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+The Project Gutenberg EBook History of United Netherlands, 1590-92
+#63 in our series by John Lothrop Motley
+
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+Title: History of the United Netherlands, 1590-92
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+Author: John Lothrop Motley
+
+Release Date: January, 2004  [EBook #4863]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on April 9, 2002]
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+Edition: 10
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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HISTORY UNITED NETHERLANDS, 1590-92 ***
+
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+This eBook was produced by David Widger
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+[NOTE: There is a short list of bookmarks, or pointers, at the end of the
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+
+HISTORY OF THE UNITED NETHERLANDS
+From the Death of William the Silent to the Twelve Year's Truce--1609
+
+By John Lothrop Motley
+
+
+
+MOTLEY'S HISTORY OF THE NETHERLANDS, Project Gutenberg Edition, Vol. 63
+
+History of the United Netherlands, 1590-1592
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV.
+
+     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 tho 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, stripped of all adequate forces to protect his important
+province, was equally destitute of means for feeding the troops that were
+left to him.  "I hope to God that I may do my duty to the king and your
+Highness," he cried, "but I find myself sold up and pledged to such an
+extent that I am poorer than when I was a soldier at four crowns a month.
+And everybody in the town is as desperate as myself."
+
+Maurice, after making a feint of attacking Gertruydenberg and Bois le
+Duc, so that Farnese felt compelled, with considerable difficulty, to
+strengthen the garrison of those places, came unexpectedly to Arnhem
+with a force of nine thousand foot and sixteen hundred horse.  He had
+previously and with great secrecy sent some companies of infantry under
+Sir Francis Vere to Doesburg.
+
+On the 23rd May (1591) five peasants and six peasant women made their
+appearance at dawn of day before the chief guard-house of the great fort
+in the Badmeadow (Vel-uwe), opposite Zutphen, on the west side of the
+Yssel.  It was not an unusual occurrence.  These boors and their wives
+had brought baskets of eggs, butter, and cheese, for the garrison, and
+they now set themselves quietly down on the ground before the gate,
+waiting for the soldiers of the garrison to come out and traffic with
+them for their supplies.  Very soon several of the guard made their
+appearance, and began to chaffer with the peasants, when suddenly one of
+the women plucked a pistol from under her petticoats and shot dead the
+soldier who was cheapening her eggs.  The rest of the party, transformed
+in an instant from boors to soldiers, then sprang upon the rest of the
+guard, overpowered and bound them, and took possession of the gate.  A
+considerable force, which had been placed in ambush by Prince Maurice
+near the spot, now rushed forward, and in a few minutes the great fort of
+Zutphen was mastered by the States' forces without loss of a man.  It was
+a neat and perfectly successful stratagem.
+
+Next day Maurice began the regular investment of the city.  On the 26th,
+Count Lewis William arrived with some Frisian companies.  On the 27th,
+Maurice threw a bridge of boats from the Badmeadow side, across the river
+to the Weert before the city.  On the 28th he had got batteries, mounting
+thirty-two guns, into position, commanding the place at three points.  On
+the 30th the town capitulated.  Thus within exactly one week from the
+firing of the pistol shot by the supposed butterwoman, this fort and
+town, which had so long resisted the efforts of the States, and were such
+important possessions of the Spaniards, fell into the hands of Maurice.
+The terms of surrender were easy.  The city being more important than
+its garrison, the soldiers were permitted to depart with bag and baggage.
+The citizens were allowed three days to decide whether to stay under
+loyal obedience to the States-General, or to take their departure.
+Those who chose to remain were to enjoy all the privileges of citizens
+of the United Provinces.
+
+But very few substantial citizens were left, for such had been the
+tyranny, the misery, and the misrule during the long occupation by a
+foreign soldiery of what was once a thriving Dutch town, that scarcely
+anybody but paupers and vagabonds were left.  One thousand houses were
+ruined and desolate.  It is superfluous to add that the day of its
+restoration to the authority of the Union was the beginning of its
+renewed prosperity.
+
+Maurice, having placed a national garrison in the place, marched the same
+evening straight upon Deventer, seven miles farther down the river,
+without pausing to sleep upon his victory.  His artillery and munitions
+were sent rapidly down the Yssel.
+
+Within five days he had thoroughly invested the city, and brought twenty-
+eight guns to bear upon the weakest part of its defences.
+
+It was a large, populous, well-built town, once a wealthy member of the
+Hanseatic League, full of fine buildings, both public and private, the
+capital of the rich and fertile province of Overyssel, and protected by a
+strong wall and moat--as well-fortified a place as could be found in the
+Netherlands.  The garrison consisted of fourteen hundred Spaniards and
+Walloons, under the command of Count Herman van den Berg, first cousin of
+Prince Maurice.
+
+No sooner had the States army come before the city than a Spanish captain
+observed--"We shall now have a droll siege--cousins on the outside,
+cousins on the inside.  There will be a sham fight or two, and then the
+cousins will make it up, and arrange matters to suit themselves."
+
+Such hints had deeply wounded Van den Berg, who was a fervent Catholic,
+and as loyal a servant to Philip II. as he could have been, had that
+monarch deserved, by the laws of nature and by his personal services and
+virtues, to govern all the swamps of Friesland.  He slept on the gibe,
+having ordered all the colonels and captains of the garrison to attend at
+solemn mass in the great church the next morning.  He there declared to
+them all publicly that he felt outraged at the suspicions concerning his
+fidelity, and after mass he took the sacrament, solemnly swearing never
+to give up the city or even to speak of it until he had made such
+resistance that he must be carried from the breach.  So long as he could
+stand or sit he would defend the city entrusted to his care.
+
+The whole council who had come from Zutphen to Maurice's camp were
+allowed to deliberate concerning the siege.  The, enemy had been seen
+hovering about the neighbourhood in considerable numbers, but had not
+ventured an attempt to throw reinforcements into the place.  Many of the
+counsellors argued against the siege.  It was urged that the resistance
+would be determined and protracted, and that the Duke of Parma was sure
+to take the field in person to relieve so important a city, before its
+reduction could be effected.
+
+But Maurice had thrown a bridge across the Yssel above, and another below
+the town, had carefully and rapidly taken measures in the success of
+which he felt confident, and now declared that it would be cowardly and
+shameful to abandon an enterprise so well begun.
+
+The city had been formally summoned to surrender, and a calm but most
+decided refusal had been returned.
+
+On the 9th June the batteries began playing, and after four thousand six
+hundred shots a good breach had been effected in the defences along the
+Kaye--an earthen work lying between two strong walls of masonry.
+
+The breach being deemed practicable, a storm was ordered.  To reach the
+Kaye it was necessary to cross a piece of water called the Haven, over
+which a pontoon bridge was hastily thrown.  There was now a dispute among
+the English, Scotch, and Netherlanders for precedence in the assault.
+It was ultimately given to the English, in order that the bravery of that
+nation might now on the same spot wipe out the disgrace inflicted upon
+its name by the treason of Sir William Stanley.  The English did their
+duty well and rushed forward merrily, but the bridge proved too short.
+Some sprang over and pushed boldly for the breach.  Some fell into the
+moat and were drowned.  Others, sustained by the Netherlanders under
+Solms, Meetkerke, and Brederode, effected their passage by swimming,
+leaping, or wading, so that a resolute attack was made.  Herman van den
+Berg met them in the breach at the head of seven companies.  The
+defenders were most ferocious in their resistance.  They were also very
+drunk.  The count had placed many casks of Rhenish and of strong beer
+within reach, and ordered his soldiers to drink their fill as they
+fought.  He was himself as vigorous in his potations as he was chivalrous
+with sword and buckler.  Two pages and two lieutenants fell at his side,
+but still he fought at the head of his men with a desperation worthy of
+his vow, until he fell wounded in the eye and was carried from the place.
+Notwithstanding this disaster to the commander of the town, the
+assailants were repulsed, losing two hundred-and twenty-five in killed
+and wounded--Colonel Meetkerke and his brother, two most valuable Dutch
+officers, among them.
+
+During the whole of the assault, a vigorous cannonade had been kept up
+upon other parts of the town, and houses and church-towers were toppling
+down in all directions.  Meanwhile the inhabitants--for it was Sunday--
+instead of going to service were driven towards the breach by the
+serjeant-major, a truculent Spaniard, next in command to Van den Berg,
+who ran about the place with a great stick, summoning the Dutch burghers
+to assist the Spanish garrison on the wall.  It was thought afterwards
+that this warrior would have been better occupied among the soldiers, at
+the side of his commander.
+
+A chivalrous incident in the open field occurred during the assault.
+A gigantic Albanian cavalry officer came prancing out of Deventer into
+the spaces between the trenches, defying any officer in the States' army
+to break a lance with him.  Prince Maurice forbade any acceptance of the
+challenge, but Lewis van der Cathulle, son of the famous Ryhove of Ghent,
+unable to endure the taunts and bravado of this champion, at last
+obtained permission to encounter him in single combat.  They met
+accordingly with much ceremony, tilted against each other, and shivered
+their lances in good style, but without much effect.  The Albanian then
+drew a pistol.  Cathulle had no weapon save a cutlass, but with this
+weapon he succeeded in nearly cutting off the hand which held the pistol.
+He then took his enemy prisoner, the vain-glorious challenger throwing
+his gold chain around his conqueror's neck in token of his victory.
+Prince Maurice caused his wound to be bound up and then liberated him,
+sending him into the city with a message to the governor.
+
+During the following night the bridge, over which the  assailants had
+nearly forced their way into the town, was vigorously attacked by the
+garrison, but Count Lewis William, in person, with a chosen band defended
+it stoutly till morning, beating back the Spaniards with heavy loss in a
+sanguinary midnight contest.
+
+Next morning there was a unanimous outcry on the part of the besieged for
+a capitulation.  It was obvious that, with the walls shot to ruins as
+they had been, the place was no longer tenable against Maurice's superior
+forces.  A trumpet was sent to the prince before the dawn of day, and on
+the 10th of June, accordingly, the place capitulated.
+
+It was arranged that the garrison should retire with arms and baggage
+whithersoever they chose.  Van den Berg stipulated nothing in favour of
+the citizens, whether through forgetfulness or spite does not distinctly
+appear.  But the burghers were received like brothers.  No plunder was
+permitted, no ransom demanded, and the city took its place among its
+sisterhood of the United Provinces.
+
+Van den Berg himself was received at the prince's head, quarters with
+much cordiality.  He was quite blind; but his wound seemed to be the
+effect of exterior contusions, and he ultimately recovered the sight of
+one eye.  There was mach free conversation between himself and his
+cousins during the brief interval in which he was their guest.
+
+"I've often told Verdugo," said he, "that the States had no power to make
+a regular siege, nor to come with proper artillery into the field, and he
+agreed with me.  But we were both wrong, for I now see the contrary."
+
+To which Count Lewis William replied with a laugh: "My dear cousin, I've
+observed that in all your actions you were in the habit of despising us
+Beggars, and I have said that you would one day draw the shortest straw
+in consequence.  I'm glad to hear this avowal from your own lips."
+Herman attempted no reply but let the subject drop, seeming to regret
+having said so much.
+
+Soon afterwards he was forwarded by Maurice in his own coach to Ulff,
+where he was attended by the prince's body physician till he was re-
+established in health.
+
+Thus within ten days of his first appearance before its walls, the city
+of Deventer, and with it a whole province, had fallen into the hands of
+Maurice.  It began to be understood that the young pedant knew something
+about his profession, and that he had not been fagging so hard at the
+science of war for nothing.
+
+The city was in a sorry plight when the States took possession of it.
+As at Zutphen, the substantial burghers had wandered away, and the
+foreign soldiers bivouacking there so long had turned the stately old
+Hanseatic city into a brick and mortar wilderness.  Hundreds of houses
+had been demolished by the garrison, that the iron might be sold and the
+woodwork burned for fuel; for the enemy had conducted himself as if
+feeling in his heart that the occupation could not be a permanent one,
+and as if desirous to make the place as desolate as possible for the
+Beggars when they should return.
+
+The dead body of the traitor York, who had died and been buried in
+Deventer, was taken from the tomb, after the capture of the city, and
+with the vulgar ferocity so characteristic of the times, was hung, coffin
+and all, on the gibbet for the delectation of the States' soldiery.
+
+Maurice, having thus in less than three weeks recovered two most
+important cities, paused not an instant in his career but moved at once
+on Groningen.  There was a strong pressure put upon him to attempt the
+capture of Nymegen, but the understanding with the Frisian stadholders
+and his troops had been that the enterprise upon Groningen should follow
+the reduction of Deventer.
+
+On the 26th June Maurice appeared before Groningen.  Next day, as a
+precautionary step, he moved to the right and attacked the strong city of
+Delfzyl.  This place capitulated to him on the 2nd July.  The fort of
+Opslag surrendered on the 7th July.  He then moved to the west of
+Groningen, and attacked the forts of Yementil and Lettebaest, which fell
+into his hands on the 11th July.  He then moved along the Nyenoort
+through the Seven Wolds and Drenthe to Steenwyk, before which strongly
+fortified city he arrived on the 15th July.
+
+Meantime, he received intercepted letters from Verdugo to the Duke of
+Parma, dated 19th June from Groningen.  In these, the Spanish stadholder
+informed Farnese that the enemy was hovering about his neighbourhood, and
+that it would be necessary for the duke to take the field in person in
+considerable force, or that Groningen would be lost, and with it the
+Spanish forces in the province.  He enclosed a memorial of the course
+proper to be adopted by the duke for his relief.
+
+Notwithstanding the strictness by which Philip had tied his great
+general's hands, Farnese felt the urgency of the situation.  By the end
+of June, accordingly, although full of his measures for marching to the
+relief of the Leaguers in Normandy, he moved into Gelderland, coming by
+way of Xanten, Rees, and neighbouring places.  Here he paused for a
+moment perplexed, doubting whether to take the aggressive in Gelderland
+or to march straight to the relief of Groningen.  He decided that it was
+better for the moment to protect the line of the Waal.  Shipping his army
+accordingly into the Batavian Island or Good-meadow (Bet-uwe), which lies
+between the two great horns of the Rhine, he laid siege to Fort
+Knodsenburg, which Maurice had built the year before, on the right bank
+of the Waal for the purpose of attacking Nymegen.  Farnese, knowing that
+the general of the States was occupied with his whole army far away to
+the north, and separated from him by two great rivers, wide and deep, and
+by the whole breadth of that dangerous district called the Foul-meadow
+(Vel-uwe), and by the vast quagmire known as the Rouvenian morass, which
+no artillery nor even any organised forces had ever traversed since the
+beginning of the world, had felt no hesitation in throwing his army in
+boats across the Waal.  He had no doubt of reducing a not very powerful
+fortress long before relief could be brought to it, and at the same time
+of disturbing by his presence in Batavia the combinations of his young
+antagonist in Friesland and Groningen.
+
+So with six thousand foot and one thousand horse, Alexander came before
+Knodsenburg.  The news reached Maurice at Steenwyk on the 15th July.
+Instantly changing his plans, the prince decided that Farnese must be
+faced at once, and, if possible, driven from the ground, thinking it more
+important to maintain, by concentration, that which had already been
+gained, than to weaken and diffuse his forces in insufficient attempts to
+acquire more.  Before two days had passed, he was on the march southward,
+having left Lewis William with a sufficient force to threaten Groningen.
+Coming by way of Hasselt Zwol to Deventer, he crossed the Yssel on a
+bridge of boats on the 18th of July, 1591 and proceeded to Arnhem.
+His army, although excessively fatigued by forced marches in very hot
+weather, over nearly impassable roads, was full of courage and
+cheerfulness, having learned implicit confidence in their commander.
+On the 20th he was at Arnhem.  On the 22nd his bridge of boats was made,
+and he had thrown his little army across the Rhine into Batavia, and
+entrenched himself with his six thousand foot and fourteen hundred horse
+in the immediate neighbourhood of Farnese--Foul-meadow and Good-meadow,
+dyke, bog, wold, and quagmire, had been successfully traversed, and
+within one week of his learning that the great viceroy of Philip had
+reached the Batavian island, Maurice stood confronting that famous
+chieftain in battle-array.
+
+On the 22nd July, Farnese, after firing two hundred and eighty-five shots
+at Fort Knodsenburg, ordered an assault, expecting that so trifling a
+work could hardly withstand a determined onslaught by his veterans.
+To his surprise they were so warmly received that two hundred of the
+assailants fell at the first onset, and the attack was most conclusively
+repulsed.
+
+And now Maurice had appeared upon the scene, determined to relieve a
+place so important for his ulterior designs.  On the 24th July he sent
+out a small but picked force of cavalry to reconnoitre the enemy.  They
+were attacked by a considerable body of Italian and Spanish horse from
+the camp before Knodsenburg, including Alexander's own company of lancers
+under Nicelli.  The States troops fled before them in apparent dismay for
+a little distance, hotly pursued by the royalists, until, making a sudden
+halt, they turned to the attack, accompanied by five fresh companies of
+cavalry and a thousand musketeers, who fell upon the foe from all
+directions.  It was an ambush, which had been neatly prepared by Maurice
+in person, assisted by Sir Francis Vere.  Sixty of the Spaniards and
+Italians were killed and one hundred and fifty prisoners, including
+Captain Nicelli, taken, while the rest of the party sought safety in
+ignominious flight.  This little skirmish, in which ten companies of the
+picked veterans of Alexander Farnese had thus been utterly routed before
+his eyes, did much to inspire the States troops with confidence in
+themselves and their leader.
+
+Parma was too experienced a campaigner, and had too quick an eye, not to
+recognise the error which he had committed in placing the dangerous river
+Waal, without a bridge; between himself and his supplies.  He had not
+dreamed that his antagonist would be capable of such celerity of movement
+as he had thus displayed, and his first business now was to extricate
+himself from a position which might soon become fatal.  Without
+hesitation, he did his best to amuse the enemy in front of the fort, and
+then passed the night in planting batteries upon the banks of the river,
+under cover of which he succeeded next day in transporting in ferry-boats
+his whole force, artillery and: baggage, to the opposite shore, without
+loss, and with his usual skill.
+
+He remained but a short time in Nymegen, but he was hampered by the
+express commands of the king.  Moreover, his broken health imperatively
+required that he should once more seek the healing influence of the
+waters of Spa, before setting forth on his new French expedition.
+Meanwhile, although he had for a time protected the Spanish possessions
+in the north by his demonstration in Gelderland, it must be confessed
+that the diversion thus given to the plans of Maurice was but a feeble
+one.
+
+Having assured the inhabitants of Nymegen that he would watch over the
+city like the apple of, his eye, he took his departure on the 4th of
+August for Spa.  He was accompanied on his journey by his son, Prince
+Ranuccio, just arrived from Italy.
+
+After the retreat of Farnese, Maurice mustered his forces at Arnhem, and
+found himself at the head of seven thousand foot and fifteen hundred
+horse.  It was expected by all the world that, being thus on the very
+spot, he would forthwith proceed to reduce the ancient, wealthy, imperial
+city of Nynegen.  The garrison and burghers accordingly made every
+preparation to resist the attack, disconcerted as they were, however,
+by the departure of Parma, and by the apparent incapacity of Verdugo to
+bring them effectual relief.
+
+But to the surprise of all men, the States forces suddenly disappeared
+from the scene, having been, as it were, spirited away by night-time,
+along those silent watery highways and crossways of canal, river, and
+estuary--the military advantages of which to the Netherlands, Maurice was
+the first thoroughly to demonstrate.  Having previously made great
+preparations of munitions and provisions in Zeeland, the young general,
+who was thought hard at work in Gelderland, suddenly presented himself
+on the 19th September, before the gates of Hulst, on the border of
+Zeeland and Brabant.
+
+It was a place of importance from its situation, its possession by the
+enemy being a perpetual thorn in the side of the States, and a constant
+obstacle to the plans of Maurice.  His arrangements having been made with
+the customary, neatness, celerity, and completeness, he received the
+surrender of the city on the fifth day after his arrival.
+
+Its commander, Castillo, could offer no resistance; and was subsequently,
+it is said, beheaded by order of the Duke of Parma for his negligence.
+The place is but a dozen miles from Antwerp, which city was at the very,
+moment keeping great holiday and outdoing itself in magnificent festivals
+in honour of young Ranuccio.  The capture of Hulst before his eyes was a
+demonstration quite unexpected by the prince, and great was the wrath of
+old Mondragon, governor of Antwerp, thus bearded in his den.  The veteran
+made immediate preparations for chastising the audacious Beggars of
+Zeeland and their, pedantic young commander, but no sooner had the
+Spaniards taken the field than the wily foe had disappeared as magically
+as he had come.
+
+The Flemish earth seemed to have bubbles as the water hath, and while
+Mondragon was beating the air in vain on the margin of the Scheld,
+Maurice was back again upon the Waal, horse, foot, and artillery, bag,
+baggage, and munition, and had fairly set himself down in earnest to
+besiege Nymegen, before the honest burghers and the garrison had finished
+drawing long breaths at their recent escape.  Between the 14th and 16th
+October he had bridged the deep, wide, and rapid river, had transported
+eight thousand five hundred infantry and, sixteen companies of cavalry to
+the southern side, had entrenched his camp and made his approaches, and
+had got sixty-eight pieces of artillery into three positions commanding
+the weakest part of the defences of the city between the Falcon Tower and
+the Hoender gate.  The fort of Knodsenburg was also ready to throw hot
+shot across the river into the town.  Not a detail in all these
+preparations escaped the vigilant eye of the Commander-in-Chief, and
+again and again was he implored not so recklessly to expose a life
+already become precious to his country.  On the 20th October, Maurice
+sent to demand the surrender of the city.  The reply was facetious but
+decisive.
+
+The prince was but a young suitor, it was said, and the city a spinster
+not so lightly to be won.  A longer courtship and more trouble would be
+necessary.
+
+Whereupon the suitor opened all his batteries without further delay, and
+the spinster gave a fresh example of the inevitable fate of talking
+castles and listening ladies.
+
+Nymegen, despite her saucy answer on the 20th, surrendered on the 21st.
+Relief was impossible.  Neither Parma, now on his way to France, nor
+Verdugo, shut up in Friesland, could come to the rescue of the place,
+and the combinations of Maurice were an inexorable demonstration.
+
+The terms of the surrender were similar to those accorded to Zutphen and
+Deventer.  In regard to the religious point it was expressly laid down by
+Maurice that the demand for permission to exercise publicly the Roman
+Catholic religion should be left to the decision of the States-General.
+
+And thus another most important city had been added to the domains of the
+republic.  Another triumph was inscribed on the record of the young
+commander.  The exultation was very great throughout the United
+Netherlands, and heartfelt was the homage rendered by all classes of his
+countrymen to the son of William the Silent.
+
+Queen Elizabeth wrote to congratulate him in warmest terms on his great
+successes, and even the Spaniards began to recognise the merits of the
+new chieftain.  An intercepted letter from Verdugo, who had been foiled
+in his efforts to arrest the career of Maurice, indicated great respect
+for his prowess.  "I have been informed," said the veteran, "that Count
+Maurice of Nassau wishes to fight me.  Had I the opportunity I assure you
+that I should not fail him, for even if ill luck were my portion, I
+should at least not escape the honour of being beaten by such a
+personage.  I beg you to tell him so with my affectionate compliments.
+Yours, FRANCIS VERDUGO."
+
+These chivalrous sentiments towards Prince Maurice had not however
+prevented Verdugo from doing his best to assassinate Count Lewis William.
+Two Spaniards had been arrested in the States camp this summer, who came
+in as deserters, but who confessed "with little, or mostly without
+torture," that they had been sent by their governor and colonel with
+instructions to seize a favourable opportunity to shoot Lewis William and
+set fire to his camp.  But such practices were so common on the part of
+the Spanish commanders as to occasion no surprise whatever.
+
+It will be remembered that two years before, the famous Martin Schenk had
+come to a tragic end at Nymegen.  He had been drowned, fished up, hanged,
+drawn, and quartered; after which his scattered fragments, having been
+exposed on all the principal towers of the city, had been put in
+pickle and deposited in a chest.  They were now collected and buried
+triumphantly in the tomb of the Dukes of Gelderland.  Thus the shade
+of the grim freebooter was at last appeased.
+
+The government of the city was conferred upon Count Lewis William, with
+Gerard de Jonge as his lieutenant.  A substantial garrison was placed in
+the city, and, the season now far advanced Maurice brought the military
+operations of the year, saving a slight preliminary demonstration against
+Gertruydenberg, to a close.  He had deserved and attained--considerable
+renown.  He had astonished the leisurely war-makers and phlegmatic
+veterans of the time, both among friends and foes, by the unexampled
+rapidity of his movements and the concentration of his attacks.  He had
+carried great waggon trains and whole parks of siege artillery--the
+heaviest then known--over roads and swamps which had been deemed
+impassable even for infantry.  He had traversed the length and breadth of
+the republic in a single campaign, taken two great cities in Overyssel,
+picked up cities and fortresses in the province of Groningen, and
+threatened its capital, menaced Steenwyk, relieved Knodsenburg though
+besieged in person by the greatest commander of the age, beaten the most
+famous cavalry of Spain and Italy under the eyes of their chieftain,
+swooped as it were through the air upon Brabant, and carried off an
+important city almost in the sight of Antwerp, and sped back again in the
+freezing weather of early autumn, with his splendidly served and
+invincible artillery, to the imperial city of Nymegen, which Farnese had
+sworn to guard like the apple of his eye, and which, with consummate
+skill, was forced out of his grasp in five days.
+
+"Some might attribute these things to blind fortune," says an honest
+chronicler who had occupied important posts in the service of the prince
+and of his cousin Lewis William, "but they who knew the prince's constant
+study and laborious attention to detail, who were aware that he never
+committed to another what he could do himself, who saw his sobriety,
+vigilance, his perpetual study and holding of council with Count Lewis
+William (himself possessed of all these good gifts, perhaps even in
+greater degree), and who never found him seeking, like so many other
+commanders, his own ease and comfort, would think differently."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+     War in Brittany and Normandy--Death of La Noue--Religious and
+     political persecution in Paris--Murder of President Brisson,
+     Larcher, and Tardif--The sceptre of France offered to Philip--The
+     Duke of Mayenne punishes the murderers of the magistrates--Speech of
+     Henry's envoy to the States-General--Letter of Queen Elizabeth to
+     Henry--Siege of Rouen--Farnese leads an army to its relief--The king
+     is wounded in a skirmish--Siege of Rue by Farnese--Henry raises the
+     siege of Rouen--Siege of Caudebec--Critical position of Farnese and
+     his army--Victory of the Duke of Mercoeur in Brittany.
+
+Again the central point towards which the complicated events to be
+described in this history gravitate is found on the soil of France.
+Movements apparently desultory and disconnected--as they may have seemed
+to the contemporaneous observer, necessarily occupied with the local and
+daily details which make up individual human life--are found to be
+necessary parts of a whole, when regarded with that breadth and clearness
+of vision which is permitted to human beings only when they can look
+backward upon that long sequence of events which make up the life of
+nations and which we call the Past.  It is only by the anatomical study
+of what has ceased to exist that we can come thoroughly to comprehend the
+framework and the vital conditions of that which lives.  It is only by
+patiently lifting the shroud from the Past that we can enable ourselves
+to make even wide guesses at the meaning of the dim Present and the
+veiled Future.  It is only thus that the continuity of human history
+reveals itself to us as the most important of scientific facts.
+
+If ever commonwealth was apparently doomed to lose that national
+existence which it had maintained for a brief period at the expense of
+infinite sacrifice of blood and treasure, it was the republic of the
+United Netherlands in the period immediately succeeding the death of
+William the Silent.  Domestic treason, secession of important provinces,
+religious-hatred, foreign intrigue, and foreign invasion--in such a sea
+of troubles was the republic destined generations long to struggle.  Who
+but the fanatical, the shallow-minded, or the corrupt could doubt the
+inevitable issue of the conflict?  Did not great sages and statesmen
+whose teachings seemed so much wiser in their generation than the
+untaught impulses of the great popular heart, condemn over and over again
+the hopeless struggles and the atrocious bloodshed which were thought to
+disgrace the age, and by which it was held impossible that the cause of
+human liberty should ever be advanced?
+
+To us who look back from the vantage summit which humanity has reached--
+thanks to the toil and sacrifices of those who have preceded us--it may
+seem doubtful whether premature peace in the Netherlands, France, and
+England would have been an unmitigated blessing, however easily it might
+have been purchased by the establishment all over Europe of that holy
+institution called the Inquisition, and by the tranquil acceptance of the
+foreign domination of Spain.
+
+If, too; ever country seemed destined to the painful process of national
+vivisection and final dismemberment, it was France: Its natural guardians
+and masters, save one, were in secret negotiation with foreign powers to
+obtain with their assistance a portion of the national territory under
+acknowledgment of foreign supremacy.  There was hardly an inch of French
+soil that had not two possessors.  In Burgundy Baron Biron was battling
+against the Viscount Tavannes; in the Lyonese and Dauphiny Marshal des
+Digiueres was fighting with the Dukes of Savoy and Nemours; in Provence,
+Epernon was resisting Savoy; in Languedoc, Constable Montmorency
+contended with the Duke of Joyeuse; in Brittany, the Prince of Dombes was
+struggling with the Duke of Mercoeur.
+
+But there was one adventurer who thought he could show a better legal
+title to the throne of France than all the doctors of the Sorbonne could
+furnish to Philip II. and his daughter, and who still trusted, through
+all the disasters which pursued him, and despite the machinations of
+venal warriors and mendicant princes, to his good right and his good
+sword, and to something more potent than both, the cause of national
+unity.  His rebuke to the intriguing priests at the interview of St.
+Denis, and his reference to the judgment of Solomon, formed the text to
+his whole career.
+
+The brunt of the war now fell upon Brittany and Normandy.  Three thousand
+Spaniards under Don John de Aquila had landed in the port of Blavet which
+they had fortified, as a stronghold on the coast.  And thither, to defend
+the integrity of that portion of France, which, in Spanish hands, was a
+perpetual menace to her realm, her crown, even to her life, Queen
+Elizabeth had sent some three thousand Englishmen, under commanders well
+known to France and the Netherlands.  There was black Norris again
+dealing death among the Spaniards and renewing his perpetual squabbles
+with Sir Roger Williams.  There was that doughty Welshman himself,
+truculent and caustic as ever--and as ready with sword or pen, foremost
+in every mad adventure or every forlorn hope, criticising with sharpest
+tongue the blunders and shortcomings of friend and foe, and devoting the
+last drop in his veins with chivalrous devotion to his Queen.  "The world
+cannot deny," said he, "that any carcase living ventured himself freer
+and oftener for his prince, state, and friends than I did mine.  There is
+no more to be had of a poor beast than his skin, and for want of other
+means I never respected mine in the least respect towards my sovereign's
+service, or country."  And so passing his life in the saddle and under
+fire, yet finding leisure to collect the materials for, and to complete
+the execution of, one of the most valuable and attractive histories of
+the age, the bold Welshman again and again appears, wearing the same
+humorous but truculent aspect that belonged to him when he was wont to
+run up and down in a great morion and feathers on Flemish battlefields,
+a mark for the Spanish sharpshooters.
+
+There, too, under the banner of the Bearnese, that other historian of
+those sanguinary times, who had fought on almost every battle-field where
+tyranny and liberty had sought to smite each other dead, on French or
+Flemish soil, and who had prepared his famous political and military
+discourses in a foul dungeon swarming with toads and rats and other
+villainous reptiles to which the worse than infernal tyranny of Philip
+II. had consigned him for seven years long as a prisoner of war--the
+brave and good La Noue, with the iron arm, hero of a hundred combats,
+was fighting his last fight.  At the siege of Lamballe in Brittany, he
+had taken off his calque and climbed a ladder to examine the breach
+effected by the batteries.  An arquebus shot from the town grazed his
+forehead, and, without inflicting a severe wound, stunned him so much
+that he lost his balance and fell head foremost towards the ground; his
+leg, which had been wounded at the midnight assault upon Paris, where he
+stood at the side of King Henry, caught in the ladder and held him
+suspended.  His head was severely bruised, and the contusions and shock
+to his war-worn frame were so great that he died after lingering eighteen
+days.
+
+His son de Teligny; who in his turn had just been exchanged and released
+from the prison where he had lain since his capture before Antwerp, had
+hastened with joy to join his father in the camp, but came to close his
+eyes.  The veteran caused the chapter in Job on the resurrection of the
+body to be read to him on his death-bed, and died expressing his firm
+faith in a hereafter.  Thus passed away, at the age of sixty, on the 4th
+August, 1591, one of the most heroic spirits of France.  Prudence,
+courage, experience, military knowledge both theoretic and practical,
+made him one of the first captains of the age, and he was not more
+distinguished for his valour than for the purity of his life, and the
+moderation, temperance, and justice of his character.  The Prince of
+Dombes, in despair at his death, raised the siege of Lamballe.
+
+There was yet another chronicler, fighting among the Spaniards, now in
+Brittany, now in Normandy, and now in Flanders, and doing his work as
+thoroughly with his sword as afterwards with his pen, Don Carlos Coloma,
+captain of cavalry, afterwards financier, envoy, and historian.  For it
+was thus that those writers prepared themselves for their work.  They
+were all actors in the great epic, the episodes of which they have
+preserved.  They lived and fought, and wrought and suffered and wrote.
+Rude in tongue; aflame with passion, twisted all awry by prejudice,
+violent in love and hate, they have left us narratives which are at
+least full of colour and thrilling with life.
+
+Thus Netherlanders, Englishmen, and Frenchmen were again mingling their
+blood and exhausting their energies on a hundred petty battle-fields of
+Brittany and Normandy; but perhaps to few of those hard fighters was it
+given to discern the great work which they were slowly and painfully
+achieving.
+
+In Paris the League still maintained its ascendancy.  Henry, having again
+withdrawn from his attempts to reduce the capital, had left the sixteen
+tyrants who governed it more leisure to occupy themselves with internal
+politics.  A network of intrigue was spread through the whole atmosphere
+of the place.  The Sixteen, sustained by the power of Spain and Rome, and
+fearing nothing so much as the return of peace, by which their system of
+plunder would come to an end, proceeded with their persecution of all
+heretics, real or supposed, who were rich enough to offer a reasonable
+chance of spoil.  The soul of all these intrigues was the new legate,
+Sego, bishop of Piacenza.  Letters from him to Alexander Farnese,
+intercepted by Henry, showed a determination to ruin the Duke of Mayenne
+and Count Belin governor of Paris, whom he designated as Colossus and
+Renard, to extirpate the magistrates, and to put Spanish partizans in
+their places, and in general to perfect the machinery by which the
+authority of Philip was to be established in France.  He was perpetually
+urging upon that monarch the necessity of spending more money among his
+creatures in order to carry out these projects.
+
+Accordingly the attention of the Sixteen had been directed to President
+Brisson, who had already made himself so dangerously conspicuous by his
+resistance to the insolent assumption of the cardinal-legate.  This
+eminent juris-consult had succeeded Pomponne de Bellievre as first
+president of the Parliament of Paris.  He had been distinguished for
+talent, learning, and eloquence as an advocate; and was the author of
+several important legal works.  His ambition to fill the place of first
+president had caused him to remain in Paris after its revolt against
+Henry III.  He was no Leaguer; and, since his open defiance of the ultra-
+Catholic party, he had been a marked man--doomed secretly by the
+confederates who ruled the capital.  He had fondly imagined that he could
+govern the Parisian populace as easily as he had been in the habit of
+influencing the Parliament or directing his clients.  He expected to
+restore the city to its obedience to the constituted authorities.  He
+hoped to be himself the means of bringing Henry IV. in triumph to the
+throne of his ancestors.  He found, however, that a revolution was more
+difficult to manage than a law case; and that the confederates of the
+Holy League were less tractable than his clients had usually been found.
+
+On the night of the 14th November; 1591; he was seized on the bridge St.
+Michel, while on his way to parliament, and was told that he was expected
+at the Hotel de Ville.  He was then brought to the prison of the little
+Chatelet.
+
+Hardly had he been made secure in the dimly-lighted dungeon, when Crome,
+a leader among the Parisian populacey made his appearance, accompanied by
+some of his confederates, and dressed in a complete suit of mail.  He
+ordered the magistrate to take off his hat and to kneel.  He then read a
+sentence condemning him to death.  Profoundly astonished, Brisson
+demanded to know of what crime he was accused; and under what authority.
+The answer was a laugh; and an assurance that he had no time to lose.
+He then begged that at least he might be imprisoned long enough to enable
+him to complete a legal work on which he was engaged, and which, by his
+premature death, would be lost to the commonwealth.  This request
+produced no doubt more merriment than his previous demands.  His judges
+were inflexible; and allowed him hardly time to confess himself.  He was
+then hanged in his dungeon.
+
+Two other magistrates, Larcher and Tardif, were executed in the same
+way, in the same place, and on the same night.  The crime charged against
+them was having spoken in a public assembly somewhat freely against the
+Sixteen, and having aided in the circulation in Paris of a paper drawn
+up by the Duke of Nevers, filled with bitterness against the Lorraine
+princes and the League, and addressed to the late Pope Sixtus.
+
+The three bodies were afterwards gibbeted on the Greve in front of the
+Hotel de Ville, and exposed for two days to the insults and fury of the
+populace.
+
+This was the culminating point of the reign of terror in Paris.  Never
+had the sixteen tyrants; lords of the market halls, who governed the
+capital by favour of and in the name of the populace, seemed more
+omnipotent.  As representatives or plenipotentiaries of Madam League they
+had laid the crown.  at the feet of the King of Spain, hoping by still
+further drafts on his exchequer and his credulity to prolong indefinitely
+their own ignoble reign.  The extreme democratic party, which had
+hitherto supported the House of Lorraine and had seemed to idolize that
+family in the person of the great Balafre, now believed themselves
+possessed of sufficient power to control the Duke of Mayenne and all his
+adherents.  They sent the Jesuit Claude Mathieu with a special memorial
+to Philip II.  That monarch was implored to take, the sceptre of France,
+and to reign over them, inasmuch as they most willingly threw themselves
+into his arms?  They assured him that all reasonable people, and
+especially the Holy League, wished him to take the reins of Government,
+on condition of exterminating heresy throughout the kingdom by force of
+arms, of publishing the Council of Trent, and of establishing everywhere
+the Holy inquisition--an institution formidable only to the wicked and
+desirable for the good.  It was suggested that Philip should not call
+himself any longer King of Spain nor adopt the title of King of France,
+but that he should proclaim himself the Great King, or make use of some
+similar designation, not indicating any specialty but importing universal
+dominion.
+
+Should Philip, however, be disinclined himself to accept the monarchy,
+it was suggested that the young Duke of Guise, son of the first martyr
+of France, would be the most appropriate personage to be honoured with
+the hand of the legitimate Queen of France, the Infanta Clara Isabella.
+
+But the Sixteen were reckoning without the Duke of Mayenne.  That great
+personage, although an indifferent warrior and an utterly unprincipled
+and venal statesman, was by no means despicable as a fisherman in the
+troubled waters of revolution.  He knew how to manage intrigues with both
+sides for his own benefit.  Had he been a bachelor he might have obtained
+the Infanta and shared her prospective throne.  Being encumbered with a
+wife he had no hope of becoming the son-in-law of Philip, and was
+determined that his nephew Guise should not enjoy a piece of good fortune
+denied to himself.  The escape of the young duke from prison had been the
+signal for the outbreak of jealousies between uncle and nephew, which
+Parma and other agents had been instructed by their master to foster to
+the utmost.  "They must be maintained in such disposition in regard to
+me," he said, "that the one being ignorant of my relations to the other,
+both may without knowing it do my will."
+
+But Mayenne, in this grovelling career of self-seeking, in this perpetual
+loading of dice and marking of cards, which formed the main occupation of
+so many kings and princes of the period, and which passed for
+Machiavellian politics, was a fair match for the Spanish king and his
+Italian viceroy.  He sent President Jeannin on special mission to Philip,
+asking for two armies, one to be under his command, the other under that
+of Farnese, and assured him that he should be king himself, or appoint
+any man he liked to the vacant throne.  Thus he had secured one hundred
+thousand crowns a month to carry on his own game withal.  "The
+maintenance of these two armies costs me 261,000 crowns a month," said
+Philip to his envoy Ybarra.
+
+And what was the result of all this expenditure of money, of all this
+lying and counter-lying, of all this frantic effort on the part of the
+most powerful monarch of the age to obtain property which did not belong
+to him--the sovereignty of a great kingdom, stocked with a dozen millions
+of human beings--of all this endless bloodshed of the people in the
+interests of a high-born family or two, of all this infamous brokerage
+charged by great nobles for their attempts to transfer kingdoms like
+private farms from one owner to another?  Time was to show.  Meanwhile
+men trembled at the name of Philip II., and grovelled before him as the
+incarnation of sagacity, high policy, and king-craft.
+
+But Mayenne, while taking the brokerage, was less anxious about the
+transfer.  He had fine instinct enough to suspect that the Bearnese,
+outcast though he seemed, might after all not be playing so desperate a
+game against the League as it was the fashion to suppose.  He knew
+whether or not Henry was likely to prove a more fanatical Huguenot in
+1592 than he bad shown himself twenty years before at the Bartholomew
+festival.  And he had wit enough to foresee that the "instruction" which
+the gay free-thinker held so cautiously in his fingers might perhaps turn
+out the trump card.  A bold, valorous Frenchman with a flawless title,
+and washed whiter than snow by the freshet of holy water, might prove a
+more formidable claimant to the allegiance of Frenchmen than a foreign
+potentate, even though backed by all the doctors of the Sorbonne.
+
+The murder of President Brisson and his colleagues by the confederates of
+the sixteen quarters, was in truth the beginning of the end.  What seemed
+a proof of supreme power was the precursor of a counter-revolution,
+destined ere long to lead farther than men dreamed.  The Sixteen believed
+themselves omnipotent.  Mayenne being in their power, it was for them to
+bestow the crown at their will, or to hold it suspended in air as long as
+seemed best to them.  They felt no doubt that all the other great cities
+in the kingdom would follow the example of Paris.
+
+But the lieutenant-general of the realm felt it time for him to show that
+his authority was not a shadow--that he was not a pasteboard functionary
+like the deceased cardinal-king, Charles X.  The letters entrusted by the
+Sixteen to Claude Mathieu were intercepted by Henry, and, very probably,
+an intimation of their contents was furnished to Mayenne.  At any rate,
+the duke, who lacked not courage nor promptness when his own interests
+were concerned, who felt his authority slipping away from him, now that
+it seemed the object of the Spaniards to bind the democratic party to
+themselves by a complicity in crime, hastened at once to Paris,
+determined to crush these intrigues and to punish the murderers of the
+judges.  The Spanish envoy Ybarra, proud, excitable, violent, who had
+been privy to the assassinations, and was astonished that the deeds had
+excited indignation and fury instead of the terror counted upon,
+remonstrated with Mayenne, intimating that in times of civil commotion it
+was often necessary to be blind and deaf.
+
+In vain.  The duke carried it with a high and firm hand.  He arrested the
+ringleaders, and hanged four of them in the basement of the Louvre within
+twenty days after the commission of their crime.  The energy was well-
+timed and perfectly successful.  The power of the Sixteen was struck to
+the earth at a blow.  The ignoble tyrants became  in a moment as
+despicable as they had been formidable and insolent.  Crome, more
+fortunate than many of his fellows, contrived to make his escape
+out of the kingdom.
+
+Thus Mayenne had formally broken with the democratic party, so called-
+with the market-halls oligarchy.  In thus doing, his ultimate rupture
+with the Spaniards was foreshadowed.  The next combination for him to
+strive for would be one to unite the moderate Catholics and the Bearnese.
+Ah! if Henry would but "instruct" himself out of hand, what a game the
+duke might play!
+
+The burgess-party, the mild royalists, the disgusted portion of the
+Leaguers, coalescing with those of the Huguenots whose fidelity might
+prove stanch even against the religious apostasy contemplated by their
+chief--this combination might prove an over-match for the ultra-leaguers,
+the democrats, and the Spaniards.  The king's name would be a tower of
+strength for that "third party," which began to rear its head very boldly
+and to call itself "Politica."  Madam League might succumb to this new
+rival in the fickle hearts of the French.
+
+At the beginning of the year 1591; Buzanval had presented his credentials
+to the States-General at the Hague as envoy of Henry IV.  In the speech
+which he made on this occasion he expressed the hope that the mission of
+the Viscount Turenne, his Majesty's envoy to England and to the
+Netherlands, had made known the royal sentiments towards the States and
+the great satisfaction of the king with their energetic sympathy and
+assistance.  It was notorious, said Buzanval, that the King of Spain for
+many years had been governed by no other motive than to bring all the
+rest of Christendom under his dominion, while at the same time he forced
+upon those already placed under his sceptre a violent tyranny, passing
+beyond all the bounds that God, nature, and reason had set to lawful
+forms of government.  In regard to nations born under other laws than
+his, he had used the pretext of religion for reducing them to servitude.
+The wars stirred up by his family in Germany, and his recent invasion of
+England, were proofs of this intention, still fresh in the memory of all
+men.  Still more flagrant were his machinations in the present troubles
+of France.  Of his dealings with his hereditary realms, the condition of
+the noble provinces of the Netherlands, once so blooming under reasonable
+laws, furnished, a sufficient illustration.  You see, my masters,
+continued the envoy, the subtle plans of the Spanish king and his
+counsellors to reach with certainty the object of their ambition.
+They have reflected that Spain, which is the outermost corner of Europe,
+cannot conveniently make war upon other Christian realms.  They have seen
+that a central position is necessary to enable them to stretch their arms
+to every side.  They have remembered that princes who in earlier days
+were able to spread their wings over all Christendom had their throne in
+France, like Charles the Great and his descendants.  Therefore the king
+is now earnestly bent on seizing this occasion to make himself master of
+France.  The death of the late king (Henry III.) had no sooner occurred,
+than--as the blood through great terror rushes from the extremities and
+overflows the heart--they here also, fearing to lose their opportunity
+and astonished at the valour of our present king, abandoned all their
+other enterprises in order to pour themselves upon France.
+
+Buzanval further reminded the States that Henry had received the most
+encouraging promises from the protestant princes of Germany, and that so
+great a personage as the Viscount Turenne, who had now gone thither to
+reap the fruit of those promises, would not have been sent on such a
+mission except that its result was certain.  The Queen of England, too,
+had promised his Majesty most liberal assistance.
+
+It was not necessary to argue as to the close connection between the
+cause of the Netherlands and that of France.  The king had beaten down
+the mutiny of his own subjects, and repulsed the invasion of the Dukes of
+Savoy and of Lorraine.  In consideration of the assistance promised by
+Germany and England--for a powerful army would be at the command of Henry
+in the spring--it might be said that the Netherlands might repose for a
+time and recruit their exhausted energies, under the shadow of these
+mighty preparations.
+
+"I do not believe, however," said the minister, "that you will all answer
+me thus.  The faint-hearted and the inexperienced might flatter
+themselves with such thoughts, and seek thus to cover their cowardice,
+but the zealous and the courageous will see that it is time to set sail
+on the ship, now that the wind is rising so freshly and favourably.
+
+"For there are many occasions when an army might be ruined for want of
+twenty thousand crowns.  What a pity if a noble edifice, furnished to the
+roof-tree, should fall to decay for want of a few tiles.  No doubt your
+own interests are deeply connected with our own.  Men may say that our
+proposals should be rejected on the principle that the shirt is nearer
+to the skin than the coat, but it can be easily proved that our cause
+is one.  The mere rumour of this army will prevent the Duke of Parma from
+attacking you.  His forces will be drawn to France.  He will be obliged
+to intercept the crash of this thunderbolt.  The assistance of this army
+is worth millions to you, and has cost you nothing.  To bring France into
+hostility with Spain is the very policy that you have always pursued and
+always should pursue in order to protect your freedom.  You have always
+desired a war between France and Spain, and here is a fierce and cruel
+one in which you have hazarded nothing.  It cannot come to an end without
+bringing signal advantages to yourselves.
+
+"You have always desired an alliance with a French sovereign, and here is
+a firm friendship offered you by our king, a natural alliance.
+
+"You know how unstable are most treaties that are founded on shifting
+interests, and do not concern the freedom of bodies and souls.  The first
+are written with pen upon paper, and are generally as light as paper.
+They have no roots in the heart.  Those founded on mutual assistance on
+trying occasions have the perpetual strength of nature.  They bring
+always good and enduring fruit in a rich soil like the heart of our king;
+that heart which is as beautiful and as pure from all untruth as the lily
+upon his shield.
+
+"You will derive the first profits from the army thus raised.  From the
+moment of its mustering under a chief of such experience as Turenne, it
+will absorb the whole attention of Spain, and will draw her thoughts from
+the Netherlands to France."
+
+All this and more in the same earnest manner did the envoy urge upon the
+consideration of the States-General, concluding with a demand of 100,000
+florins as their contribution towards the French campaign.
+
+His eloquence did not fall upon unwilling ears; for the States-General,
+after taking time to deliberate, replied to the propositions by an
+expression of the strongest sympathy with, and admiration for, the heroic
+efforts of the King of France.  Accordingly, notwithstanding their own
+enormous expenses, past and present, and their strenuous exertions at
+that very moment to form an army of foot and horse for the campaign, the
+brilliant results of which have already been narrated, they agreed to
+furnish the required loan of 100,000 florins to be repaid in a year,
+besides six or seven good ships of war to co-operate with the fleets of
+England and France upon the coasts of Normandy.  And the States were
+even better than their word.
+
+Before the end of autumn of the year 1591, Henry had laid siege to Rouen,
+then the second city of the kingdom.  To leave much longer so important a
+place--dominating, as it did, not only Normandy but a principal portion
+of the maritime borders of France--under the control of the League and of
+Spain was likely to be fatal to Henry's success.  It was perfectly sound
+in Queen Elizabeth to insist as she did, with more than her usual
+imperiousness towards her excellent brother, that he should lose no more
+time before reducing that city.  It was obvious that Rouen in the hands
+of her arch-enemy was a perpetual menace to the safety of her own
+kingdom.  It was therefore with correct judgment, as well as with that
+high-flown gallantry so dear to the heart of Elizabeth, that her royal
+champion and devoted slave assured her of his determination no longer to
+defer obeying her commands in this respect.
+
+The queen had repeatedly warned him of the necessity of defending the
+maritime frontier of his kingdom, and she was not sparing of her
+reproaches that the large sums which she expended in his cause had been
+often ill bestowed.  Her criticisms on what she considered his military
+mistakes were not few, her threats to withdraw her subsidies frequent.
+"Owning neither the East nor the West Indies," she said, "we are unable
+to supply the constant demands upon us; and although we have the
+reputation of being a good housewife, it does not follow that we can be a
+housewife for all the world."  She was persistently warning the king of
+an attack upon Dieppe, and rebuking him for occupying himself with petty
+enterprises to the neglect of vital points.  She expressed her surprise
+that after the departure of Parma, he had not driven the Spaniards out of
+Brittany, without allowing them to fortify themselves in that country.
+"I am astonished," she said to him, "that your eyes are so blinded as not
+to see this danger.  Remember, my dear brother," she frankly added, "that
+it is not only France that I am aiding, nor are my own natural realms of
+little consequence to me.  Believe me, if I see that you have no more
+regard to the ports and maritime places nearest to us, it will be
+necessary that my prayers should serve you in place of any other
+assistance, because it does not please me to send my people to the
+shambles where they may perish before having rendered you any assistance.
+I am sure the Spaniards will soon besiege Dieppe.  Beware of it, and
+excuse my bluntness, for if in the beginning you had taken the maritime
+forts, which are the very gates of your kingdom, Paris would not have
+been so well furnished, and other places nearer the heart of the kingdom
+would not have received so much foreign assistance, without which the
+others would have soon been vanquished.  Pardon my simplicity as
+belonging to my own sex wishing to give a lesson to one who knows better,
+but my experience in government makes me a little obstinate in believing
+that I am not ignorant of that which belongs to a king, and I persuade
+myself that in following my advice you will not fail to conquer your
+assailants."
+
+Before the end of the year Henry had obtained control of the, Seine, both
+above and below the city, holding Pont de l'Arche on the north--where was
+the last bridge across the river; that of Rouen, built by the English
+when they governed Normandy, being now in ruins--and Caudebec on the
+south in an iron grasp.  Several war-vessels sent by the Hollanders,
+according to the agreement with Buzanval, cruised in the north of the
+river below Caudebec, and rendered much service to the king in cutting
+off supplies from the beleaguered place, while the investing army of
+Henry, numbering twenty-five thousand foot--inclusive of the English
+contingent, and three thousand Netherlanders--and ten thousand cavalry,
+nearly all French, was fast reducing the place to extremities.
+
+Parma, as usual, in obedience to his master's orders, but entirely
+against his own judgment, had again left the rising young general of the
+Netherlands to proceed from one triumph to another, while he transferred
+beyond the borders of that land which it was his first business to
+protect, the whole weight of his military genius and the better portion
+of his well disciplined forces.
+
+Most bitterly and indignantly did he express himself, both at the outset
+and during the whole progress of the expedition, concerning the utter
+disproportions between the king's means and aims.  The want of money was
+the cause of wholesale disease, desertion, mutiny, and death in his
+slender army.
+
+Such great schemes as his master's required, as he perpetually urged,
+liberality of expenditure and measures of breadth.  He protested that he
+was not to blame for the ruin likely to come upon the whole enterprise.
+He had besought, remonstrated, reasoned with the king in vain.  He had
+seen his beard first grow, he said, in the king's service, and he had
+grown gray in that service, but rather than be kept longer in such a
+position, without money, men, or means to accomplish the great purposes
+on which he was sent, he protested that he would "abandon his office and
+retire into the woods to feed on roots."  Repeatedly did he implore his
+master for a large and powerful army; for money and again money.  The
+royal plans should be enforced adequately or abandoned entirely.  To
+spend money in small sums, as heretofore, was only throwing it into the
+sea.
+
+It was deep in the winter however before he could fairly come to the
+rescue of the besieged city.  Towards the end of January, 1592, he moved
+out of Hainault, and once more made his junction at Guise with the Duke
+of Mayenne.  At a review of his forces on 16th January, 1592, Alexander
+found himself at the head of thirteen thousand five hundred and sixteen
+infantry and four thousand and sixty-one cavalry.  The Duke of Mayenne's
+army, for payment of which that personage received from Philip 100,000
+dollars a month, besides 10,000 dollars a month for his own pocket, ought
+to have numbered ten thousand foot and three thousand horse, according to
+contract, but was in reality much less.
+
+The Duke of Montemarciano, nephew of Gregory XIV., had brought two
+thousand Swiss, furnished by the pontiff to the cause of the League,
+and the Duke of Lorraine had sent his kinsmen, the Counts Chaligny and
+Vaudemont, with a force of seven hundred lancers and cuirassiers.
+
+The town of Fere was assigned in pledge to Farnese to hold as a
+convenient: mustering-place and station in proximity to his own borders,
+and, as usual, the chief command over the united armies was placed in his
+hands.  These arrangements concluded, the allies moved slowly forward
+much in the same order as in the previous year.  The young Duke of Guise,
+who had just made his escape from the prison of Tours, where he had been
+held in durance since the famous assassination of his father and uncle,
+and had now come to join his uncle Mayenne, led the vanguard.  Ranuccio,
+son of the duke, rode also in the advance, while two experienced
+commanders, Vitry and De la Chatre, as well as the famous Marquis del
+Vasto, formerly general of cavalry in the Netherlands, who had been
+transferred to Italy but was now serving in the League's army as a
+volunteer, were associated with the young princes.  Parma, Mayenne, and
+Montemarciano rode in the battalia, the rear being under command of the
+Duke of Aumale and the Count Chaligny.  Wings of cavalry protected the
+long trains of wagons which were arranged on each flank of the invading
+army.  The march was very slow, a Farnese's uniform practice to guard
+himself scrupulously against any possibility of surprise and to entrench
+himself thoroughly at nightfall.
+
+By the middle of February they reached the vicinity of Aumale in Picardy.
+Meantime Henry, on the news of the advance of the relieving army, had
+again the same problem to solve that had been presented to him before
+Paris in the summer of 1590.  Should he continue in the trenches,
+pressing more and more closely the city already reduced to great straits?
+Should he take the open field against the invaders and once more attempt
+to crush the League and its most redoubtable commander in a general
+engagement?  Biron strenuously advised the continuance of the siege.
+Turenne, now, through his recent marriage with the heiress, called Duc
+de Bouillon, great head of the Huguenot party in France, counselled as
+warmly the open attack.  Henry, hesitating more than was customary with
+him, at last decided on a middle course.  The resolution did not seem a
+very wise one, but the king, who had been so signally out-generalled in
+the preceding campaign by the great Italian, was anxious to avoid his
+former errors, and might perhaps fall into as great ones by attempting
+two inconsistent lines of action.  Leaving Biron in command of the
+infantry and a portion of the horse to continue the siege, he took the
+field himself with the greater part of the cavalry, intending to
+intercept and harass the enemy and to prevent his manifest purpose of
+throwing reinforcements and supplies into the invested city.
+
+Proceeding to Neufchatel and Aumale, he soon found himself in the
+neighbourhood of the Leaguers, and it was not long before skirmishing
+began.  At this time, on a memorable occasion, Henry, forgetting as
+usual, in his eagerness for the joys of the combat that he was not a
+young captain of cavalry with his spurs to win by dashing into every mad
+adventure that might present itself, but a king fighting for his crown,
+with the welfare of a whole people depending on his fortunes, thought
+proper to place himself at the head of a handful of troopers to
+reconnoitre in person the camp of the Leaguers.  Starting with five
+hundred horse, and ordering Lavardin and Givry to follow with a larger
+body, while the Dukes of Nevers and Longueville were to move out, should
+it prove necessary, in force, the king rode forth as merrily as to a
+hunting party, drove in the scouts and pickets of the confederated
+armies, and, advancing still farther in his investigations, soon found
+himself attacked by a cavalry force of the enemy much superior to his
+own.  A skirmish began, and it was necessary for the little troop to beat
+a hasty retreat, fighting as it ran.  It was not long before Henry was
+recognised by the enemy, and the chase became all the more lively; George
+Basti, the famous Albanian trooper, commanding the force which pressed
+most closely upon the king.  The news spread to the camp of the League
+that the Bearnese was the leader of the skirmishers.  Mayenne believed
+it, and urged the instant advance of the flying squadron and of the whole
+vanguard.  Farnese refused.  It was impossible that the king should be
+there, he said, doing picket duty at the head of a company.  It was a
+clumsy ambush to bring on a general engagement in the open field, and he
+was not to be drawn out of his trenches into a trap by such a shallow
+device.  A French captain, who by command of Henry had purposely allowed
+himself to be taken, informed his captors that the skirmishers were in
+reality supported by a heavy force of infantry.  This suggestion of the
+ready Bearnese confirmed the doubts of Alexander.  Meantime the
+skirmishing steeplechase went on before his eyes.  The king dashing down
+a hill received an arquebus shot in his side, but still rode for his
+life.  Lavardin and Givry came to the rescue, but a panic seized their
+followers as the rumour flew that the king was mortally wounded--was
+already dead--so that they hardly brought a sufficient force to beat back
+the Leaguers.  Givry's horse was soon killed under him, and his own thigh
+crushed; Lavardin was himself dangerously wounded.  The king was more
+hard pressed than ever, men were falling on every side of him, when four
+hundred French dragoons--as a kind of musketeers who rode on hacks to the
+scene of action but did their work on foot, were called at that day--now
+dismounted and threw themselves between Henry and his pursuers.  Nearly
+every man of them laid down his life, but they saved the king's.  Their
+vigorous hand to hand fighting kept off the assailants until Nevers and
+Longueville received the king at the gates of Aumale with a force before
+which the Leaguers were fain to retreat as rapidly as they had come.
+
+In this remarkable skirmish of Aumale the opposite qualities of Alexander
+and of Henry were signally illustrated.  The king, by his constitutional
+temerity, by his almost puerile love of confronting danger for the
+danger's sake, was on the verge of sacrificing himself with all the hopes
+of his house and of the nobler portion of his people for an absolute
+nothing; while the duke, out of his superabundant caution, peremptorily
+refused to stretch out his hand and seize the person of his great enemy
+when directly within his, grasp.  Dead or alive, the Bearnese was
+unquestionably on that day in the power of Farnese, and with him the
+whole issue of the campaign and of the war.  Never were the narrow limits
+that separate valour on the one side and discretion on the other from
+unpardonable lunacy more nearly effaced than on that occasion.'
+
+When would such an opportunity occur again?
+
+The king's wound proved not very dangerous, although for many days
+troublesome, and it required, on account of his general state of health,
+a thorough cure.  Meantime the royalists fell back from Aumale and
+Neufchatel, both of which places were at once occupied by the Leaguers:
+In pursuance of his original plan, the Duke of Parma advanced with his
+customary steadiness and deliberation towards Rouen.  It was his
+intention to assault the king's army in its entrenchments in combination
+with a determined sortie to be made by the besieged garrison.  His
+preparations for the attack were ready on the 26th February, when he
+suddenly received a communication from De Villars, who had thus far most
+ably and gallantly conducted the defence of the place, informing him that
+it was no longer necessary to make a general attack.  On the day before
+he had made a sally from the four gates of the city, had fallen upon the
+besiegers in great force, had wounded Biron and killed six hundred of his
+soldiers, had spiked several pieces of artillery and captured others
+which he had successfully brought into the town, and had in short so
+damaged the enemy's works and disconcerted him in all his plans, that he
+was confident of holding the place longer than the king could afford to
+stay in front of him.  All he wished was a moderate reinforcement of men
+and munitions.  Farnese by no means sympathized with the confident tone
+of Villars nor approved of his proposition.  He had come to relieve Rouen
+and to raise the siege, and he preferred to do his work thoroughly.
+Mayenne was however most heartily in favour of taking the advice of
+Villars.  He urged that it was difficult for the Bearnese to keep an army
+long in the field, still more so in the trenches.  Let them provide for
+the immediate wants of the city; then the usual process of decomposition
+would soon be witnessed in the ill-paid, ill-fed, desultory forces of the
+heretic pretender.
+
+Alexander deferred to the wishes of Mayenne, although against his better
+judgment.  Eight hundred infantry, were successfully sent into Rouen.
+The army of the League then countermarched into Picardy near the confines
+of Artois.
+
+They were closely followed by Henry at the head of his cavalry, and
+lively skirmishes were of frequent occurrence.  In a military point of
+view none of these affairs were of consequence, but there was one which
+partook at once of the comic and the pathetic.  For it chanced that in a
+cavalry action of more than common vivacity the Count Chaligny found
+himself engaged in a hand to hand conflict with a very dashing swordsman,
+who, after dealing and receiving many severe blows, at last succeeded in
+disarming the count and taking him prisoner.  It was the fortune of war,
+and, but a few days before, might have been the fate of the great Henry
+himself.  But Chaligny's mortification at his captivity became intense
+when he discovered that the knight to whom he had surrendered was no
+other than the king's jester.  That he, a chieftain of the Holy League,
+the long-descended scion of the illustrious house of Lorraine, brother of
+the great Duke of Mercoeur, should become the captive of a Huguenot
+buffoon seemed the most stinging jest yet perpetrated since fools had
+come in fashion.  The famous Chicot--who was as fond of a battle as of a
+gibe, and who was almost as reckless a rider as his master--proved on
+this occasion that the cap and bells could cover as much magnanimity as
+did the most chivalrous crest.  Although desperately wounded in the
+struggle which had resulted in his triumph, he generously granted to the
+Count his freedom without ransom.  The proud Lorrainer returned to his
+Leaguers and the poor fool died afterwards of his wounds.
+
+The army of the allies moved through Picardy towards the confines of
+Artois, and sat down leisurely to beleaguer Rue, a low-lying place on the
+banks and near the mouth of the Somme, the only town in the province
+which still held for the king.  It was sufficiently fortified to
+withstand a good deal of battering, and it certainly seemed mere trifling
+for the great Duke of Parma to leave the Netherlands in such confusion,
+with young Maurice of Nassau carrying everything before him, and to come
+all the way into Normandy in order, with the united armies of Spain and
+the League, to besiege the insignificant town of Rue.
+
+And this was the opinion of Farnese, but he had chosen throughout the
+campaign to show great deference to the judgment of Mayenne.  Meantime
+the month of March wore away, and what had been predicted came to pass.
+Henry's forces dwindled away as usual.  His cavaliers rode off to forage
+for themselves, when their battles were denied them, and the king was now
+at the head of not more than sixteen thousand foot and five thousand
+horse.  On the other hand the Leaguers' army had been melting quite as
+rapidly.  With the death of Pope Sfondrato, his nephew Montemarciano had
+disappeared with his two thousand Swiss; while the French cavalry and
+infantry, ill-fed and uncomfortable, were diminishing daily.  Especially
+the Walloons, Flemings, and other Netherlanders of Parma's army, took
+advantage of their proximity to the borders and escaped in large numbers
+to their own homes.  It was but meagre and profitless campaigning on both
+sides during those wretched months of winter and early spring, although
+there was again an opportunity for Sir Roger Williams, at the head of two
+hundred musketeers and one hundred and fifty pikemen, to make one of his
+brilliant skirmishes under the eye of the Bearnese.  Surprised and
+without armour, he jumped, in doublet and hose, on horseback, and led his
+men merrily against five squadrons of Spanish and Italian horse, and six
+companies of Spanish infantry; singled out and unhorsed the leader of the
+Spanish troopers, and nearly cut off the head, of the famous Albanian
+chief George Basti with one swinging blow of his sword.  Then, being
+reinforced by some other English companies, he succeeded in driving the
+whole body of Italians and Spaniards, with great loss, quite into their
+entrenchments.  "The king doth commend him very highly," said Umton,
+"and doth more than wonder at the valour of our nation.  I never heard
+him give more honour to any service nor to any man than he doth to Sir
+Roger Williams and the rest, whom he held as lost men, and for which he
+has caused public thanks to be given to God."
+
+At last Villars, who had so peremptorily rejected assistance at the end
+of February, sent to say that if he were not relieved by the middle of
+April he should be obliged to surrender the city.  If the siege were not
+raised by the twentieth of the month he informed Parma, to his profound
+astonishment, that Rouen would be in Henry's hands.
+
+In effecting this result the strict blockade maintained by the Dutch
+squadron at the mouth of the river, and the resolute manner in which
+those cruisers dashed at every vessel attempting to bring relief to
+Rouen, were mainly instrumental.  As usual with the stern Hollanders and
+Zeelanders when engaged at sea with the Spaniards, it was war to the
+knife.  Early in April twelve large vessels, well armed and manned,
+attempted to break the blockade.  A combat ensued, at the end of which
+eight of the Spanish ships were captured, two were sunk, and two were set
+on fire in token of victory, every man on board of all being killed and
+thrown into the sea.  Queen Elizabeth herself gave the first news of this
+achievement to the Dutch envoy in London.  "And in truth," said he, "her
+Majesty expressed herself, in communicating these tidings, with such
+affection and extravagant joy to the glory and honour of our nation and
+men-of-war's-men, that it wonderfully delighted me, and did me good into
+my very heart to hear it from her."
+
+Instantly Farnese set himself to the work which, had he followed his own
+judgment, would already have been accomplished.  Henry with his cavalry
+had established himself at Dieppe and Arques, within a distance of five
+or six leagues from the infantry engaged in the siege of Rouen.
+Alexander saw the profit to be derived from the separation between the
+different portions of the enemy's forces, and marched straight upon the
+enemy's entrenchments.  He knew the disadvantage of assailing a strongly
+fortified camp, but believed that by a well-concerted, simultaneous
+assault by Villars from within and the Leaguers from without, the king's
+forces would be compelled to raise the siege or be cut up in their
+trenches.
+
+But Henry did not wait for the attack.  He had changed his plan, and,
+for once in his life, substituted extreme caution for his constitutional
+temerity.  Neither awaiting the assault upon his entrenchments nor
+seeking his enemy in the open field, he ordered the whole camp to be
+broken up, and on the 20th of April raised the siege.
+
+Farnese marched into Rouen, where the Leaguers were received with
+tumultuous joy, and this city, most important for the purposes of the
+League and for Philip's ulterior designs, was thus wrested from the grasp
+just closing upon it.  Henry's main army now concentrated itself in the
+neighbourhood of Dieppe, but the cavalry under his immediate
+superintendence continued to harass the Leaguers.  It was now determined
+to lay siege to Caudebec, on the right bank of the Seine, three leagues
+below Rouen; the possession of this place by the enemy being a constant.
+danger and difficulty to Rouen, whose supplies by the Seine were thus cut
+off.
+
+Alexander, as usual, superintended the planting of the batteries against
+the place.  He had been suffering during the whole campaign with those
+dropsical ailments which were making life a torture to him; yet his
+indomitable spirit rose superior to his physical disorders, and he
+wrought all day long on foot or on horseback, when he seemed only fit to
+be placed on his bed as a rapid passage to his grave.  On this occasion,
+in company with the Italian engineer Properzio, he had been for some time
+examining with critical nicety the preliminaries, for the siege, when it
+was suddenly observed by those around him that he was growing pale.  It
+then appeared that he had received a musket-ball between the wrist and
+the elbow, and had been bleeding profusely; but had not indicated by a
+word or the movement of a muscle that he had been wounded, so intent was
+he upon carrying out the immediate task to which he had set himself.  It
+was indispensable, however, that he should now take to his couch.  The
+wound was not trifling, and to one in his damaged and dropsical condition
+it was dangerous.  Fever set in, with symptoms of gangrene, and it became
+necessary to entrust the command of the League to Mayenne.  But it was
+hardly concealed from Parma that the duke was playing a double game.
+Prince Ranuccio, according to his father's express wish, was placed
+provisionally at the head of the Flemish forces.  This was conceded;
+however, with much heart-burning, and with consequences easily to be
+imagined.
+
+Meantime Caudebec fell at once.  Henry did nothing to relieve it, and the
+place could offer but slight resistance to the force arrayed against it.
+The bulk of the king's army was in the neighbourhood of Dieppe, where
+they had been recently strengthened by twenty companies of Netherlanders
+and Scotchmen brought by Count Philip Nassau.  The League's headquarters
+were in the village of Yvetot, capital of the realm of the whimsical
+little potentate so long renowned under that name.
+
+The king, in pursuance of the plan he had marked out for himself,
+restrained his skirmishing more than was his wont.  Nevertheless he lay
+close to Yvetot.  His cavalry, swelling and falling as usual like an
+Alpine torrent, had now filled up its old channels again, for once more
+the mountain chivalry had poured themselves around their king.  With ten
+thousand horsemen he was now pressing the Leaguers, from time to time,
+very hard, and on one occasion the skirmishing became so close and so
+lively that a general engagement seemed imminent.  Young Ranuccio had a
+horse shot under him, and his father--suffering as he was--had himself
+dragged out of bed and brought on a litter into the field, where he was
+set on horseback, trampling on wounds and disease, and, as it were, on
+death itself, that he might by his own unsurpassed keenness of eye and
+quickness of resource protect the army which had been entrusted to his
+care.  The action continued all day; young Bentivoglio, nephew of the
+famous cardinal, historian and diplomatist, receiving a bad wound in the
+leg, as he fought gallantly at the side of Ranuccio.  Carlo Coloma also
+distinguished himself in the engagement.  Night separated the combatants
+before either side had gained a manifest advantage, and on the morrow it
+seemed for the interest of neither to resume the struggle.
+
+The field where this campaign was to be fought was a narrow peninsula
+enclosed between the sea and the rivers Seine and Dieppe.  In this
+peninsula, called the Land of Caux, it was Henry's intention to shut up
+his enemy.  Farnese had finished the work that he had been sent to do,
+and was anxious, as Henry was aware, to return to the Netherlands.  Rouen
+was relieved, Caudebec had fallen.  There was not food or forage enough
+in the little peninsula to feed both the city and the whole army of the
+League.  Shut up in this narrow area, Alexander must starve or surrender.
+His only egress was into Picardy and so home to Artois, through the base
+of the isosceles triangle between the two rivers and on the borders of
+Picardy.  On this base Henry had posted his whole army.  Should Farnese
+assail him, thus provided with a strong position and superiority of
+force, defeat was certain.  Should he remain where he was, he must
+inevitably starve.  He had no communications with the outside.  The
+Hollanders lay with their ships below Caudebec, blockading the river's
+mouth and the coast.  His only chance of extrication lay across the
+Seine.  But Alexander was neither a bird nor a fish, and it was
+necessary, so Henry thought, to be either the one or the other to cross
+that broad, deep, and rapid river, where there were no bridges, and where
+the constant ebb and flow of the tide made transportation almost
+impossible in face of a powerful army in rear and flank.  Farnese's
+situation seemed, desperate; while the shrewd Bearnese sat smiling
+serenely, carefully watching at the mouth of the trap into which he had
+at last inveigled his mighty adversary.  Secure of his triumph, he seemed
+to have changed his nature, and to have become as sedate and wary as, by
+habit, he was impetuous and hot.
+
+And in truth Farnese found himself in very narrow quarters.  There was no
+hay for his horses, no bread for his men.  A penny loaf was sold for two
+shillings.  A jug of water was worth a crown.  As for meat or wine, they
+were hardly to be dreamed of.  His men were becoming furious at their
+position.  They had enlisted to fight, not to starve, and they murmured
+that it was better for an army to fall with weapons in its hands than to
+drop to pieces hourly with the enemy looking on and enjoying their agony.
+
+It was obvious to Farnese that there were but two ways out of his
+dilemma.  He might throw himself upon Henry--strongly entrenched as he
+was, and with much superior forces to his own, upon ground deliberately
+chosen for himself--defeat him utterly, and march over him back to the
+Netherlands.  This would be an agreeable result; but the undertaking
+seemed difficult, to say the least.  Or he might throw his army across
+the Seine and make his escape through the isle of France and Southern
+Picardy back to the so-called obedient provinces.  But it seemed,
+hopeless without bridges or pontoons to attempt the passage of the Seine.
+
+There was; however, no time left, for hesitation.  Secretly he took his
+resolution and communicated it in strict confidence to Mayenne, to
+Ranuccio, and to one or two other chiefs.  He came to Caudebec, and
+there, close to the margin of the river, he threw up a redoubt.  On the
+opposite bank, he constructed another.  On both he planted artillery,
+placing a force of eight hundred Netherlanders under Count Bossu in the
+one, and an equal number of the same nation, Walloons chiefly, under
+Barlotte in the other.  He collected all the vessels, flatboats,--
+wherries,--and rafts that could be found or put together at Rouen, and
+then under cover of his forts he transported all the Flemish infantry,
+and the Spanish, French, and Italian cavalry, during the night of 22nd
+May to the 22 May, opposite bank of the Seine.  Next morning he sent up
+all the artillery together with the Flemish cavalry to Rouen, where,
+making what use he could by temporary contrivances of the broken arches
+of the broken bridge, in order to shorten the distance from shore to
+shore, he managed to convey his whole army with all its trains across the
+river.
+
+A force was left behind, up to the last moment, to engage in the
+customary skirmishes, and to display themselves as largely as possible
+for the purpose of imposing upon the enemy.  The young Prince of Parma
+had command of this rearguard.  The device was perfectly successful.  The
+news of the movement was not brought to the ears of Henry until after it
+had been accomplished.  When the king reached the shore of the Seine, he
+saw to his infinite chagrin and indignation that the last stragglers of
+the army, including the garrison of the fort on the right bank, were just
+ferrying themselves across under command of Ranuccio.
+
+Furious with disappointment, he brought some pieces of artillery to bear
+upon the triumphant fugitives.  Not a shot told, and the Leaguers had the
+satisfaction of making a bonfire in the king's face of the boats which
+had brought them over.  Then, taking up their line of march rapidly
+inland, they placed themselves completely out of the reach of the
+Huguenot guns.
+
+Henry had a bridge at Pont de l'Arche, and his first impulse was to
+pursue with his cavalry, but it was obvious that his infantry could never
+march by so circuitous a route fast enough to come up with the enemy, who
+had already so prodigious a stride in advance.
+
+There was no need to disguise it to himself.  Henry saw himself for the
+second time out-generalled by the consummate Farnese.  The trap was
+broken, the game had given him the slip.  The manner in which the duke
+had thus extricated himself from a profound dilemma; in which his
+fortunes seemed hopelessly sunk, has usually been considered one of the
+most extraordinary exploits of his life.
+
+Precisely at this time, too, ill news reached Henry from Brittany and the
+neighbouring country.  The Princes Conti and Dombes had been obliged, on
+the 13th May, 1592, to raise the siege of Craon, in consequence of the
+advance of the Duke of Mercoeur, with a force of seven thousand men.
+
+They numbered, including lanzknechts and the English contingent, about
+half as many, and before they could effect their retreat, were attacked
+by Mercoeur, and utterly routed.  The English, who alone stood to their
+colours, were nearly all cut to pieces.  The rest made a disorderly
+retreat,  but were ultimately, with few exceptions, captured or slain.
+The duke, following up his victory, seized Chateau Gontier and La Val,
+important crossing places on the river Mayenne, and laid siege to
+Mayenne, capital city of that region.  The panic, spreading through
+Brittany and Maine, threatened the king's cause there with complete
+overthrow, hampered his operations in Normandy, and vastly encouraged the
+Leaguers.  It became necessary for Henry to renounce his designs upon
+Rouen, and the pursuit of Parma, and to retire to Vernon, there to occupy
+himself with plans for the relief of Brittany.  In vain had the Earl of
+Essex, whose brother had already been killed in the campaign, manifested
+such headlong gallantry in that country as to call forth the sharpest
+rebukes from the admiring but anxious Elizabeth.  The handful of brave
+Englishmen who had been withdrawn from the Netherlands, much to the
+dissatisfaction of the States-General, in order to defend the coasts of
+Brittany, would have been better employed under Maurice of Nassau.  So
+soon as the heavy news reached the king, the faithful Umton was sent for.
+"He imparted the same unto me," said the envoy, "with extraordinary
+passion and discontent.  He discoursed at large of his miserable estate,
+of the factions of his servants, and of their ill-dispositions, and then
+required my opinion touching his course for Brittan, as also what further
+aid he might expect from her Majesty; alleging that unless he were
+presently strengthened by England it was impossible for him, longer to
+resist the greatness of the King of Spain, who assailed his country by
+Brittany, Languedoc, the Low Countries by the Duke of Saxony and the Duke
+of Lorraine, and so ended his speech passionately."  Thus adjured, Sir
+Henry spoke to the king firmly but courteously, reminding him how,
+contrary to English advice, he had followed other counsellors to the
+neglect of Brittany, and had broken his promises to the queen.  He
+concluded by urging him to advance into that country in person, but did
+not pledge himself on behalf of her Majesty to any further assistance.
+"To this," said Umton, "the king gave a willing ear, and replied, with
+many thanks, and without disallowing of anything that I alleged, yielding
+many excuses of his want of means, not of disposition, to provide a
+remedy, not forgetting to acknowledge her Majesty's care of him and his
+country, and especially of Brittany, excusing much the bad disposition of
+his counsellors, and inclining much to my motion to go in person thither,
+especially because he might thereby give her Majesty better satisfaction;
+.  .  .  .  and protesting that he would either immediately himself make
+war there in those parts or send an army thither.  I do not doubt," added
+the ambassador, "but with good handling her Majesty may now obtain any
+reasonable matter for the conservation of Brittany, as also for a place
+of retreat for the English, and I urge continually the yielding of Brest
+into her Majesty's hands, whereunto I find the king well inclined, if he
+might bring it to pass."
+
+Alexander passed a few days in Paris, where he was welcomed with much
+cordiality, recruiting his army for a brief period in the land of Brie,
+and then--broken in health but entirely successful--he dragged himself
+once more to Spa to drink the waters.  He left an auxiliary force with
+Mayenne, and promised--infinitely against his own wishes--to obey his
+master's commands and return again before the winter to do the League's
+work.
+
+And thus Alexander had again solved a difficult problem.  He had saved
+for his master and for the League the second city of France and the whole
+coast of Normandy.  Rouen had been relieved in masterly manner even as
+Paris had been succoured the year before.  He had done this, although
+opposed by the sleepless energy and the exuberant valour of the quick-
+witted Navarre, and although encumbered by the assistance of the
+ponderous Duke of Mayenne.  His military reputation, through these
+two famous reliefs and retreats, grew greater than ever.
+
+No commander of the age was thought capable of doing what he had thus
+done.  Yet, after all, what had he accomplished?  Did he not feel in his
+heart of hearts that he was but a strong and most skilful swimmer
+struggling for a little while against an ocean-tide which was steadily
+sweeping him and his master and all their fortunes far out into the
+infinite depths?
+
+Something of this breathed ever in his most secret utterances.  But, so
+long as life was in him, his sword and his genius were at the disposal of
+his sovereign, to carry out a series of schemes as futile as they were
+nefarious.
+
+For us, looking back upon the Past, which was then the Future, it is
+easy to see how remorselessly the great current of events was washing
+away the system and the personages seeking to resist its power and to
+oppose the great moral principles by which human affairs in the long run
+are invariably governed.  Spain and Rome were endeavouring to obliterate
+the landmarks of race, nationality, historical institutions, and the
+tendencies of awakened popular conscience, throughout Christendom,
+and to substitute for them a dead level of conformity to one regal
+and sacerdotal despotism.
+
+England, Holland, the Navarre party in France, and a considerable part of
+Germany were contending for national unity and independence, for vested
+and recorded rights.  Much farther than they themselves or their
+chieftains dreamed those millions of men were fighting for a system
+of temperate human freedom; for that emancipation under just laws from
+arbitrary human control, which is the right--however frequently trampled
+upon--of all classes, conditions, and races of men; and for which it is
+the instinct of the human race to continue to struggle under every
+disadvantage, and often against all hope, throughout the ages, so long
+as the very principle of humanity shall not be extinguished in those
+who have been created after their Maker's image.
+
+It may safely be doubted whether the great Queen, the Bearnese, Alexander
+Farnese, or his master, with many of their respective adherents, differed
+very essentially from each other in their notions of the right divine and
+the right of the people.  But history has shown us which of them best
+understood the spirit of the age, and had the keenest instinct to keep
+themselves in the advance by moving fastest in the direction whither it
+was marshalling all men.  There were many, earnest, hard-toiling men in
+those days, men who believed in the work to which they devoted their
+lives.  Perhaps, too, the devil-worshippers did their master's work as
+strenuously and heartily as any, and got fame and pelf for their pains.
+Fortunately, a good portion of what they so laboriously wrought for has
+vanished into air; while humanity has at least gained something from
+those who deliberately or instinctively conformed themselves to her
+eternal laws.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Anatomical study of what has ceased to exist
+Artillery
+Bomb-shells were not often used although known for a century
+Court fatigue, to scorn pleasure
+For us, looking back upon the Past, which was then the Future
+Hardly an inch of French soil that had not two possessors
+Holy institution called the Inquisition
+Inevitable fate of talking castles and listening ladies
+Life of nations and which we call the Past
+Often necessary to be blind and deaf
+Picturesqueness of crime
+Royal plans should be enforced adequately or abandoned entirely
+Toil and sacrifices of those who have preceded us
+Use of the spade
+Utter disproportions between the king's means and aims
+Valour on the one side and discretion on the other
+Walk up and down the earth and destroy his fellow-creatures
+We have the reputation of being a good housewife
+Weapons
+
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HISTORY UNITED NETHERLANDS, 1590-92 ***
+
+************ This file should be named 4863.txt or 4863.zip ************
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