produced more of good to the human race than came of all this blood and
awoke, may be questioned.

But the divine right of kings, associating itself with the power supreme
of the Church, was struggling to maintain that old mastery of mankind
which awakening reason was inclined to dispute. Countries and nations
being regarded as private property to be inherited or bequeathed by a few
favoured individuals--provided always that those individuals were
obedient to the chief-priest--it had now become right and proper for the
Spanish monarch to annex Scotland, England, and France to the very
considerable possessions which were already his own. Scotland he claimed
by virtue of the expressed wish of Mary to the exclusion of her heretic
son.

France, which had been unjustly usurped by another family in times past
to his detriment, and which only a mere human invention--a "pleasantry"
as Alva had happily termed it, called the "Salic law"--prevented from
passing quietly to his daughter, as heiress to her mother, daughter of
Henry II., he was now fully bent upon making his own without further loss
of time. England, in consequence of the mishap of the year eighty-eight,
he was inclined to defer appropriating until the possession of the French
coasts, together with those of the Netherlands, should enable him to risk
the adventure with assured chances of success.

The Netherlands were fast slipping beyond his control, to be sure, as he
engaged in these endless schemes; and ill-disposed people of the day said
that the king was like Aesop's dog, lapping the river dry in order to get
at the skins floating on the surface. The Duke of Parma was driven to his
wits' ends for expedients, and beside himself with vexation, when
commanded to withdraw his ill-paid and mutinous army from the Provinces
for the purpose of invading France. Most importunate were the appeals and
potent the arguments by which he attempted to turn Philip from his
purpose. It was in vain. Spain was the great, aggressive, overshadowing
power at that day, before whose plots and whose violence the nations
alternately trembled, and it was France that now stood in danger of being
conquered or dismembered by the common enemy of all. That unhappy
kingdom, torn by intestine conflict, naturally invited the ambition and
the greediness of foreign powers. Civil war had been its condition, with
brief intervals, for a whole generation of mankind. During the last few
years, the sword had been never sheathed, while "the holy Confederacy"
and the Bearnese struggled together for the mastery. Religion was the
mantle under which the chiefs on both sides concealed their real designs
as they led on their followers year after year to the desperate conflict.
And their followers, the masses, were doubtless in earnest. A great
principle--the relation of man to his Maker and his condition in a future
world as laid down by rival priesthoods--has in almost every stage of
history had power to influence the multitude to fury and to deluge the
world in blood. And so long as the superstitious element of human nature
enables individuals or combinations of them to dictate to their
fellow-creatures those relations, or to dogmatize concerning those
conditions--to take possession of their consciences in short, and to
interpose their mummeries between man and his Creator--it is, probable
that such scenes as caused the nations to shudder, throughout so large a
portion of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries will continue to
repeat themselves at intervals in various parts of the earth. Nothing can
be more sublime than the self-sacrifice, nothing more demoniac than the
crimes, which human creatures have seemed always ready to exhibit under
the name of religion.

It was and had been really civil war in France. In the Netherlands it had
become essentially a struggle for independence against a foreign monarch;
although the germ out of which both conflicts had grown to their enormous
proportions was an effort of the multitude to check the growth of papacy.
In France, accordingly, civil war, attended by that gaunt sisterhood,
murder, pestilence, and famine, had swept from the soil almost everything
that makes life valuable. It had not brought in its train that
extraordinary material prosperity and intellectual development at which
men wondered in the Netherlands, and to which allusion has just been
made. But a fortunate conjunction of circumstances had now placed Henry
of Navarre in a position of vantage. He represented the principle of
nationality, of French unity. It was impossible to deny that he was in
the regular line of succession, now that luckless Henry of Valois slept
with his fathers, and the principle of nationality might perhaps prove as
vital a force as attachment to the Roman Church. Moreover, the adroit and
unscrupulous Bearnese knew well how to shift the mantle of religion from
one shoulder to the other, to serve his purposes or the humours of those
whom he addressed.

"The King of Spain would exclude me from the kingdom and heritage of my
father because of my religion," he said to the Duke of Saxony; "but in
that religion I am determined to persist so long as I shall live." The
hand was the hand of Henry, but it was the voice of Duplessis Mornay.

"Were there thirty crowns to win," said he, at about the same time to the
States of France, "I would not change my religion on compulsion, the
dagger at my throat. Instruct me, instruct me, I am not obstinate." There
spoke the wily freethinker, determined not to be juggled out of what he
considered his property by fanatics or priests of either church. Had
Henry been a real devotee, the fate of Christendom might have been
different. The world has long known how much misery it is in the power of
crowned bigots to inflict.

On the other hand, the Holy League, the sacred Confederacy, was catholic
or nothing. Already it was more papist than the pope, and loudly
denounced Sixtus V. as a Huguenot because he was thought to entertain a
weak admiration both for Henry the heretic and for the Jezebel of
England.

But the holy confederacy was bent on destroying the national government
of France, and dismembering the national domain. To do this the pretext
of trampling out heresy and indefinitely extending the power of Rome, was
most influential with the multitude, and entitled the leaders to enjoy
immense power for the time being, while maturing their schemes for
acquiring permanent possession of large fragments of the national
territory. Mayenne, Nemours, Aumale, Mercoeur longed to convert temporary
governments into independent principalities. The Duke of Lorraine looked
with longing eyes on Verdun, Sedan, and, the other fair cities within the
territories contiguous--to his own domains. The reckless house of Savoy;
with whom freebooting and landrobbery seemed geographical, and hereditary
necessities, was busy on the southern borders, while it seemed easy
enough for Philip, II., in right of his daughter, to secure at least the
duchy of Brittany before entering on the sovereignty of the whole
kingdom.

To the eyes of the world at large: France might well seem in a condition
of hopeless disintegration; the restoration of its unity and former
position among the nations, under the government of a single chief, a
weak and wicked dream. Furious and incessant were the anathemas hurled on
the head of the Bearnese for his persistence in drowning the land in
blood in the hope of recovering a national capital which never could be
his, and of wresting from the control of the confederacy that power.
which, whether usurped or rightful, was considered, at least by the
peaceably inclined, to have become a solid fact.

The poor puppet locked in the tower of Fontenay, and entitled Charles X.;
deceived and scared no one. Such money as there was might be coined, in
its name, but Madam League reigned supreme in Paris. The confederates,
inspired by the eloquence of a cardinal legate, and supplied with funds
by the faithful, were ready to dare a thousand deaths rather than submit
to the rule of a tyrant and heretic.

What was an authority derived from the laws of the land and the history
of the race compared with the dogmas of Rome and the trained veterans of
Spain? It remained to be seen whether nationality or bigotry would
triumph. But in the early days of 1590 the prospects of nationality were
not encouraging.

Francois de Luxembourg, due de Pincey, was in Rome at that moment,
deputed by such catholic nobles of France as were friendly to Henry of
Navarre. Sixtus might perhaps be influenced as to the degree of respect
to be accorded to the envoy's representations by the events of the
campaign about to open. Meantime the legate Gaetano, young, rich,
eloquent, unscrupulous, distinguished alike for the splendour of his
house and the brilliancy of his intellect, had arrived in Paris.

Followed by a great train of adherents he had gone down to the House of
Parliament, and was about to seat himself under the dais reserved for the
king, when Brisson, first President of Parliament, plucked him back by
the arm, and caused him to take a seat immediately below his own.

Deeply was the bold president to expiate this defence of king and law
against the Holy League. For the moment however the legate contented
himself with a long harangue, setting forth the power of Rome, while
Brisson replied by an oration magnifying the grandeur of France.

Soon afterwards the cardinal addressed himself to the counteraction of
Henry's projects of conversion. For, well did the subtle priest
understand that in purging himself of heresy, the Bearnese was about to
cut the ground from beneath his enemies' feet. In a letter to the
archbishops and bishops of France, he argued the matter at length.
Especially he denied the necessity or the legality of an assembly of all
the prelates of France, such as Henry desired to afford him the requisite
"instruction" as to the respective merits of the Roman and the reformed
Church. Certainly, he urged, the Prince of Bearne could hardly require
instruction as to the tenets of either, seeing that at different times he
had faithfully professed both.

But while benches of bishops and doctors of the Sorbonne were burnishing
all the arms in ecclesiastical and legal arsenals for the approaching
fray, the sound of louder if not more potent artillery began to be heard
in the vicinity of Paris. The candid Henry, while seeking ghostly
instruction with eagerness from his papistical patrons, was equally
persevering in applying for the assistance of heretic musketeers and
riders from his protestant friends in England, Holland, Germany, and
Switzerland.

Queen Elizabeth and the States-General vied with each other in generosity
to the great champion of protestantism, who was combating the holy league
so valiantly, and rarely has a great historical figure presented itself
to the world so bizarre of aspect, and under such shifting perplexity of
light and shade, as did the Bearnese in the early spring of 1590.

The hope of a considerable portion of the catholic nobility of his realm,
although himself an excommunicated heretic; the mainstay of Calvinism
while secretly bending all his energies to effect his reconciliation with
the pope; the idol of the austere and grimly puritanical, while himself a
model of profligacy; the leader of the earnest and the true, although
false as water himself in every relation in which human beings can stand
to each other; a standardbearer of both great branches of the Christian
Church in an age when religion was the atmosphere of men's daily lives,
yet finding his sincerest admirer, and one of his most faithful allies,
in the Grand Turk,

   [A portion of the magnificently protective letter of Sultan Amurath,
   in which he complimented Henry on his religious stedfastness, might
   almost have made the king's cheek tingle.]

the representative of national liberty and human rights against regal and
sacerdotal absolutism, while himself a remorseless despot by nature and
education, and a believer in no rights of the people save in their
privilege to be ruled by himself; it seems strange at first view that
Henry of Navarre should have been for centuries so heroic and popular an
image. But he was a soldier, a wit, a consummate politician; above all,
he was a man, at a period when to be a king was often to be something
much less or much worse.

To those accustomed to weigh and analyse popular forces it might well
seem that he was now playing an utterly hopeless game. His capital
garrisoned by the Pope and the King of Spain, with its grandees and its
populace scoffing at his pretence of authority and loathing his name;
with an exchequer consisting of what he could beg or borrow from Queen
Elizabeth--most parsimonious of sovereigns reigning over the half of a
small island--and from the States-General governing a half-born,
half-drowned little republic, engaged in a quarter of a century's warfare
with the greatest monarch in the world; with a wardrobe consisting of a
dozen shirts and five pocket-handkerchiefs, most of them ragged, and with
a commissariat made up of what could be brought in the saddle-bags of his
Huguenot cavaliers who came to the charge with him to-day, and to-morrow
were dispersed again to their mountain fastnesses; it did not seem likely
on any reasonable theory of dynamics that the power of the Bearnese was
capable of outweighing Pope and Spain, and the meaner but massive
populace of France, and the Sorbonne, and the great chiefs of the
confederacy, wealthy, long descended, allied to all the sovereigns of
Christendom, potent in territorial possessions and skilful in wielding
political influences.

"The Bearnese is poor but a gentleman of good family," said the cheerful
Henry, and it remained to-be seen whether nationality, unity, legitimate
authority, history, and law would be able to neutralise the powerful
combination of opposing elements.

The king had been besieging Dreux and had made good progress in reducing
the outposts of the city. As it was known that he was expecting
considerable reinforcements of English ships, Netherlanders, and Germans,
the chiefs of the league issued orders from Paris for an attack before he
should thus be strengthened.

For Parma, unwillingly obeying the stringent commands of his master, had
sent from Flanders eighteen hundred picked cavalry under Count Philip
Egmont to join the army of Mayenne. This force comprised five hundred
Belgian heavy dragoons under the chief nobles of the land, together with
a selection, in even proportions, of Walloon, German, Spanish, and
Italian troopers.

Mayenne accordingly crossed the Seine at Mantes with an army of ten
thousand foot, and, including Egmont's contingent, about four thousand
horse. A force under Marshal d'Aumont, which lay in Ivry at the passage
of the Eure, fell back on his approach and joined the remainder of the
king's army. The siege of Dreux was abandoned; and Henry withdrew to the
neighbourhood of Nonancourt. It was obvious that the duke meant to offer
battle, and it was rare that the king under any circumstances could be
induced to decline a combat.

On the night of the 12th-13th March, Henry occupied Saint Andre, a
village situated on an elevated and extensive plain four leagues from
Nonancourt, in the direction of Ivry, fringed on three sides by villages
and by a wood, and commanding a view of all the approaches from the
country between the Seine and Eure. It would have been better had Mayenne
been beforehand with him, as the sequel proved; but the duke was not
famed for the rapidity of his movements. During the greater part of the
night, Henry was employed in distributing his orders for that conflict
which was inevitable on the following day. His army was drawn up
according to a plan prepared by himself, and submitted to the most
experienced of his generals for their approval. He then personally
visited every portion of the encampment, speaking words of encouragement
to his soldiers, and perfecting his arrangements for the coming conflict.
Attended by Marshals d'Aumont and Biron he remained on horseback during a
portion of the night, having ordered his officers to their tents and
reconnoitred as well as he could the position of the enemy. Towards
morning he retired to his headquarters at Fourainville, where he threw
himself half-dressed on his truckle bed, and although the night was
bitterly cold, with no covering but his cloak. He was startled from his
slumber before the dawn by a movement of lights in the enemy's camp, and
he sprang to his feet supposing that the duke was stealing a march upon
him despite all his precautions. The alarm proved to be a false one, but
Henry lost no time in ordering his battle. His cavalry he divided in
seven troops or squadrons. The first, forming the left wing, was a body
of three hundred under Marshal d'Aumont, supported by two regiments of
French infantry. Next, separated by a short interval, was another troop
of three hundred under the Duke of Montpensier, supported by two other
regiments of foot, one Swiss and one German. In front of Montpensier was
Baron Biron the younger, at the head of still another body of three
hundred. Two troops of cuirassiers, each four hundred strong, were on
Biron's left, the one commanded by the Grand Prior of France, Charles
d'Angouleme, the other by Monsieur de Givry. Between the Prior and Givry
were six pieces of heavy artillery, while the battalia, formed of eight
hundred horse in six squadrons, was commanded by the king in person, and
covered on both sides by English and Swiss infantry, amounting to some
four thousand in all. The right wing was under the charge of old Marshal
Biron, and comprised three troops of horse, numbering one hundred and
fifty each, two companies of German riders, and four regiments of French
infantry. These numbers, which are probably given with as much accuracy
as can be obtained, show a force of about three thousand horse and twelve
thousand foot.

The Duke of Mayenne, seeing too late the advantage of position which he
might have easily secured the day before, led his army forth with the
early light, and arranged it in an order not very different from that
adopted by the king, and within cannon-shot of his lines. The right wing
under Marshal de la Chatre consisted of three regiments of French and one
of Germans, supporting three regiments of Spanish lancers, two cornets of
German riders under the Bastard of Brunswick, and four hundred
cuirassiers. The battalia, which was composed of six hundred splendid
cavalry, all noblemen of France, guarding the white banner of the Holy
League, and supported by a column of three thousand Swiss and two
thousand French infantry, was commanded by Mayenne in person, assisted by
his half-brother, the Duke of Nemours. In front of the infantry was a
battery of six cannon and three culverines. The left wing was commanded
by Marshal de Rene, with six regiments of French and Lorrainers, two
thousand Germans, six hundred French cuirassiers, and the mounted
troopers of Count Egmont. It is probable that Mayenne's whole force,
therefore, amounted to nearly four thousand cavalry and at least thirteen
thousand foot.

Very different was the respective appearance of the two armies, so far,
especially, as regarded the horsemen on both sides. Gay in their gilded
armour and waving plumes, with silken scarves across their shoulders, and
the fluttering favours of fair ladies on their arms or in their helmets,
the brilliant champions of the Holy Catholic Confederacy clustered around
the chieftains of the great house of Guise, impatient for the conflict.
It was like a muster for a brilliant and chivalrous tournament. The
Walloon and Flemish nobles, outrivalling even the self-confidence of
their companions in arms, taunted them with their slowness. The
impetuous Egmont, burning to eclipse the fame of his ill-fated father at
Gravelines and St. Quintin in the same holy cause, urged on the battle
with unseemly haste, loudly proclaiming that if the French were
faint-hearted he would himself give a good account of the Navarrese
prince without any assistance from them.

A cannon-shot away, the grim puritan nobles who had come forth from their
mountain fastnesses to do battle for king and law and for the rights of
conscience against the Holy League--men seasoned in a hundred
battle-fields, clad all in iron, with no dainty ornaments nor holiday
luxury of warfare--knelt on the ground, smiting their mailed breasts with
iron hands, invoking blessings on themselves and curses and confusion on
their enemies in the coming conflict, and chanting a stern psalm of
homage to the God of battles and of wrath. And Henry of France and
Navarre, descendant of Lewis the Holy and of Hugh the Great, beloved
chief of the Calvinist cavaliers, knelt among his heretic brethren, and
prayed and chanted with them. But not the staunchest Huguenot of them
all, not Duplessis, nor D'Aubigne, nor De la Noue with the iron arm, was
more devoted on that day to crown and country than were such papist
supporters of the rightful heir as had sworn to conquer the insolent
foreigner on the soil of France or die.

When this brief prelude was over, Henry made an address to his soldiers,
but its language has not been preserved. It is known, however, that he
wore that day his famous snow-white plume, and that he ordered his
soldiers, should his banner go down in the conflict, to follow wherever
and as long as that plume should be seen waving on any part of the field.
He had taken a position by which his troops had the sun and wind in their
backs, so that the smoke rolled toward the enemy and the light shone in
their eyes. The combat began with the play of artillery, which soon
became so warm that Egmont, whose cavalry--suffering and galled--soon
became impatient, ordered a charge. It was a most brilliant one. The
heavy troopers of Flanders and Hainault, following their spirited
chieftain, dashed upon old Marshal Biron, routing his cavalry, charging
clean up to the Huguenot guns and sabring the cannoneers. The shock was
square, solid, irresistible, and was followed up by the German riders
under Eric of Brunswick, who charged upon the battalia of the royal army,
where the king commanded in person.

There was a panic. The whole royal cavalry wavered, the supporting
infantry recoiled, the day seemed lost before the battle was well begun.
Yells of "Victory! Victory! up with the Holy League, down with the
heretic Bearnese," resounded through the Catholic squadrons. The king and
Marshal Biron, who were near each other, were furious with rage, but
already doubtful of the result. They exerted themselves to rally the
troops under their immediate command, and to reform the shattered ranks.

The German riders and French lancers under Brunswick and Bassompierre
had, however, not done their work as thoroughly as Egmont had done. The
ground was so miry and soft that in the brief space which separated the
hostile lines they had not power to urge their horses to full speed.
Throwing away their useless lances, they came on at a feeble canter,
sword in hand, and were unable to make a very vigorous impression on the
more heavily armed troopers opposed to them. Meeting with a firm
resistance to their career, they wheeled, faltered a little and fell a
short distance back. Many of the riders being of the reformed religion,
refused moreover to fire upon the Huguenots, and discharged their
carbines in the air.

The king, whose glance on the battle-field was like inspiration, saw the
blot and charged upon them in person with his whole battalia of cavalry.
The veteran Biron followed hard upon the snow-white plume. The scene was
changed, victory succeeded to impending defeat, and the enemy was routed.
The riders and cuirassiers, broken into a struggling heap of confusion,
strewed the ground with their dead bodies, or carried dismay into the
ranks of the infantry as they strove to escape. Brunswick went down in
the melee, mortally wounded as it was believed. Egmont renewing the
charge at the head of his victorious Belgian troopers, fell dead with a
musket-ball through his heart. The shattered German and Walloon cavalry,
now pricked forward by the lances of their companions, under the
passionate commands of Mayenne and Aumale, now fading back before the
furious charges of the Huguenots, were completely overthrown and cut to
pieces.

Seven times did Henry of Navarre in person lead his troopers to the
charge; but suddenly, in the midst of the din of battle and the cheers of
victory, a message of despair went from lip to lip throughout the royal
lines. The king had disappeared. He was killed, and the hopes of
Protestantism and of France were fallen for ever with him. The white
standard of his battalia had been seen floating wildly and purposelessly
over the field; for his bannerman, Pot de Rhodes, a young noble of
Dauphiny, wounded mortally in the head, with blood streaming over his
face and blinding his sight, was utterly unable to control his horse, who
gallopped hither and thither at his own caprice, misleading many troopers
who followed in his erratic career. A cavalier, armed in proof, and
wearing the famous snow-white plume, after a hand-to-hand struggle with a
veteran of Count Bossu's regiment, was seen to fall dead by the side of
the bannerman: The Fleming, not used to boast, loudly asserted that he
had slain the Bearnese, and the news spread rapidly over the
battle-field. The defeated Confederates gained new courage, the
victorious Royalists were beginning to waver, when suddenly, between the
hostile lines, in the very midst of the battle, the king gallopped
forward, bareheaded, covered with blood and dust, but entirely unhurt. A
wild shout of "Vive le Roi!" rang through the air. Cheerful as ever, he
addressed a few encouraging words to his soldiers, with a smiling face,
and again led a charge. It was all that was necessary to complete the
victory. The enemy broke and ran away on every side in wildest confusion,
followed by the royalist cavalry, who sabred them as they fled. The panic
gained the foot-soldiers, who should have supported the cavalry, but had
not been at all engaged in the action. The French infantry threw away
their arms as they rushed from the field and sought refuge in the woods.
The Walloons were so expeditious in the race, that they never stopped
till they gained their own frontier. The day was hopelessly lost, and
although Mayenne had conducted himself well in the early part of the day,
it was certain that he was excelled by none in the celerity of his flight
when the rout had fairly begun. Pausing to draw breath as he gained the
wood, he was seen to deal blows with his own sword among the mob of
fugitives, not that he might rally them to their flag and drive them back
to another encounter, but because they encumbered his own retreat.

The Walloon carbineers, the German riders, and the French lancers,
disputing as to the relative blame to be attached to each corps, began
shooting and sabring each other, almost before they were out of the
enemy's sight. Many were thus killed. The lansquenets were all put to the
sword. The Swiss infantry were allowed to depart for their own country on
pledging themselves not again to bear arms against Henry IV.

It is probable that eight hundred of the leaguers were either killed on
the battle-field or drowned in the swollen river in their retreat. About
one-fourth of that number fell in the army of the king. It is certain
that of the contingent from the obedient Netherlands, two hundred and
seventy, including their distinguished general, lost their lives. The
Bastard of Brunswick, crawling from beneath a heap of slain, escaped with
life. Mayenne lost all his standards and all the baggage of his army,
while the army itself was for a time hopelessly dissolved.

Few cavalry actions have attained a wider celebrity in history than the
fight of Ivry. Yet there have been many hard-fought battles, where the
struggle was fiercer and closer, where the issue was for a longer time
doubtful, where far more lives on either side were lost, where the final
victory was immediately productive of very much greater results, and
which, nevertheless, have sunk into hopeless oblivion. The personal
details which remain concerning the part enacted by the adventurous king
at this most critical period of his career, the romantic interest which
must always gather about that ready-witted, ready-sworded Gascon, at the
moment when, to contemporaries, the result of all his struggles seemed so
hopeless or at best so doubtful; above all, the numerous royal and
princely names which embellished the roll-call of that famous passage of
arms, and which were supposed, in those days at least, to add such lustre
to a battle-field, as humbler names, however illustrious by valour or
virtue, could never bestow, have made this combat for ever famous.

Yet it is certain that the most healthy moral, in military affairs, to be
derived from the event, is that the importance of a victory depends less
upon itself than on the use to be made of it. Mayenne fled to Mantes, the
Duke of Nemours to Chartres, other leaders of the League in various
directions, Mayenne told every body he met that the Bearnese was killed,
and that although his own army was defeated, he should soon have another
one on foot. The same intelligence was communicated to the Duke of Parma,
and by him to Philip. Mendoza and the other Spanish agents went about
Paris spreading the news of Henry's death, but the fact seemed woefully
to lack confirmation, while the proofs of the utter overthrow and
shameful defeat of the Leaguers were visible on every side. The
Parisians--many of whom the year before had in vain hired windows in the
principal streets, in order to witness the promised entrance of the
Bearnese, bound hand and foot, and with a gag in his mouth, to swell the
triumph of Madam League--were incredulous as to the death now reported to
them of this very lively heretic, by those who had fled so ignominiously
from his troopers.

De la None and the other Huguenot chieftains, earnestly urged upon Henry
the importance of advancing upon Paris without an instant's delay, and it
seems at least extremely probable that, had he done so, the capital would
have fallen at once into his hands. It is the concurrent testimony of
contemporaries that the panic, the destitution, the confusion would have
made resistance impossible had a determined onslaught been made. And
Henry had a couple of thousand horsemen flushed with victory, and a dozen
thousand foot who had been compelled to look upon a triumph in which they
had no opportunity of sharing: Success and emulation would have easily
triumphed over dissension and despair.

But the king, yielding to the councils of Biron and other Catholics,
declined attacking the capital, and preferred waiting the slow, and in
his circumstances eminently hazardous, operations of a regular siege. Was
it the fear of giving a signal triumph to the cause of Protestantism that
caused the Huguenot leader--so soon to become a renegade--to pause in his
career? Was it anxiety lest his victorious entrance into Paris might undo
the diplomacy of his catholic envoys at Rome? or was it simply the
mutinous condition of his army, especially of the Swiss mercenaries, who
refused to advance a step unless their arrears of pay were at once
furnished them out of the utterly empty exchequer of the king? Whatever
may have been the cause of the delay, it is certain that the golden fruit
of victory was not plucked, and that although the confederate army had
rapidly dissolved, in consequence of their defeat, the king's own forces
manifested as little cohesion.

And now began that slow and painful siege, the details of which are as
terrible, but as universally known, as those of any chapters in the
blood-stained history of the century. Henry seized upon the towns
guarding the rivers Seine and Marne, twin nurses of Paris. By controlling
the course of those streams as well as that of the Yonne and
Oise--especially by taking firm possession of Lagny on the Marne, whence
a bridge led from the Isle of France to the Brie country--great
thoroughfare of wine and corn--and of Corbeil at the junction of the
little river Essonne with the Seine-it was easy in that age to stop the
vital circulation of the imperial city.

By midsummer, Paris, unquestionably the first city of Europe at that day,
was in extremities, and there are few events in history in which our
admiration is more excited by the power of mankind to endure almost
preternatural misery, or our indignation more deeply aroused by the
cruelty with which the sublimest principles of human nature may be made
to serve the purposes of selfish ambition and grovelling superstition,
than this famous leaguer.

Rarely have men at any epoch defended their fatherland against foreign
oppression with more heroism than that which was manifested by the
Parisians of 1590 in resisting religious toleration, and in obeying a
foreign and priestly despotism. Men, women, and children cheerfully laid
down their lives by thousands in order that the papal legate and the king
of Spain might trample upon that legitimate sovereign of France who was
one day to become the idol of Paris and of the whole kingdom.

A census taken at the beginning of the siege had showed a populace of two
hundred thousand souls, with a sufficiency of provisions, it was thought,
to last one month. But before the terrible summer was over--so completely
had the city been invested--the bushel of wheat was worth three hundred
and sixty crowns, rye and oats being but little cheaper. Indeed, grain
might as well have cost three thousand crowns the bushel, for the prices
recorded placed it beyond the reach of all but the extremely wealthy. The
flesh of horses, asses, dogs, cats, rats had become rare luxuries. There
was nothing cheap, said a citizen bitterly, but sermons. And the priests
and monks of every order went daily about the streets, preaching
fortitude in that great resistance to heresy, by which Paris was earning
for itself a crown of glory, and promising the most direct passage to
paradise for the souls of the wretched victims who fell daily, starved to
death, upon the pavements. And the monks and priests did their work
nobly, aiding the general resolution by the example of their own courage.
Better fed than their fellow citizens, they did military work in trench,
guard-house and rampart, as the population became rapidly unfit, from
physical exhaustion, for the defence of the city.

The young Duke of Nemours, governor of the place, manifested as much
resolution and conduct in bringing his countrymen to perdition as if the
work in which he was engaged had been the highest and holiest that ever
tasked human energies. He was sustained in his task by that proud
princess, his own and Mayenne's mother, by Madame Montpensier, by the
resident triumvirate of Spain, Mendoza, Commander Moreo, and John Baptist
Tasais, by the cardinal legate Gaetano, and, more than all, by the
sixteen chiefs of the wards, those municipal tyrants of the unhappy
populace.

Pope Sixtus himself was by no means eager for the success of the League.
After the battle of Ivry, he had most seriously inclined his ear to the
representations of Henry's envoy, and showed much willingness to admit
the victorious heretic once more into the bosom of the Church. Sixtus was
not desirous of contributing to the advancement of Philip's power. He
feared his designs on Italy, being himself most anxious at that time to
annex Naples to the holy see. He had amassed a large treasure, but he
liked best to spend it in splendid architecture, in noble fountains, in
magnificent collections of art, science, and literature, and, above all,
in building up fortunes for the children of his sister the washerwoman,
and in allying them all to the most princely houses of Italy, while never
allowing them even to mention the name of their father, so base was his
degree; but he cared not to disburse from his hoarded dollars to supply
the necessities of the League.

But Gaetano, although he could wring but fifty thousand crowns from his
Holiness after the fatal fight of Ivry, to further the good cause, was
lavish in expenditures from his own purse and from other sources, and
this too at a time when thirty-three per cent. interest was paid to the
usurers of Antwerp for one month's loan of ready money. He was
indefatigable, too, and most successful in his exhortations and ghostly
consolations to the people. Those proud priests and great nobles were
playing a reckless game, and the hopes of mankind beyond the grave were
the counters on their table. For themselves there were rich prizes for
the winning. Should they succeed in dismembering the fair land where they
were enacting their fantastic parts, there were temporal principalities,
great provinces, petty sovereignties, to be carved out of the heritage
which the Bearnese claimed for his own. Obviously then, their consciences
could never permit this shameless heretic, by a simulated conversion at
the critical moment, to block their game and restore the national unity
and laws. And even should it be necessary to give the whole kingdom,
instead of the mere duchy of Brittany, to Philip of Spain, still there
were mighty guerdons to be bestowed on his supporters before the foreign
monarch could seat himself on the throne of Henry's ancestors.

As to the people who were fighting, starving, dying by thousands in this
great cause, there were eternal rewards in another world profusely
promised for their heroism instead of the more substantial bread and
beef, for lack of which they were laying down their lives.

It was estimated that before July twelve thousand human beings in Paris
had died, for want of food, within three months. But as there were no
signs of the promised relief by the army of Parma and Mayenne, and as the
starving people at times appeared faint-hearted, their courage was
strengthened one day by a stirring exhibition.

An astonishing procession marched through the streets of the city, led by
the Bishop of Senlis and the Prior of Chartreux, each holding a halberd
in one hand and a crucifix in the other, and graced by the presence of
the cardinal-legate, and of many prelates from Italy. A lame monk,
adroitly manipulating the staff of a drum major, went hopping and limping
before them, much to the amazement of the crowd. Then came a long file of
monks-Capuchins, Bernardists, Minimes, Franciscans, Jacobins, Carmelites,
and other orders--each with his cowl thrown back, his long robes trussed
up, a helmet on his head, a cuirass on his breast, and a halberd in his
hand. The elder ones marched first, grinding their teeth, rolling their
eyes, and making other ferocious demonstrations. Then came the younger
friars, similarly attired, all armed with arquebusses, which they
occasionally and accidentally discharged to the disadvantage of the
spectators, several of whom were killed or wounded on the spot. Among
others a servant of Cardinal Gaetano was thus slain, and the even caused
much commotion, until the cardinal proclaimed that a man thus killed in
so holy a cause had gone straight to heaven and had taken his place among
the just. It was impossible, thus argued the people in their simplicity,
that so wise and virtuous a man as the cardinal should not know what was
best.

The procession marched to the church of our Lady of Loretto, where they
solemnly promised to the blessed Virgin a lamp and ship of gold--should
she be willing to use her influence in behalf of the suffering city--to
be placed on her shrine as soon as the siege should be raised.

But these demonstrations, however cheering to the souls, had
comparatively little effect upon the bodies of the sufferers. It was
impossible to walk through the streets of Paris without stumbling over
the dead bodies of the citizens. Trustworthy eye-witnesses of those
dreadful days have placed the number of the dead during the summer at
thirty thousand. A tumultuous assemblage of the starving and the forlorn
rushed at last to the municipal palace, demanding peace or bread. The
rebels were soon dispersed however by a charge, headed by the Chevalier
d'Aumale, and assisted by the chiefs of the wards, and so soon as the
riot was quelled, its ringleader, a leading advocate, Renaud by name, was
hanged.

Still, but for the energy of the priests, it is doubtful whether the city
could have been held by the Confederacy. The Duke of Nemours confessed
that there were occasions when they never would have been able to sustain
a determined onslaught, and they were daily expecting to see the Prince
of Bearne battering triumphantly at their gates.

But the eloquence of the preachers, especially of the one-eyed father
Boucher, sustained the fainting spirits of the people, and consoled the
sufferers in their dying agonies by glimpses of paradise. Sublime was
that devotion, superhuman that craft; but it is only by weapons from the
armoury of the Unseen that human creatures can long confront such horrors
in a wicked cause. Superstition, in those days at least, was a political
force absolutely without limitation, and most adroitly did the agents of
Spain and Rome handle its tremendous enginery against unhappy France. For
the hideous details of the most dreadful sieges recorded in ancient or
modern times were now reproduced in Paris. Not a revolutionary
circumstance, at which the world had shuddered in the accounts of the
siege of Jerusalem, was spared. Men devoured such dead vermin as could be
found lying in the streets. They crowded greedily around stalls in the
public squares where the skin, bones, and offal of such dogs, cats and
unclean beasts as still remained for the consumption of the wealthier
classes were sold to the populace. Over the doorways of these flesh
markets might be read "Haec runt munera pro iis qui vitam pro Philippo
profuderunt." Men stood in archways and narrow passages lying in wait for
whatever stray dogs still remained at large, noosed them, strangled them,
and like savage beasts of prey tore them to pieces and devoured them
alive. And it sometimes happened, too, that the equally hungry dog proved
the more successful in the foul encounter, and fed upon the man. A lady
visiting the Duchess of Nemours--called for the high pretensions of her
sons by her two marriages the queen-mother--complained bitterly that
mothers in Paris had been compelled to kill their own children outright
to save them from starving to death in lingering agony. "And if you are
brought to that extremity," replied the duchess, "as for the sake of our
holy religion to be forced to kill your own children, do you think that
so great a matter after all? What are your children made of more than
other people's children? What are we all but dirt and dust?" Such was the
consolation administered by the mother of the man who governed Paris, and
defended its gates against its lawful sovereign at the command of a
foreigner; while the priests in their turn persuaded the populace that it
was far more righteous to kill their own children, if they had no food to
give them, than to obtain food by recognising a heretic king.

It was related too, and believed, that in some instances mothers had
salted the bodies of their dead children and fed upon them, day by day,
until the hideous repast would no longer support their own life. They
died, and the secret was revealed by servants who had partaken of the
food. The Spanish ambassador, Mendoza, advised recourse to an article of
diet which had been used in some of the oriental sieges. The counsel at
first was rejected as coming from the agent of Spain, who wished at all
hazards to save the capital of France from falling out of the hands of
his master into those of the heretic. But dire necessity prevailed, and
the bones of the dead were taken in considerable quantities from the
cemeteries, ground into flour, baked into bread, and consumed. It was
called Madame Montpensier's cake, because the duchess earnestly
proclaimed its merits to the poor Parisians. "She was never known to
taste it herself, however," bitterly observed one who lived in Paris
through that horrible summer. She was right to abstain, for all who ate
of it died, and the Montpensier flour fell into disuse.

Lansquenets and other soldiers, mad with hunger and rage, when they could
no longer find dogs to feed on, chased children through the streets, and
were known in several instances to kill and devour them on the spot.  To
those expressing horror at the perpetration of such a crime, a leading
personage, member of the Council of Nine, maintained that there was less
danger to one's soul in satisfying one's hunger with a dead child, in
case of necessity, than in recognizing the heretic Bearnese, and he added
that all the best theologians and doctors of Paris were of his opinion.

As the summer wore on to its close, through all these horrors, and as
there were still no signs of Mayenne and Parma leading their armies to
the relief of the city, it became necessary to deceive the people by a
show of negotiation with the beleaguering army. Accordingly, the Spanish
ambassador, the legate, and the other chiefs of the Holy League appointed
a deputation, consisting of the Cardinal Gondy, the Archbishop of Lyons,
and the Abbe d'Elbene, to Henry. It soon became evident to the king,
however, that these commissioners were but trifling with him in order to
amuse the populace. His attitude was dignified and determined throughout
the interview. The place appointed was St. Anthony's Abbey, before the
gates of Paris. Henry wore a cloak and the order of the Holy Ghost, and
was surrounded by his council, the princes of the blood, and by more than
four hundred of the chief gentlemen of his army. After passing the
barricade, the deputies were received by old Marshal Biron, and conducted
by him to the king's chamber of state. When they had made their
salutations, the king led the way to an inner cabinet, but his progress
was much impeded by the crowding of the nobles about him. Wishing to
excuse this apparent rudeness, he said to the envoys: "Gentlemen, these
men thrust me on as fast to the battle against the foreigner as they now
do to my cabinet. Therefore bear with them." Then turning to the crowd,
he said: "Room, gentlemen, for the love of me," upon which they all
retired.

The deputies then stated that they had been sent by the authorities of
Paris to consult as to the means of obtaining a general peace in France.
They expressed the hope that the king's disposition was favourable to
this end, and that he would likewise permit them to confer with the Duke
of Mayenne. This manner of addressing him excited his choler. He told
Cardinal Gondy, who was spokesman of the deputation, that he had long
since answered such propositions. He alone could deal with his subjects.
He was like the woman before Solomon; he would have all the child or none
of it. Rather than dismember his kingdom he would lose the whole. He
asked them what they considered him to be. They answered that they knew
his rights, but that the Parisians had different opinions. If Paris would
only acknowledge him to be king there could be no more question of war.
He asked them if they desired the King of Spain or the Duke of Mayenne
for their king, and bade them look well to themselves. The King of Spain
could not help them, for he had too much business on hand; while Mayenne
had neither means nor courage, having been within three leagues of them
for three weeks doing nothing. Neither king nor duke should have that
which belonged to him, of that they might be assured. He told them he
loved Paris as his capital, as his eldest daughter. If the Parisians
wished to see the end of their miseries it was to him they should appeal,
not to the Spaniard nor to the Duke of Mayenne. By the grace of God and
the swords of his brave gentlemen he would prevent the King of Spain from
making a colony of France as he had done of Brazil. He told the
commissioners that they ought to die of shame that they, born Frenchmen,
should have so forgotten their love of country and of liberty as thus to
bow the head to the Spaniard, and--while famine was carrying off
thousands of their countrymen before their eyes--to be so cowardly as not
to utter one word for the public welfare from fear of offending Cardinal.
Gaetano, Mendoza, and Moreo. He said that he longed for a combat to
decide the issue, and that he had charged Count de Brissac to tell
Mayenne that he would give a finger of his right hand for a battle, and
two for a general peace. He knew and pitied the sufferings of Paris, but
the horrors now raging there were to please the King of Spain. That
monarch had told the Duke of Parma to trouble himself but little about
the Netherlands so long as he could preserve for him his city of Paris.
But it was to lean on a broken reed to expect support from this old,
decrepit king, whose object was to dismember the flourishing kingdom of
France, and to divide it among as many tyrants as he had sent viceroys to
the Indies. The crown was his own birthright. Were it elective he should
receive the suffrages of the great mass of the electors. He hoped soon to
drive those red-crossed foreigners out of his kingdom. Should he fail,
they would end by expelling the Duke of Mayenne and all the rest who had
called them in, and Paris would become the theatre of the bloodiest
tragedy ever yet enacted. The king then ordered Sir Roger Williams to see
that a collation was prepared for the deputies, and the veteran Welshman
took occasion to indulge in much blunt conversation with the guests. He
informed them that he, Mr. Sackville, and many other strangers were
serving the king from the hatred they bore the Spaniards and Mother
League, and that his royal mistress had always 8000 Englishmen ready to
maintain the cause.

While the conferences were going on, the officers and soldiers of the
besieging army thronged to the gate, and had much talk with the townsmen.
Among others, time-honoured La None with the iron arm stood near the gate
and harangued the Parisians. "We are here," said he, "five thousand
gentlemen; we desire your good, not your ruin. We will make you rich: let
us participate in your labour and industry. Undo not yourselves to serve
the ambition of a few men." The townspeople hearing the old warrior
discoursing thus earnestly, asked who he was. When informed that it was
La Noue they cheered him vociferously, and applauded his speech with the
greatest vehemence. Yet La Noue was the foremost Huguenot that the sun
shone upon, and the Parisians were starving themselves to death out of
hatred to heresy. After the collation the commissioners were permitted to
go from the camp in order to consult Mayenne.

Such then was the condition of Paris during that memorable summer of
tortures. What now were its hopes of deliverance out of this Gehenna? The
trust of Frenchmen was in Philip of Spain, whose legions, under command
of the great Italian chieftain, were daily longed for to save them from
rendering obedience to their lawful prince.

For even the king of straw--the imprisoned cardinal--was now dead, and
there was not even the effigy of any other sovereign than Henry of
Bourbon to claim authority in France. Mayenne, in the course of long
interviews with the Duke of Parma at Conde and Brussels, had expressed
his desire to see Philip king of France, and had promised his best
efforts to bring about such a result. In that case he stipulated for the
second place in the kingdom for himself, together with a good rich
province in perpetual sovereignty, and a large sum of money in hand.
Should this course not run smoothly, he would be willing to take the
crown himself, in which event he would cheerfully cede to Philip the
sovereignty of Brittany and Burgundy, besides a selection of cities to be
arranged for at a later day. Although he spoke of himself with modesty,
said Alexander, it was very plain that he meant to arrive at the crown
himself: Well had the Bearnese alluded to the judgment of Solomon. Were
not children, thus ready to dismember their mother, as foul and unnatural
as the mother who would divide her child?

And what was this dependence on a foreign tyrant really worth? As we look
back upon those dark days with the light of what was then the almost
immediate future turned full and glaring upon them, we find it difficult
to exaggerate the folly of the chief actors in those scenes of crime. Did
not the penniless adventurer, whose keen eyesight and wise recklessness
were passing for hallucination and foolhardiness in the eyes of his
contemporaries, understand the game he was playing better than did that
profound thinker, that mysterious but infallible politician, who sat in
the Escorial and made the world tremble at every hint of his lips, every
stroke of his pen?

The Netherlands--that most advanced portion of Philip's domain, without
the possession of which his conquest of England and his incorporation of
France were but childish visions, even if they were not monstrous
chimeras at best--were to be in a manner left to themselves, while their
consummate governor and general was to go forth and conquer France at the
head of a force with which he had been in vain attempting to hold those
provinces to their obedience. At that very moment the rising young
chieftain of the Netherlands was most successfully inaugurating his
career of military success. His armies well drilled, well disciplined,
well paid, full of heart and of hope, were threatening their ancient
enemy in every quarter, while the veteran legions of Spain and Italy,
heroes of a hundred Flemish and Frisian battle-fields, were disorganised,
starving, and mutinous. The famous ancient legion, the terzo viejo, had
been disbanded for its obstinate and confirmed unruliness. The legion of
Manrique, sixteen hundred strong, was in open mutiny at Courtray. Farnese
had sent the Prince of Ascoli to negotiate with them, but his attempts
were all in vain. Two years' arrearages--to be paid, not in cloth at four
times what the contractors had paid for it, but in solid gold--were their
not unreasonable demands after years of as hard fighting and severe
suffering as the world has often seen. But Philip, instead of ducats or
cloth, had only sent orders to go forth and conquer a new kingdom for
him. Verdugo, too, from Friesland was howling for money, garrotting and
hanging his mutinous veterans every day, and sending complaints and most
dismal forebodings as often as a courier could make his way through the
enemy's lines to Farnese's headquarters. And Farnese, on his part, was
garrotting and hanging the veterans.

Alexander did not of course inform his master that he was a mischievous
lunatic, who upon any healthy principle of human government ought long
ago to have been shut up from all communion with his species. It was very
plain, however, from his letters, that such was his innermost, thought,
had it been safe, loyal, or courteous to express it in plain language.

He was himself stung almost to madness moreover by the presence of
Commander Moreo, who hated him, who was perpetually coming over from
France to visit him, who was a spy upon all his actions, and who was
regularly distilling his calumnies into the ears of Secretary Idiaquez
and of Philip himself. The king was informed that Farnese was working for
his own ends, and was disgusted with his sovereign; that there never had
been a petty prince of Italy that did not wish to become a greater one,
or that was not jealous of Philip's power, and that there was not a
villain in all Christendom but wished for Philip's death. Moreo followed
the prince about to Antwerp, to Brussels, to Spa, whither he had gone to
drink the waters for his failing health, pestered him, lectured him,
pried upon him, counselled him, enraged him. Alexander told him at last
that he cared not if the whole world came to an end so long as Flanders
remained, which alone had been entrusted to him, and that if he was
expected to conquer France it would be as well to give him the means of
performing that exploit. So Moreo told the king that Alexander was
wasting time and wasting money, that he was the cause of Egmont's
overthrow, and that he would be the cause of the loss of Paris and of the
downfall of the whole French scheme; for that he was determined to do
nothing to assist Mayenne, or that did not conduce to his private
advantage.

Yet Farnese had been not long before informed in sufficiently plain
language, and by personages of great influence, that in case he wished to
convert his vice-royalty of the Netherlands into a permanent sovereignty,
he might rely on the assistance of Henry of Navarre, and perhaps of Queen
Elizabeth. The scheme would not have been impracticable, but the duke
never listened to it for a moment.

If he were slow in advancing to the relief of starving, agonising Paris,
there were sufficient reasons for his delay. Most decidedly and bitterly,
but loyally, did he denounce the madness of his master's course in all
his communications to that master's private ear.

He told him that the situation in which he found himself was horrible. He
had no money for his troops, he had not even garrison bread to put in
their mouths. He had not a single stiver to advance them on account. From
Friesland, from the Rhine country, from every quarter, cries of distress
were rising to heaven, and the lamentations were just. He was in absolute
penury. He could not negotiate a bill on the royal account, but had
borrowed on his own private security a few thousand crowns which he had
given to his soldiers. He was pledging his jewels and furniture like a
bankrupt, but all was now in vain to stop the mutiny at Courtray. If that
went on it would be of most pernicious example, for the whole army was
disorganised, malcontent, and of portentous aspect. "These things," said
he, "ought not to surprise people of common understanding, for without
money, without credit, without provisions, and in an exhausted country,
it is impossible to satisfy the claims, or even to support the life of
the army." When he sent the Flemish cavalry to Mayenne in March, it was
under the impression that with it that prince would have maintained his
reputation and checked the progress of the Bearnese until greater
reinforcements could be forwarded. He was now glad that no larger number
had been sent, for all would have been sacrificed on the fatal field of
Ivry.

The country around him was desperate, believed itself abandoned, and was
expecting fresh horrors everyday. He had been obliged to remove portions
of the garrisons at Deventer and Zutphen purely to save them from
starving and desperation. Every day he was informed by his garrisons that
they could feed no longer on fine words or hopes, for in them they found
no sustenance.

But Philip told him that he must proceed forthwith to France, where he
was to raise the siege of Paris, and occupy Calais and Boulogne in order
to prevent the English from sending succour to the Bearnese, and in order
to facilitate his own designs on England. Every effort was to be made
before the Bearnese climbed into the seat. The Duke of Parma was to talk
no more of difficulties, but to conquer them; a noble phrase on the
battle field, but comparatively easy of utterance at the writing-desk!

At last, Philip having made some remittances, miserably inadequate for
the necessities of the case, but sufficient to repress in part the
mutinous demonstrations throughout the army, Farnese addressed himself
with a heavy heart to the work required of him. He confessed the deepest
apprehensions of the result both in the Netherlands and in France. He
intimated a profound distrust of the French, who had, ever been Philip's
enemies, and dwelt on the danger of leaving the provinces, unable to
protect themselves, badly garrisoned, and starving. "It grieves me to the
soul, it cuts me to the heart," he said, "to see that your Majesty
commands things which are impossible, for it is our Lord alone that can
work miracles. Your Majesty supposes that with the little money you have
sent me, I can satisfy all the soldiers serving in these provinces,
settle with the Spanish and the German mutineers--because, if they are to
be used in the expedition, they must at least be quieted--give money to
Mayenne and the Parisians, pay retaining wages (wartgeld) to the German
Riders for the protection of these provinces, and make sure of the
maritime places where the same mutinous language is held as at Courtray.
The poverty, the discontent, and the desperation of this unhappy
country," he added, "have, been so often described to your Majesty that I
have nothing to add. I am hanging and garrotting my veterans everywhere,
only because they have rebelled for want of pay without committing any
excess. Yet under these circumstances I am to march into France with
twenty thousand troops--the least number to effect anything withal. I am
confused and perplexed because the whole world is exclaiming against me,
and protesting that through my desertion the country entrusted to my care
will come to utter perdition. On the other hand, the French cry out upon
me that I am the cause that Paris is going to destruction, and with it
the Catholic cause in France. Every one is pursuing his private ends. It
is impossible to collect a force strong enough for the necessary work.
Paris has reached its extreme unction, and neither Mayenne nor any one of
the confederates has given this invalid the slightest morsel to support
her till your Majesty's forces should arrive."

He reminded his sovereign that the country around Paris was eaten bare of
food and forage, and yet that it was quite out of the question for him to
undertake the transportation of supplies for his army all the
way--supplies from the starving Netherlands to starving France. Since the
king was so peremptory, he had nothing for it but to obey, but he
vehemently disclaimed all responsibility for the expedition, and, in case
of his death, he called on his Majesty to vindicate his honour, which his
enemies were sure to assail.

The messages from Mayenne becoming daily more pressing, Farnese hastened
as much as possible those preparations which at best were so woefully
inadequate, and avowed his determination not to fight the Bearnese if it
were possible to avoid an action. He feared, however, that with totally
insufficient forces he should be obliged to accept the chances of an
engagement.

With twelve thousand foot and three thousand horse Farnese left the
Netherlands in the beginning of August, and arrived on the 3rd of that
month at Valenciennes. His little army, notwithstanding his bitter
complaints, was of imposing appearance. The archers and halberdiers of
his bodyguard were magnificent in taffety and feathers and surcoats of
cramoisy velvet. Four hundred nobles served in the cavalry. Arenberg and
Barlaymont and Chimay, and other grandees of the Netherlands, in company
with Ascoli and the sons of Terranova and Pastrana, and many more great
lords of Italy and Spain were in immediate attendance on the illustrious
captain. The son of Philip's Secretary of State, Idiaquez, and the nephew
of the cardinal-legate, Gaetano, were among the marshals of the camp.

Alexander's own natural authority and consummate powers of organisation
had for the time triumphed over the disintegrating tendencies which, it
had been seen, were everywhere so rapidly destroying the foremost
military establishment of the world. Nearly half his forces, both cavalry
and infantry, were Netherlanders; for--as if there were not graves enough
in their own little territory--those Flemings, Walloons, and Hollanders
were destined to leave their bones on both sides of every well-stricken
field of that age between liberty and despotism. And thus thousands of
them had now gone forth under the banner of Spain to assist their own
tyrant in carrying out his designs upon the capital of France, and to
struggle to the death with thousands of their own countrymen who were
following the fortunes of the Bearnese. Truly in that age it was religion
that drew the boundary line between nations.

The army was divided into three portions. The vanguard was under the
charge of the Netherland General, Marquis of Renty. The battalia was
commanded by Farnese in person, and the rearguard was entrusted to that
veteran Netherlander, La Motte, now called the Count of Everbeck. Twenty
pieces of artillery followed the last division. At Valenciennes Farnese
remained eight days, and from this place Count Charles Mansfeld took his
departure in a great rage--resigning his post as chief of artillery
because La Motte had received the appointment of general-marshal of the
camp--and returned to his father, old Peter Ernest Mansfeld, who was
lieutenant-governor of the Netherlands in Parma's absence.

Leaving Valenciennes on the 11th, the army proceeded by way of Quesney,
Guise, Soissons, Fritemilon to Meaux. At this place, which is ten leagues
from Paris, Farnese made his junction, on the 22nd of August, with
Mayenne, who was at the head of six thousand infantry--one half of them
Germans under Cobalto, and the other half French--and of two thousand
horse.

On arriving at Meaux, Alexander proceeded straightway to the cathedral,
and there, in presence of all, he solemnly swore that he had not come to
France in order to conquer that kingdom or any portion of it, in the
interests of his master, but only to render succour to the Catholic cause
and to free the friends and confederates of his Majesty from violence and
heretic oppression. Time was to show the value of that oath.

Here the deputation from Paris--the Archbishop of Lyons and his
colleagues, whose interview with Henry has just been narrated--were
received by the two dukes. They departed, taking with them promises of
immediate relief for the starving city. The allies remained five days at
Meaux, and leaving that place on the 27th, arrived in the neighbourhood
of Chelles, on the last day but one of the summer. They had a united
force of five thousand cavalry and eighteen thousand foot.

The summer of horrors was over, and thus with the first days of autumn
there had come a ray of hope for the proud city which was lying at its
last gasp. When the allies, came in sight of the monastery of Chellea
they found themselves in the immediate neighbourhood of the Bearnese.

The two great captains of the age had at last met face to face. They were
not only the two first commanders of their time, but there was not a man
in Europe at that day to be at all compared with either of them. The
youth, concerning whose earliest campaign an account will be given in the
following chapter, had hardly yet struck his first blow. Whether that
blow was to reveal the novice or the master was soon to be seen. Meantime
in 1590 it would have been considered a foolish adulation to mention the
name of Maurice of Nassau in the same breath with that of Navarre or of
Farnese.

The scientific duel which was now to take place was likely to task the
genius and to bring into full display the peculiar powers and defects of
the two chieftains of Europe. Each might be considered to be still in the
prime of life, but Alexander, who was turned of forty-five, was already
broken in health, while the vigorous Henry was eight years younger, and
of an iron constitution. Both had passed then lives in the field, but the
king, from nature, education, and the force of circumstances, preferred
pitched battles to scientific combinations, while the duke, having
studied and practised his art in the great Spanish and Italian schools of
warfare, was rather a profound strategist than a professional fighter,
although capable of great promptness and intense personal energy when his
judgment dictated a battle. Both were born with that invaluable gift
which no human being can acquire, authority, and both were adored and
willingly obeyed by their soldiers, so long as those soldiers were paid
and fed.

The prize now to be contended for was a high one. Alexander's complete
success would tear from Henry's grasp the first city of Christendom, now
sinking exhausted into his hands, and would place France in the power of
the Holy League and at the feet of Philip. Another Ivry would shatter the
confederacy, and carry the king in triumph to his capital and his
ancestral throne. On the approach of the combined armies under Parma and
Mayenne, the king had found himself most reluctantly compelled to suspend
the siege of Paris. His army, which consisted of sixteen thousand foot
and five thousand horse, was not sufficiently numerous to confront at the
same time the relieving force and to continue the operations before the
city. So long, however, as he held the towns and bridges on the great
rivers, and especially those keys to the Seine and Marne, Corbeil and
Lagny, he still controlled the life-blood of the capital, which indeed
had almost ceased to flow.

On the 31st August he advanced towards the enemy. Sir Edward Stafford,
Queen Elizabeth's ambassador, arrived at St. Denis in the night of the
30th August. At a very early hour next morning he heard a shout under his
window, and looking down beheld King Henry at the head of his troops,
cheerfully calling out to his English friend as he passed his door.
"Welcoming us after his familiar manner," said Stafford, "he desired us,
in respect of the battle every hour expected, to come as his friends to
see and help him, and not to treat of anything which afore, we meant,
seeing the present state to require it, and the enemy so near that we
might well have been interrupted in half-an-hour's talk, and necessity
constrained the king to be in every corner, where for the most part we
follow him."

That day Henry took up his headquarters at the monastery of Chelles, a
fortified place within six leagues of Paris, on the right bank of the
Marne. His army was drawn up in a wide valley somewhat encumbered with
wood and water, extending through a series of beautiful pastures towards
two hills of moderate elevation. Lagny, on the left bank of the river,
was within less than a league of him on his right hand. On the other side
of the hills, hardly out of cannon-shot, was the camp of the allies.
Henry, whose natural disposition in this respect needed no prompting, was
most eager for a decisive engagement. The circumstances imperatively
required it of him. His infantry consisted of Frenchmen, Netherlanders,
English, Germans, Scotch; but of his cavalry four thousand were French
nobles, serving at their own expense, who came to a battle as to a
banquet, but who were capable of riding off almost as rapidly, should the
feast be denied them. They were volunteers, bringing with them rations
for but a few days, and it could hardly be expected that they would
remain as patiently as did Parma's veterans, who, now that their mutiny
had been appeased by payment of a portion of their arrearages, had become
docile again. All the great chieftains who surrounded Henry, whether
Catholic or Protestant--Montpensier, Nevers, Soissons, Conti, the Birons,
Lavradin, d'Aumont, Tremouille, Turenne, Chatillon, La Noue--were urgent
for the conflict, concerning the expediency of which there could indeed
be no doubt, while the king was in raptures at the opportunity of dealing
a decisive blow at the confederacy of foreigners and rebels who had so
long defied his authority and deprived him of his rights.

Stafford came up with the king, according to his cordial invitation, on
the same day, and saw the army all drawn up in battle array. While Henry
was "eating a morsel in an old house," Turenne joined him with six or
seven hundred horsemen and between four and five thousand infantry. "They
were the likeliest footmen," said Stafford, "the best countenanced, the
best furnished that ever I saw in my life; the best part of them old
soldiers that had served under the king for the Religion all this while."

The envoy was especially enthusiastic, however, in regard to the French
cavalry. "There are near six thousand horse," said he, "whereof gentlemen
above four thousand, about twelve hundred other French, and eight hundred
reiters. I never saw, nor I think never any man saw, in prance such a
company of gentlemen together so well horsed and so well armed."

Henry sent a herald to the camp of the allies, formally challenging them
to a general engagement, and expressing a hope that all differences might
now be settled by the ordeal of battle, rather than that the sufferings
of the innocent people should be longer protracted.

Farnese, on arriving at Meaux, had resolved to seek the enemy and take
the hazards of a stricken field. He had misgivings as to the possible
result, but he expressly announced this intention in his letters to
Philip, and Mayenne confirmed him in his determination. Nevertheless,
finding the enemy so eager and having reflected more maturely, he saw no
reason for accepting the chivalrous cartel. As commanderin-chief--for
Mayenne willingly conceded the supremacy which it would have been absurd
in him to dispute--he accordingly replied that it was his custom to
refuse a combat when a refusal seemed advantageous to himself, and to
offer battle whenever it suited his purposes to fight. When that moment
should arrive the king would find him in the field. And, having sent this
courteous, but unsatisfactory answer to the impatient Bearnese, he gave
orders to fortify his camp, which was already sufficiently strong. Seven
days long the two armies lay face to face--Henry and his chivalry chafing
in vain for the longed-for engagement--and nothing occurred between those
forty or fifty thousand mortal enemies, encamped within a mile or two of
each other, save trifling skirmishes leading to no result.

At last Farnese gave orders for an advance. Renty, commander of the
vanguard, consisting of nearly all the cavalry, was instructed to move
slowly forward over the two hills, and descending on the opposite side,
to deploy his forces in two great wings to the right and left. He was
secretly directed in this movement to magnify as much as possible the
apparent dimensions of his force. Slowly the columns moved over the
hills. Squadron after squadron, nearly all of them lancers, with their
pennons flaunting gaily in the summer wind, displayed themselves
deliberately and ostentatiously in the face of the Royalists. The
splendid light-horse of Basti, the ponderous troopers of the Flemish
bands of ordnance under Chimay and Berlaymont, and the famous Albanian
and Italian cavalry, were mingled with the veteran Leaguers of France who
had fought under the Balafre, and who now followed the fortunes of his
brother Mayenne. It was an imposing demonstration.

Henry could hardly believe his eyes as the much-coveted opportunity, of
which he had been so many days disappointed, at last presented itself,
and he waited with more than his usual caution until the plan of attack
should be developed by his great antagonist. Parma, on his side, pressed
the hand of Mayenne as he watched the movement, saying quietly, "We have
already fought our battle and gained the victory." He then issued orders
for the whole battalia--which, since the junction, had been under command
of Mayenne, Farnese reserving for himself the superintendence of the
entire army--to countermarch rapidly towards the Marne and take up a
position opposite Lagny. La Motte, with the rearguard, was directed
immediately to follow. The battalia had thus become the van, the
rearguard the battalia, while the whole cavalry corps by this movement
had been transformed from the vanguard into the rear. Renty was
instructed to protect his manoeuvres, to restrain the skirmishing as much
as possible, and to keep the commander-in-chief constantly informed of
every occurrence. In the night he was to entrench and fortify himself
rapidly and thoroughly, without changing his position.

Under cover of this feigned attack, Farnese arrived at the river side on
the 15th September, seized an open village directly opposite Lagny, which
was connected with it by a stone bridge, and planted a battery of nine
pieces of heavy artillery directly opposite the town. Lagny was fortified
in the old-fashioned manner, with not very thick walls, and without a
terreplain. Its position, however, and its command of the bridge, seemed
to render an assault impossible, and De la Fin, who lay there with a
garrison of twelve hundred French, had no fear for the security of the
place. But Farnese, with the precision and celerity which characterized
his movements on special occasions, had thrown pontoon bridges across the
river three miles above, and sent a considerable force of Spanish and
Walloon infantry to the other side. These troops were ordered to hold
themselves ready for an assault, so soon as the batteries opposite should
effect a practicable breach. The next day Henry, reconnoitering the
scene, saw, with intense indignation, that he had been completely
out-generalled. Lagny, the key to the Marne, by holding which he had
closed the door on nearly all the food supplies for Paris, was about to
be wrested from him. What should he do? Should he throw himself across
the river and rescue the place before it fell? This was not to be thought
of even by the audacious Bearnese. In the attempt to cross the river,
under the enemy's fire, he was likely to lose a large portion of his
army. Should he fling himself upon Renty's division which had so
ostentatiously offered battle the day before? This at least might be
attempted, although not so advantageously as would have been the case on
the previous afternoon. To undertake this was the result of a rapid
council of generals. It was too late. Renty held the hills so firmly
entrenched and fortified that it was an idle hope to carry them by
assault. He might hurl column after column against those heights, and
pass the day in seeing his men mowed to the earth without result.

His soldiers, magnificent in the open field, could not be relied upon to
carry so strong a position by sudden storm; and there was no time to be
lost. He felt the enemy a little. There was some small skirmishing, and
while it was going on, Farnese opened a tremendous fire across the river
upon Lagny. The weak walls soon crumbled; a breach was effected, the
signal for assault was given, and the troops posted on the other side,
after a brief but sanguinary straggle, overcame all, resistance, and were
masters of the town. The whole garrison, twelve hundred strong, was
butchered, and the city thoroughly sacked; for Farnese had been brought
up in the old-fashioned school of Alva; and Julian Romero and Com-.
wander Requesens.

Thus Lagny was seized before the eyes of Henry, who was forced to look
helplessly on his great antagonist's triumph. He had come forth in full
panoply and abounding confidence to offer battle. He was foiled of his
combat; and he had lost the prize. Never was blow more successfully
parried, a counter-stroke more ingeniously planted. The bridges of
Charenton and St. Maur now fell into Farnese's hands without a contest.
In an incredibly short space of time provisions and munitions were poured
into the starving city; two thousand boat-loads arriving in a single day.
Paris was relieved. Alexander had made his demonstration, and solved the
problem. He had left the Netherlands against his judgment, but he had at
least accomplished his French work as none but he could have done it. The
king was now in worse plight than ever. His army fell to pieces. His
cavaliers, cheated of their battle; and having neither food nor forage,
rode off by hundreds every day. "Our state is such," said Stafford; on
the 16th September, "and so far unexpected and wonderful, that I am
almost ashamed to write, because methinks everybody should think I dream.
Myself seeing of it methinketh that I dream. For, my lord, to see an army
such a one I think as I shall never see again--especially for horsemen
and gentlemen to take a mind to disband upon the taking of such a paltry
thing as Lagny, a town no better indeed than Rochester, it is a thing so
strange to me that seeing of it I can scarce believe it. They make their
excuses of their want, which I know indeed is great--for there were few
left with one penny in their purses--but yet that extremity could not be
such but that they might have tarried ten days or fifteen at the most
that the king desired of them. . . . From six thousand horse that we
were and above, we are come to two thousand and I do not see an end of
our leave-takers, for those be hourly.

"The most I can see we can make account of to tarry are the Viscount
Turenne's troops, and Monsieur de Chatillon's, and our Switzers, and
Lanaquenettes, which make very near five thousand. The first that went
away, though he sent word to the king an hour before he would tarry, was
the Count Soissons, by whose parting on a sudden and without leave-taking
we judge a discontentment."

The king's army seemed fading into air. Making virtue of necessity he
withdrew to St. Denis, and decided to disband his forces, reserving to
himself only a flying camp with which to harass the enemy as often as
opportunity should offer.

It must be confessed that the Bearnese had been thoroughly
out-generalled. "It was not God's will," said Stafford, who had been in
constant attendance upon Henry through the whole business; "we deserved
it not; for the king might as easily have had Paris as drunk, four or
five times. And at the last, if he had not committed those faults that
children would not have done, only with the desire to fight and give the
battle (which the other never meant), he had had it in the Duke of
Parma's eight as he took Lagny in ours." He had been foiled of the battle
on which he had set his heart, and, in which he felt confident of
overthrowing the great captain of the age, and trampling the League under
his feet. His capital just ready to sink exhausted into his hands had
been wrested from his grasp, and was alive with new hope and new
defiance. The League was triumphant, his own army scattering to the four
winds. Even a man of high courage and sagacity might have been in
despair. Yet never were the magnificent hopefulness, the wise audacity of
Henry more signally manifested than now when he seemed most blundering
and most forlorn. His hardy nature ever met disaster with so cheerful a
smile as almost to perplex disaster herself.

Unwilling to relinquish his grip without a last effort, he resolved on a
midnight assault upon Paris. Hoping that the joy at being relieved, the
unwonted feasting which had succeeded the long fasting, and the
consciousness of security from the presence of the combined armies of the
victorious League, would throw garrison and citizens off their guard, he
came into the neighbourhood of the Faubourgs St. Jacques, St. Germain,
St. Marcel, and St. Michel on the night of 9th September. A desperate
effort was made to escalade the walls between St. Jacques and St.
Germain. It was foiled, not by the soldiers nor the citizens, but by the
sleepless Jesuits, who, as often before during this memorable siege, had
kept guard on the ramparts, and who now gave the alarm. The first
assailants were hurled from their ladders, the city was roused, and the
Duke of Nemours was soon on the spot, ordering burning pitch hoops,
atones, and other missiles to be thrown down upon the invaders. The
escalade was baffled; yet once more that night, just before dawn, the
king in person renewed the attack on the Faubourg St. Germain. The
faithful Stafford stood by his side in the trenches, and was witness to
his cool determination, his indomitable hope. La None too was there, and
was wounded in the leg--an accident the results of which were soon to
cause much weeping through Christendom. Had one of those garlands of
blazing tar which all night had been fluttering from the walls of Paris
alighted by chance on the king's head there might have been another
history of France. The ladders, too, proved several feet too short, and
there were too few, of them. Had they been more numerous and longer, the
tale might have been a different one. As it was, the king was forced to
retire with the approaching daylight.

The characteristics of the great commander of the Huguenots and of the
Leaguers' chieftain respectively were well illustrated in several
incidents of this memorable campaign. Farnese had been informed by scouts
and spies of this intended assault by Henry on the walls of Paris. With
his habitual caution he discredited the story. Had he believed it, he
might have followed the king in overwhelming force and taken him captive.
The penalty of Henry's unparalleled boldness was thus remitted by
Alexander's exuberant discretion.

Soon afterwards Farnese laid siege to Corbeil. This little place--owing
to the extraordinary skill and determination of its commandant, Rigaut,
an old Huguenot officer, who had fought with La Noue in
Flanders--resisted for nearly four weeks. It was assaulted at last,
Rigaut killed, the garrison of one thousand French soldiers put to the
sword, and the town sacked. With the fall of Corbeil both the Seine and
Marne were re-opened.

Alexander then made a visit to Paris, where he was received with great
enthusiasm. The legate, whose efforts and whose money had so much
contributed to the successful defence of the capital had returned to
Italy to participate in the election of a new pope. For the "Huguenot
pope," Sixtus V., had died at the end of August, having never bestowed on
the League any of his vast accumulated treasures to help it in its utmost
need. It was not surprising that Philip was indignant, and had resorted
to menace of various kinds against the holy father, when he found him
swaying so perceptibly in the direction of the hated Bearnese. Of course
when he died his complaint was believed to be Spanish poison. In those
days, none but the very obscure were thought capable of dying natural
deaths, and Philip was esteemed too consummate an artist to allow so
formidable an adversary as Sixtus to pass away in God's time only.
Certainly his death was hailed as matter of great rejoicing by the
Spanish party in Rome, and as much ignominy bestowed upon his memory as
if he had been a heretic; while in Paris his decease was celebrated with
bonfires and other marks of popular hilarity.

To circumvent the great Huguenot's reconciliation with the Roman Church
was of course an indispensable portion of Philip's plan; for none could
be so dull as not to perceive that the resistance of Paris to its heretic
sovereign would cease to be very effective, so soon as the sovereign had
ceased to be heretic. It was most important therefore that the successor
of Sixtus should be the tool of Spain. The leading confederates were well
aware of Henry's intentions to renounce the reformed faith, and to return
to the communion of Rome whenever he could formally accomplish that
measure. The crafty Bearnese knew full well that the road to Paris lay
through the gates of Rome. Yet it is proof either of the privacy with
which great public matters were then transacted, or of the extraordinary
powers of deceit with which Henry was gifted, that the leaders of
protestantism were still hoodwinked in regard to his attitude.
Notwithstanding the embassy of Luxembourg, and the many other indications
of the king's intentions, Queen Elizabeth continued to regard him as the
great champion of the reformed faith. She had just sent him an emerald,
which she had herself worn, accompanied by the expression of her wish
that the king in wearing it might never strike a blow without demolishing
an enemy, and that in his farther progress he might put all his enemies
to rout and confusion. "You will remind the king, too," she added, "that
the emerald has this virtue, never to break so long as faith remains
entire and firm."

And the shrewd Stafford, who was in daily attendance upon him, informed
his sovereign that there were no symptoms of wavering on Henry's part.
"The Catholics here," said he, "cry hard upon the king to be a Catholic
or else that he is lost, and they would persuade him that for all their
calling in the Spaniards, both Paris and all other towns will yield to
him, if he will but assure them that he will become a Catholic. For my
part, I think they would laugh at him when he had done so, and so I find
he believeth the same, if he had mind to it, which I find no disposition
in him unto it." The not very distant future was to show what the
disposition of the bold Gascon really was in this great matter, and
whether he was likely to reap nothing but ridicule from his apostasy,
should it indeed become a fact. Meantime it was the opinion of the wisest
sovereign in Europe, and of one of the most adroit among her
diplomatists, that there was really nothing in the rumours as to the
king's contemplated conversion.

It was, of course, unfortunate for Henry that his staunch friend and
admirer Sixtus was no more. But English diplomacy could do but little in
Rome, and men were trembling with apprehension lest that arch-enemy of
Elizabeth, that devoted friend of Philip, the English Cardinal Allen,
should be elected to the papal throne. "Great ado is made in Rome," said
Stafford, "by the Spanish ambassador, by all corruptions and ways that
may be, to make a pope that must needs depend and be altogether at the
King of Spain's devotion. If the princes of Italy put not their hands
unto it, no doubt they will have their wills, and I fear greatly our
villainous Allen, for, in my judgment, I can comprehend no man more with
reason to be tied altogether to the King of Spain's will than he. I pray
God send him either to God or the Devil first. An evil-minded Englishman,
tied to the King of Spain by necessity, finding almost four millions of
money, is a dangerous beast for a pope in this time."

Cardinal Allen was doomed to disappointment. His candidacy was not
successful, and, after the brief reign--thirteen days long--of Urban VII,
Sfondrato wore the triple tiara with the title of Gregory XIV. Before the
year closed, that pontiff had issued a brief urging the necessity of
extirpating heresy in France, and of electing a Catholic king, and
asserting his determination to send to Paris--that bulwark of the
Catholic faith--not empty words alone but troops, to be paid fifteen
thousand crowns of gold each month, so long as the city should need
assistance. It was therefore probable that the great leader of the
Huguenots, now that he had been defeated by Farnese, and that his capital
was still loyal to the League, would obtain less favour--however
conscientiously he might instruct himself--from Gregory XIV. than he had
begun to find in the eyes of Sixtus after the triumph of Ivry.

Parma refreshed his army by a fortnight's repose, and early in November
determined on his return to the Netherlands. The Leaguers were aghast at
his decision, and earnestly besought him to remain. But the duke had
given them back their capital, and although this had been accomplished
without much bloodshed in their army or his own, sickness was now making
sad ravages among his troops, and there was small supply of food or
forage for such large forces as had now been accumulated, in the
neighbourhood of Paris. Moreover, dissensions were breaking out between
the Spaniards, Italians, and Netherlanders of the relieving army with
their French allies. The soldiers and peasants hated the foreigners who
came there as victors, even although to assist the Leaguers in
overthrowing the laws, government, and nationality of France. The
stragglers and wounded on Farnese's march were killed by the country
people in considerable numbers, and it was a pure impossibility for him
longer to delay his return to the provinces which so much against his
will he had deserted.

He marched back by way of Champagne rather than by that of Picardy, in
order to deceive the king. Scarcely had he arrived in Champagne when he
heard of the retaking of Lagny and Corbeil. So soon as his back was
turned, the League thus showed its impotence to retain the advantage
which his genius had won. Corbeil, which had cost him a month of hard
work, was recaptured in two days. Lagny fell almost as quickly. Earnestly
did the confederates implore him to return to their rescue, but he
declined almost contemptuously to retrace his steps. His march was
conducted in the same order and with the same precision which--had marked
his advance. Henry, with his flying camp, hung upon his track, harassing
him now in front, now in rear, now in flank. None of the skirmishes were
of much military importance. A single cavalry combat, however, in which
old Marshal Biron was nearly surrounded and was in imminent danger of
death or capture, until chivalrously rescued by the king in person at the
head of a squadron of lancers, will always possess romantic interest. In
a subsequent encounter, near Baroges on the Yesle, Henry had sent Biron
forward with a few companies of horse to engage some five hundred
carabineers of Farnese on their march towards the frontier, and had
himself followed close upon the track with his usual eagerness to witness
or participate in every battle. Suddenly Alphonse Corse, who rode at
Henry's aide, pointed out to him, not more than a hundred paces off, an
officer wearing a felt hat, a great ruff, and a little furred cassock,
mounted on a horse without armour or caparisons, galloping up and down
and brandishing his sword at the carabineers to compel them to fall back.

This was the Duke of Parma, and thus the two great champions of the
Huguenots and of the Leaguers--the two foremost captains of the age--had
met face to face. At that moment La Noue, riding up, informed the king
that he had seen the whole of the enemy's horse and foot in battle array,
and Henry, suspecting the retreat of Farnese to be a feint for the
purpose of luring him on with his small force to an attack, gave orders
to retire as soon as possible.

At Guise, on the frontier, the duke parted with Mayenne, leaving with him
an auxiliary force of four thousand foot and five hundred horse, which he
could ill spare. He then returned to Brussels, which city he reached on
the 4th December, filling every hotel and hospital with his sick
soldiers, and having left one-third of his numbers behind him. He had
manifested his own military skill in the adroit and successful manner in
which he had accomplished the relief of Paris, while the barrenness of
the result from the whole expedition vindicated the political sagacity
with which he had remonstrated against his sovereign's infatuation.

Paris, with the renewed pressure on its two great arteries at Lagny and
Corbeil, soon fell into as great danger as before; the obedient
Netherlands during the absence of Farnese had been sinking rapidly to
ruin, while; on the other hand, great progress and still greater
preparations in aggressive warfare had been made by the youthful general
and stadtholder of the Republic.

     ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

     Alexander's exuberant discretion
     Divine right of kings
     Ever met disaster with so cheerful a smile
     Future world as laid down by rival priesthoods
     Invaluable gift which no human being can acquire, authority
     King was often to be something much less or much worse
     Magnificent hopefulness
     Myself seeing of it methinketh that I dream
     Nothing cheap, said a citizen bitterly, but sermons
     Obscure were thought capable of dying natural deaths
     Philip II. gave the world work enough
     Righteous to kill their own children
     Road to Paris lay through the gates of Rome
     Shift the mantle of religion from one shoulder to the other
     Thirty-three per cent. interest was paid (per month)
     Under the name of religion (so many crimes)




CHAPTER XXIV. 1590-1592

   Prince Maurice--State of the Republican army--Martial science of the
   period--Reformation of the military system by Prince Maurice--His
   military genius--Campaign in the Netherlands--The fort and town of
   Zutphen taken by the States' forces--Attack upon Deventer--Its
   capitulation--Advance on Groningen, Delfzyl, Opslag, Yementil,
   Steenwyk, and other places--Farnese besieges Fort Knodsenburg--
   Prince Maurice hastens to its relief--A skirmish ensues resulting in
   the discomfiture of the Spanish and Italian troops--Surrender of
   Hulat and Nymegen--Close of military, operations of the year.

While the events revealed in the last chapter had been occupying the
energies of Farnese and the resources of his sovereign, there had been
ample room for Prince Maurice to mature his projects, and to make a
satisfactory beginning in the field. Although Alexander had returned to
the Netherlands before the end of the year 1590, and did not set forth on
his second French campaign until late in the following year, yet the
condition of his health, the exhaustion of his funds, and the dwindling
of his army, made it impossible for him to render any effectual
opposition to the projects of the youthful general.

For the first time Maurice was ready to put his theories and studies into
practice on an extensive scale. Compared with modern armaments, the
warlike machinery to be used for liberating the republic from its foreign
oppressors would seem almost diminutive. But the science and skill of a
commander are to be judged by the results he can work out with the
materials within reach. His progress is to be measured by a comparison
with the progress of his contemporaries--coheirs with him of what Time
had thus far bequeathed.

The regular army of the republic, as reconstructed, was but ten thousand
foot and two thousand horse, but it was capable of being largely expanded
by the trainbands of the cities, well disciplined and enured to hardship,
and by the levies of German reiters and other, foreign auxiliaries in
such numbers as could be paid for by the hard-pressed exchequer of the
provinces.

To the state-council, according to its original constitution, belonged
the levying and disbanding of troops, the conferring of military offices,
and the supervision of military operations by sea and land. It was its
duty to see that all officers made oath of allegiance to the United
Provinces.

The course of Leicester's administration, and especially the fatal
treason of Stanley and of York, made it seem important for the true
lovers of their country to wrest from the state-council, where the
English had two seats, all political and military power. And this, as has
been seen, was practically but illegally accomplished. The silent
revolution by which at this epoch all the main attributes of government
passed into the hands of the States-General-acting as a league of
sovereignties--has already been indicated. The period during which the
council exercised functions conferred on it by the States-General
themselves was brief and evanescent. The jealousy of the separate
provinces soon prevented the state-council--a supreme executive body
entrusted with the general defence of the commonwealth--from causing
troops to pass into or out of one province or another without a patent
from his Excellency the Prince, not as chief of the whole army, but as
governor and captain-general of Holland, or Gelderland, or Utrecht, as
the case might be.

The highest military office in the Netherlands was that of
captain-general or supreme commander. This quality was from earliest
times united to that of stadholder, who stood, as his title implied, in
the place of the reigning sovereign, whether count, duke, king, or
emperor. After the foundation of the Republic this dynastic form, like
many others, remained, and thus Prince Maurice was at first only
captain-general of Holland and Zeeland, and subsequently of Gelderland,
Utrecht, and Overyssel, after he had been appointed stadholder of those
three provinces in 1590 on the death of Count Nieuwenaar. However much in
reality he was general-in-chief of the army, he never in all his life
held the appointment of captain-general of the Union.

To obtain a captain's commission in the army, it was necessary to have
served four years, while three years' service was the necessary
preliminary to the post of lieutenant or ensign. Three candidates were
presented by the province for each office, from whom the stadholder
appointed one.--The commissions, except those of the highest commanders,
were made out in the name of the States-General, by advice and consent of
the council of state. The oath of allegiance, exacted from soldiers as
well as officers; mentioned the name of the particular province to which
they belonged, as well as that of the States-Generals. It thus appears
that, especially after Maurice's first and successful campaigns; the
supreme authority over the army really belonged to the States-General,
and that the powers of the state-council in this regard fell, in the
course of four years, more and more into the back-ground, and at last
disappeared almost entirely. During the active period of the war,
however; the effect of this revolution was in fact rather a greater
concentration of military power than its dispersion, for the
States-General meant simply the province of Holland. Holland was the
republic.

The organisation of the infantry was very simple. The tactical unit was
the company. A temporary combination of several companies--made a
regiment, commanded by a colonel or lieutenant-colonel, but for such
regiments there was no regular organisation. Sometimes six or seven
companies were thus combined, sometimes three times that number, but the
strength of a force, however large, was always estimated by the number of
companies, not of regiments.

The normal strength of an infantry company, at the beginning of Maurice's
career, may be stated at one hundred and thirteen, commanded by one
captain, one lieutenant, one ensign, and by the usual non-commissioned
officers. Each company was composed of musketeers, harquebusseers,
pikemen, halberdeers, and buckler-men. Long after, portable firearms had
come into use, the greater portion of foot soldiers continued to be armed
with pikes, until the introduction of the fixed bayonet enabled the
musketeer to do likewise the duty of pikeman. Maurice was among the first
to appreciate the advantage of portable firearms, and he accordingly
increased the proportion of soldiers armed with the musket in his
companies. In a company of a hundred and thirteen, including officers, he
had sixty-four armed with firelocks to thirty carrying pikes and
halberds. As before his time the proportion between the arms had been
nearly even; he thus more than doubled the number of firearms.

Of these weapons there were two sorts, the musket and the harquebus. The
musket was a long, heavy, unmanageable instrument. When fired it
was-placed upon an iron gaffle or fork, which: the soldier carried with
him, and stuck before him into the ground. The bullets of the musket were
twelve to the pound.

The harquebus--or hak-bus, hook-gun, so called because of the hook in the
front part of the barrel to give steadiness in firing--was much lighter,
was discharged from the hand; and carried bullets of twenty-four to the
pound. Both weapons had matchlocks.

The pike was eighteen feet long at least, and pikemen as well as
halberdsmen carried rapiers.

There were three buckler-men to each company, introduced by Maurice for
the personal protection of the leader of the company. The prince was
often attended by one himself, and, on at least one memorable occasion,
was indebted to this shield for the preservation of his life.

The cavalry was divided into lancers and carabineers. The unit was the
squadron, varying in number from sixty to one hundred and fifty, until
the year 1591, when the regular complement of the squadron was fixed at
one hundred and twenty.

As the use of cavalry on the battle-field at that day, or at least in the
Netherlands, was not in rapidity of motion, nor in severity of shock--the
attack usually taking place on a trot--Maurice gradually displaced the
lance in favour of the carbine. His troopers thus became rather mounted
infantry than regular cavalry.

The carbine was at least three feet long, with wheel-locks, and carried
bullets of thirty to the pound.

The artillery was a peculiar Organisation. It was a guild of citizens,
rather than a strictly military force like the cavalry and infantry. The
arm had but just begun to develop itself, and it was cultivated as a
special trade by the guild of the holy Barbara existing in all the
principal cities. Thus a municipal artillery gradually organised itself,
under the direction of the gun-masters (bus-meesters), who in secret
laboured at the perfection of their art, and who taught it to their
apprentices and journeymen; as the principles of other crafts were
conveyed by master to pupil. This system furnished a powerful element of
defence at a period when every city had in great measure to provide for
its own safety.

In the earlier campaigns of Maurice three kinds of artillery were used;
the whole cannon (kartow) of forty-eight pounds; the half-cannon, or
twenty-four pounder, and the field-piece carrying a ball of twelve
pounds. The two first were called battering pieces or siege-guns. All the
guns were of bronze.

The length of the whole cannon was about twelve feet; its weight one
hundred and fifty times that of the ball, or about seven thousand pounds.
It was reckoned that the whole kartow could fire from eighty to one
hundred shots in an hour. Wet hair cloths were used to cool the piece
after every ten or twelve discharges. The usual charge was twenty pounds
of powder.

The whole gun was drawn by thirty-one horses, the half-cannon by
twenty-three.

The field-piece required eleven horses, but a regular field-artillery, as
an integral part of the army, did not exist, and was introduced in much
later times. In the greatest pitched battle ever fought by Maurice, that
of Nieuport, he had but six field-pieces.

The prince also employed mortars in his sieges, from which were thrown
grenades, hot shot, and stones; but no greater distance was reached than
six hundred yards. Bomb-shells were not often used although they had been
known for a century.

Before the days of Maurice a special education for engineers had never
been contemplated. Persons who had privately acquired a knowledge of
fortification and similar branches of the science were employed, upon
occasion, but regular corps of engineers there were none. The prince
established a course of instruction in this profession at the University
of Leyden, according to a system drawn up by the celebrated Stevinus.

Doubtless the most important innovation of the prince, and the one which
required the most energy to enforce, was the use of the spade. His
soldiers were jeered at by the enemy as mere boors and day labourers who
were dishonouring themselves and their profession by the use of that
implement instead of the sword. Such a novelty was a shock to all the
military ideas of the age, and it was only the determination and vigour
of the prince and of his cousin Lewis William that ultimately triumphed
over the universal prejudice.

The pay of the common soldier varied from ten to twenty florins the
month, but every miner had eighteen florins, and, when actually working
in the mines, thirty florins monthly. Soldiers used in digging trenches
received, over and above their regular pay, a daily wage of from ten to
fifteen styvers, or nearly a shilling sterling.

Another most wholesome improvement made by the prince was in the payment
of his troops. The system prevailing in every European country at that
day, by which Governments were defrauded and soldiers starved, was most
infamous. The soldiers were paid through the captain, who received the
wages of a full company, when perhaps not one-third of the names on the
master-roll were living human beings. Accordingly two-thirds of all the
money stuck to the officer's fingers, and it was not thought a disgrace
to cheat the Government by dressing and equipping for the day a set of
ragamuffins, caught up in the streets for the purpose, and made to pass
muster as regular soldiers.

These parse-volants, or scarecrows, were passed freely about from one
company to another, and the indecency of the fraud was never thought a
disgrace to the colours of the company.

Thus, in the Armada year, the queen had demanded that a portion of her
auxiliary force in the Netherlands should be sent to England. The States
agreed that three thousand of these English troops, together with a few
cavalry companies, should go, but stipulated that two thousand should
remain in the provinces. The queen accepted the proposal, but when the
two thousand had been counted out, it appeared that there was scarcely a
man left for the voyage to England. Yet every one of the English captains
had claimed full pay for his company from her Majesty's exchequer.

Against this tide of peculation and corruption the strenuous Maurice set
himself with heart and soul, and there is no doubt that to his
reformation in this vital matter much of his military success was owing.
It was impossible that roguery and venality should ever furnish a solid
foundation for the martial science.

To the student of military history the campaigns and sieges of Maurice,
and especially the earlier: ones, are of great importance. There is no
doubt whatever, that the youth who now, after deep study and careful
preparation, was measuring himself against the first captains of the age,
was founding the great modern school of military science. It was in this
Netherland academy, and under the tuition of its consummate professor,
that the commanders of the seventeenth century not only acquired the
rudiments, but perfected themselves in the higher walks of their art.
Therefore the siege operations, in which all that had been invented by
modern genius, or rescued from the oblivion which had gathered over
ancient lore during the more vulgar and commonplace practice of the
mercenary commanders of the day was brought into successful application,
must always engage the special attention of the military student.

To the general reader, more interested in marking the progress of
civilisation and the advance of the people in the path of development and
true liberty, the spectacle of the young stadholder's triumphs has an
interest of another kind. At the moment when a thorough practical soldier
was most needed by the struggling little commonwealth, to enable it to
preserve liberties partially secured by its unparalleled sacrifices of
blood and treasure during a quarter of a century, and to expel the
foreign invader from the soil which he had so long profaned, it was
destined that a soldier should appear.

Spade in hand, with his head full of Roman castrametation and geometrical
problems, a prince, scarce emerged from boyhood, presents himself on that
stage where grizzled Mansfelds, drunken Hohenlos, and truculent Verdugos
have been so long enacting, that artless military drama which consists of
hard knocks and wholesale massacres. The novice is received with
universal hilarity. But although the machinery of war varies so steadily
from age to age that a commonplace commander of to-day, rich in the
spoils of preceding time, might vanquish the Alexanders, and Caesars, and
Frederics, with their antiquated enginery, yet the moral stuff out of
which great captains, great armies, great victories are created, is the
simple material it was in the days of Sesostris or Cyrus. The moral and
physiological elements remain essentially the same as when man first
began to walk up and down the earth and destroy his fellow-creatures.

To make an army a thorough mowing-machine, it then seemed necessary that
it should be disciplined into complete mechanical obedience. To secure
this, prompt payment of wages and inexorable punishment of delinquencies
were indispensable. Long arrearages were now converting Farnese's
veterans into systematic marauders; for unpaid soldiers in every age and
country have usually degenerated into highwaymen, and it is an
impossibility for a sovereign, with the strictest intentions, to persist
in starving his soldiers and in killing them for feeding themselves. In
Maurice's little army, on the contrary, there were no back-wages and no
thieving. At the siege of Delfzyl Maurice hung two of his soldiers for
stealing, the one a hat and the other a poniard, from the townsfolk,
after the place had capitulated. At the siege of Hulst he ordered another
to be shot, before the whole camp, for robbing a woman.

This seems sufficiently harsh, but war is not a pastime nor a very humane
occupation. The result was, that robbery disappeared, and it is better
for all that enlisted men should be soldiers rather than thieves. To
secure the ends which alone can justify war--and if the Netherlanders
engaged in defending national existence and human freedom against foreign
tyranny were not justifiable then a just war has never been waged--a
disciplined army is vastly more humane in its operations than a band of
brigands. Swift and condign punishments by the law-martial, for even
trifling offences, is the best means of discipline yet devised.

To bring to utmost perfection the machinery already in existence, to
encourage invention, to ponder the past with a practical application to
the present, to court fatigue, to scorn pleasure, to concentrate the
energies on the work in hand, to cultivate quickness of eye and calmness
of nerve in the midst of danger, to accelerate movements, to economise
blood even at the expense of time, to strive after ubiquity and
omniscience in the details of person and place, these were the
characteristics of Maurice, and they have been the prominent traits of
all commanders who have stamped themselves upon their age. Although his
method of war-making differed as far as possible from that quality in
common, of the Bearnese, yet the two had one personal insensibility to
fear. But in the case of Henry, to confront danger for its own sake was
in itself a pleasure, while the calmer spirit of Maurice did not so much
seek the joys of the combat as refuse to desist from scientific
combinations in the interests of his personal safety. Very frequently, in
the course of his early campaigns, the prince was formally and urgently
requested by the States-General not to expose his life so recklessly, and
before he had passed his twenty-fifth year he had received wounds which,
but for fortunate circumstances, would have proved mortal, because he was
unwilling to leave special operations on which much was depending to
other eyes than his own. The details of his campaigns are, of necessity,
the less interesting to a general reader from their very completeness.
Desultory or semi-civilised warfare, where the play of the human passions
is distinctly visible, where individual man, whether in buff jerkin or
Milan coat of proof, meets his fellow man in close mortal combat, where
men starve by thousands or are massacred by town-fulls, where hamlets or
villages blaze throughout whole districts or are sunk beneath the
ocean--scenes of rage, hatred, vengeance, self-sacrifice, patriotism,
where all the virtues and vices of which humanity is capable stride to
and fro in their most violent colours and most colossal shape where man
in a moment rises almost to divinity, or sinks beneath the beasts of the
field--such tragical records of which the sanguinary story of mankind is
full--and no portion of them more so than the Netherland chronicles
appeal more vividly to the imagination than the neatest solution of
mathematical problems. Yet, if it be the legitimate end of military
science to accomplish its largest purposes at the least expense of human
suffering; if it be progress in civilisation to acquire by scientific
combination what might be otherwise attempted, and perhaps vainly
attempted, by infinite carnage, then is the professor with his diagrams,
standing unmoved amid danger, a more truly heroic image than
Coeur-de-Lion with his battle-axe or Alva with his truncheon.

The system--then a new one--which Maurice introduced to sustain that
little commonwealth from sinking of which he had become at the age of
seventeen the predestined chief, was the best under the circumstances
that could have been devised. Patriotism the most passionate, the most
sublime, had created the republic. To maintain its existence against
perpetual menace required the exertion of perpetual skill.

Passionless as algebra, the genius of Maurice was ready for the task.
Strategic points of immense value, important cities and fortresses, vital
river-courses and communications--which foreign tyranny had acquired
during the tragic past with a patient iniquity almost without a parallel,
and which patriotism had for years vainly struggled to recover--were the
earliest trophies and prizes of his art. But the details of his victories
may be briefly indicated, for they have none of the picturesqueness of
crime. The sieges of Naarden, Harlem, Leyden, were tragedies of maddening
interest, but the recovery of Zutphen, Deventer, Nymegen, Groningen, and
many other places--all important though they were--was accomplished with
the calmness of a consummate player, who throws down on the table the
best half dozen invincible cards which it thus becomes superfluous to
play.

There were several courses open to the prince before taking the field. It
was desirable to obtain control of the line of the Waal, by which that
heart of the republic--Holland--would be made entirely secure. To this
end, Gertruydenberg--lately surrendered to the enemy by the perfidy of
the Englishman Wingfield, to whom it had been entrusted--Bois le Duc, and
Nymegen were to be wrested from Spain.

It was also important to hold the Yssel, the course of which river led
directly through the United Netherlands, quite to the Zuyder Zee, cutting
off Friesland, Groningen, and Gelderland from their sister provinces of
Holland and Zeeland. And here again the keys to this river had been lost
by English treason. The fort of Zutphen and the city of Deventer had been
transferred to the Spaniard by Roland York and Sir William Stanley, in
whose honour the republic had so blindly confided, and those cities it
was now necessary to reduce by regular siege before the communications
between the eastern and western portions of the little commonwealth could
ever be established.

Still farther in the ancient Frisian depths, the memorable treason of
that native Netherlander, the high-born Renneberg, had opened the way for
the Spaniard's foot into the city of Groningen. Thus this whole important
province--with its capital--long subject to the foreign oppressor, was
garrisoned with his troops.

Verdugo, a veteran officer of Portuguese birth, who had risen from the
position of hostler to that of colonel and royal stadholder, commanded in
Friesland. He had in vain demanded reinforcements and supplies from
Farnese, who most reluctantly was obliged to refuse them in order that he
might obey his master's commands to neglect everything for the sake of
the campaign in France.

And Verdugo, strippe

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