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Such advice to the King of Spain was like the carnal policy of the children of Israel in making terms with the idolaters of Canaan. What to him were the lives and industries of his subjects compared to their immortal souls? Better that the Low Countries were restored to the ocean from which they had been recovered, better that every man, woman, and child should perish from off the land, than that he should acknowledge or endure as his subjects the enemies of God. To him the man who endeavoured to protect a heretic was no less infamous than the heretic himself. Compared with the service of the Almighty, the rights of the Provinces were mere forms of man's devising; and, with a purpose hard as the flinty pavement of his own Madrid, he temporized and gave doubtful answers, and marked the name of every man who petitioned to him for moderation, that he might make an example of him when the time for it should come.

At length, driven mad by their own sufferings, encouraged by the attitude of their leaders, and by the apparent absence of any force which could control them, the commons of the Netherlands rose in rebellion, sacked churches and cathedrals, burnt monasteries, killed monks when they came in their way, set up their own services, and broke into the usual excesses which the Calvinists on their side considered also supremely meritorious.

The Stadtholders put them down everywhere, used the gallows freely, and restored order; but the thing was done, the peace had been broken, and Philip had

the plea at last for which he had long waited—that his subjects were in insurrection, and required the presence of his own troops to bring them to obedience. An army, small in number but perfect in equipment and discipline, was raised from among the choicest troops which Spain and Italy could provide. The ablest living soldier was chosen to command them. The Duchess of Parma was superseded, and the military government of the Netherlands was entrusted to Ferdinand of Toledo, Duke of Alva.

The name of Alva has descended through Protestant tradition in colours black as if he had been dipped in the pitch of Cocytus. Religious history is partial in its verdicts. The exterminators of the Canaanites are enshrined among the saints, and had the Catholics come off victorious, the Duke of Alva would have been a second Joshua. He was now sixty years old. His life from his boyhood had been spent in the field, and he possessed all the qualities in perfection which go to the making of a great commander and a great military administrator. The one guide of his life was the law of his country. He was the servant of the law and not its master, and he was sent to his new government to enforce obedience to a rule which he himself obeyed, and which all subjects of the Spanish Crown were bound to obey. His intellect was of that strong practical kind which apprehends distinctly the thing to be done, and uses without flinching the appropriate means to do it. He was proud, but with the pride of a Spaniard-a pride in his race and in his country. He was ambitious,

but it was not an ambition which touched his loyalty to creed or king. In him the Spain of the sixteenth century found its truest and most complete representative. Careless of pleasure, careless of his life, temperate in his personal habits, without passion, without imagination, with nerves of steel, and with a supreme conviction that the duty of subjects was to obey those who were set over them—such was the famous, or infamous, Duke of Alva, when in June, 1567, in the same month when Mary Stuart was shut up in Lochleven, he set out from Italy for the Netherlands. He took with him ten thousand soldiers, complete in the essentials of an army, even to two thousand courtesans, who were under military discipline. He passed over Mont Cenis through Savoy, Burgundy, and Lorraine. In the middle of August he was at Thionville; before September he had entered Brussels.

The Prince of Orange, who knew the meaning of his coming, had provided for his safety and had retreated with his four brothers into Germany. Egmont, conscious of no crime except of having desired to serve his country, remained with Count Horn to receive the new governor. In a few weeks they found themselves arrested, and with them any nobleman or gentleman that Alva's arm could reach, who had signed the petitions to the King. Proceeding to business with calm skill, the Duke distributed his troops in garrisons among the towns. With a summary command he suspended the local magistrates and closed the local courts. The administration of the Provinces was made over to a

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council of which he was himself president, and from which there was no appeal. Tribunals commissioned by this body were erected all over the country, and so swift and steady were their operations, that in three months eighteen hundred persons had perished at the stake or on the scaffold.1

Deprived of their leaders, and stupefied by these prompt and dreadful measures, the people made little resistance; a few partial efforts were instantly crushed, and their one hope was then in the Prince of Orange. The Prince, accepting Alva's measures as an open violation of the constitution, without disclaiming his allegiance to Philip, at once declared war against his representative, raising money on the credit of his own estates, and gathering contributions wherever hatred of Catholic tyranny opened a purse to him. He raised two armies in Germany, and while he himself prepared to cross the Meuse, his brother, Count Louis, entered Friesland. Fortune was at first favourable. D'Arem

berg, who was sent by Alva to stop Louis, blundered into a position where even Spanish troops could not save him from disaster and defeat. The patriots won the first battle of the war, and d'Aremberg was killed.2 But the brief flood-tide soon ebbed. Alva waited only to send Horn and Egmont to the scaffold, and took the

1 History of the Dutch Republic, vol. i. p. 136. The merits of Mr Motley's history have been recognized so generally, that further praise would be impertinent and superfluI may be permitted however

ous.

as a fellow-traveller on a parallel road, to thank him for the light with which his pages never fail to furnish me whenever I turn to them.

2 Battle of Heiliger Lee, May 23, 1568.

field in person. Count Louis' military chest was badly furnished, and soon empty. The Germans would not fight without pay, and Louis had no money to pay them with. As Alva advanced upon them they fell back without order or purpose, till they entrapped themselves in a peninsula on the Ems, and there, in three miserable hours, Count Louis saw his entire force mowed down by his own cannon, which the Spaniards took at the first rush, or drowned and smothered in the tideway or the mud. The Duke's loss, if his own report of the engagement was true, was but seven men.1 The account most favourable to the patriots does not raise it above eighty. Count Louis, with a few stragglers, swam the river and made his way to his brother, for whose fortune so tremendous a catastrophe was no favourable omen. The German States, already lukewarm, became freezing in their indifference. Maximilian forbade Orange to levy troops within the Empire. Orange however had a position of his own in Nassau, from which he could act at his own risk upon his own resources. He published a justification of himself to Europe. By loan and mortgage, by the sale of every acre which he could dispose of, he again raised money enough to move; and on the 5th of October he led thirty thousand men over the Meuse and entered Brabant.

So matters stood on the Continent in the summer and autumn which followed Mary Stuart's flight to England, and they had contributed no little to Eliza

1 Battle of Jemmingen, July 21.

VOL. VIII.

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