not wonderful that this signal spectacle of atrocity should have kindled a general revolt. Alva had the meanness to seize and send prisoner to Spain the count de Buren, the eldest son of the prince of Orange, then a boy of fifteen *, who pursued his studies in the university of Louvain. Orange collected a considerable army in Germany of foreign protestants and exiled Flemings, of which one division, under his brother count Louis, after some successes in Friesland, was finally defeated. The main body, commanded by the prince of Orange himself, penetrated to the Meuse. Conscious that his pecuniary resources were too scanty to keep his troops long together, his object was to force Alva to action. Alva, who knew that the prince's army would melt away as soon as his supplies were exhausted, was content to stand on a somewhat mortifying defence against raw revolters, well knowing that winter would in no long time rid him of their presence. A campaign of positions and surprises, with incessant watchfulness on both sides, then ensued; a species of war where military ability is often best shown: and though in this case Alva, by the discipline of his troops and the superiority of his material means of war, accomplished his purpose, yet the prince of Orange proved himself to be no unworthy opponent of the most renowned commander in Europe. It was not till 1572 that Orange made another irruption into the Netherlands, attended by a success which never afterwards entirely deserted the cause of liberty in these provinces. The beggars, or gueux, besides the large party of malecontents whom the arrogance of the court of Brussels called by that name, comprehended two regular bodies, the bush beggars and the sea beggars, whose origin may be easily seen in these contemptuous appellatives. The illustrious admiral Coligny had suggested to the prince, at Paris, that, as Spain had no marine in the Netherlands, the * Van Meteren, 50. -- seizure of a sea-port would be the most effectual means of lasting war against them. The prince, well knowing that the sea beggars had lately been recruited by numerous and opulent refugees from the scaffolds of Alva, had begun to capture Spanish ships along the coast, carrying their prizes either to the protestant city of Rochelle, or, more covertly, to the ports of England. He despatched William count de la Marck, a man of no valuable quality, but of a fierce valour, which the occasion demanded, to prepare a small armament in the English harbours. The Spanish ambassador complained that the connivance at the mooring of the piratical rebels in the Downs and at Dover was a breach of neutrality, and an offence against the treaties between the two crowns. When these complaints were so often repeated that Elizabeth could no longer shut her eyes on the facts, but not, as it should seem, till the little squadron was ready for sailing, she issued a proclamation, in March, 1572, commanding the exiles, on a day therein fixed, to quit her harbours; on condition that the king of Spain should, in like manner, banish the English rebels from his dominions.* They, in consequence, set sail for the islands which form the province of Zealand, in twenty-four small vessels; the germ of a navy which became one of the most powerful that the modern world had seen. On the evening of Palm Sunday, the 1st of April, 1572, a party of them, with the appearance of men who had escaped from a shipwreck, were suffered to steal into the small town of Brille; and, being seconded by some of the inhabitants, disarmed the Spanish garrison, and made themselves masters of the place. This gallant adventure of a party of the despised beggars laid the foundations of a wise and renowned commonwealth. Zealand and Holland declared for the prince of Camd. Ann. 1572, ii. 264. Van Meteren, Hist. des Pays Bas, 71. On the 21st of February, Elizabeth, in terms of extraordinary indulgence towards the exiles, commanded the mayor of Dover to warn the count de la Marck of the necessity of ceasing to disturb her dominions, by recruiting his troops and arming his vessels within the English territory. Murden, 210. Orange, who gave some regularity to his administration by conducting the government in his character of stadtholder or lieutenant of Holland; an office conferred by the king, but under colour of which the prince continued for many years to wage war against Spanish armies by his majesty's authority. All the affairs of the law and the state were transacted, according to usual form, in the king's name. Arms were professedly employed only against foreign soldiers, whose presence in the Netherlands was in open defiance of the fundamental laws, and all the public documents contained an express saving of the supreme and sacred prerogatives of his majesty. Elizabeth beheld this great revolution with satisfaction, and considered herself as having sufficiently performed the duties of neutrality by compliance with the requisition made by the Spanish minister. She imposed no farther restraints on the inclination of her people; a small part of whom (probably catholics) joined the duke of Alva, while great numbers, yielding to the hereditary feeling of their name and lineage, espoused the cause of liberty. * The massacre of the huguenots in France, to which it will soon be necessary to recur, changed the fortune of the war in the Netherlands during the latter part of the year 1572. The successes of the Spanish arms were dishonoured by cruelties before unheard of; and excited a resistance, perhaps not to be matched in modern history. Frederic, the duke of Alva's son, began his career of blood by the massacre of old men, women, and children at Naarden. The first of those memorable defences which immortalise Holland was that of Haarlem; where the siege commenced in December, 1572, and was closed on the 12th of July, after a promise of general mercy, which did not prevent Toledo from beheading, hanging, or drowning more "Viri militares ex Angliâ in Belgium confluere cœperunt, alii propartium studiis ad Albanum, alii et longe plures ad principem arausionensem, qui religionis et libertatis nomine Albano se opposuit."-Camd. ii. 264, "Affluentibus quotidie auxiliis e Galliæ et Britaniæ regnis."—Grot. Ann maer. than 1600 of the garrison, foreigners and natives, and 2000 of the townsmen. The Spaniards evinced their sense of the merit of the defence by bestowing on the regiments who took the most active part in reducing an almost open town, in the course of seven months, the titles of the Invincibles and of the Immortals. The royal army were compelled to raise the siege of AlkThe garrison and inhabitants endured miseries, during their long defence, which would be incredible if they were not better attested than most facts in history. They were reduced to preserve the lingering wretchedness of their lives by scanty portions of unclean and loathsome rats, cats, and dogs. Fish skins were collected from the dunghills; cow-skins, cut into small pieces, were among the dishes on which they tried to subsist. They laboured to extract nourishment from the dried bones of cattle which for years had been whitening over the fields. Pestilence, as usual, followed in the train of famine. The people bore all with heroic patience, and consented to open the sluices, so as to deluge the whole environs; declaring loudly, that an injured country was better than an enslaved country. At last a high wind arose, which was regarded as the messenger of Providence sent to deliver the brave and faithful city. By this breeze the waters were so raised as to enable the Dutch squadron to come so near that they threw in supplies for the garrison, and the besiegers were obliged to retire. Amsterdam, afterwards celebrated by zeal for civil and religious liberty, was bridled by a Spanish garrison, placed in it on account of its importance. Grotius strengthens his credit in the narrative of Alva's atrocities by owning that de la Marck, though an useful ruffian, had brought infamy on infant liberty by cruelty to the catholic priests.* The duke of Alva was recalled from his deplorable administration of the Netherlands, where he boasted that in six years he had put to death 18,000 persons by the hands of the hangman. Vargas, * Grot. Ann. lib. ii. p. 40. edit. 8vo. Amstelodami, 1658. his sanguinary instrument, when he arrived with his master at the frontier, looking back on the provinces which had endured his rod for nine years, exclaimed, “There is a country lost by indulgence!" A degree of cruelty is conceivable which might altogether extinguish the spirit and resolution which resistance requires: but this extent of destruction, though it may doubtless be conceived, can hardly ever be practised. Tyrants are ignorant of the laws which limit their destructive power. Strangers to pity themselves, they know not its power over other men. Unbelievers in the force of moral indignation, it bursts upon them when they are least prepared. They know not that every new crime dissolves some link of that mutual trust between them and their accomplices or followers, without which assassins and robbers cannot act together. Men who must more and more distrust and abhor each other, and who are doomed to end in hating themselves, cannot always preserve the union and concert without which their malignity becomes powerless. The infirmities of human nature undermine the conspiracies of the wicked, perhaps, even more than they loosen the union of the good. No man was ever so consistently depraved as never to be visited by misgivings in a course of guilt which, save only the fellows of his crimes, renders all mankind his enemies, for whose constancy and fidelity he has no other security than a common criminality, which, brittle as it is, has no force but against the virtuous; for, in their relations to each other, every villain must live in continual dread of fraud, treachery, and destruction from his brethren in blood. The greater part of them, unripe in atrocity, must be often unmanned by cowardice, and appalled by fearful anticipations that they are doomed one day to regard their own dispositions with some degree of that abhorrence of which they must sometimes read in the eyes of their fellow-creatures. They at last fall unpitied victims to the eternal law which dooms the vices to perpetual discords, arms the virtues with that power which flows |