The Prince of Orange, who had been ou the watch for a favorable moment, now entered Brabant at the head of twenty thousand men, composed of French, German, and English, and made himself master of several important places; while his indefatigable brother Louis, with a minor force, suddenly appeared in Hainault, and, joined by a large body of French Huguenots under De Genlis, he seized on Mons, the capital of the province, on the 25th of May.
Alva turned first toward the recovery of this important place, and gave the command of the siege to his son Frederic of Toledo, who was assisted by the counsels of Noircarmes and Vitelli; but Louis of Nassau held out for upward of three months, and only surrendered on an honorable capitulation in the month of September; his French allies having been first entirely defeated, and their brave leader De Genlis taken prisoner. The Prince of Orange had in the meantime secured possession of Louvain, Ruremonde, Mechlin, and other towns, carried Termonde and Oudenarde by assault, and made demonstrations which seemed to court Alva once more to try the fortune of the campaign in a pitched battle. But such were not William's real intentions, nor did the cautious tactics of his able opponent allow him to provoke such a risk. He, however, ordered his son Frederic to march with all his force into Holland, and he soon undertook the siege of Haerlem. By the time that Mons fell again into the power of the Spaniards, sixty-five towns and their territories, chiefly in the northern provinces, had thrown off the yoke. The single port of Flessingue contained one hundred and fifty patriot vessels, well armed and equipped; and from that epoch may be dated the rapid growth of the first naval power in Europe, with the single exception of Great Britain.
It is here worthy of remark, that all the horrors of which the people of Flanders were the victims, and in their full proportion, had not the effect of exciting them to revolt; but they rose up with fury against the payment of the new taxes. They sacrificed everything sooner than pay these unjust exactions—_Omnia_dabant_, _ne_decimam_darant_. The next important event in these wars was the siege of Haerlem, before which place the Spaniards were arrested in their progress for seven months, and which they at length succeeded in taking with a loss of ten thousand men.
The details of this memorable siege are calculated to arouse every feeling of pity for the heroic defenders, and of execration against the cruel assailants. A widow, named Kenau Hasselaer, gained a niche in history by her remarkable valor at the head of a battalion of three hundred of her townswomen, who bore a part in all the labors and perils of the siege. After the surrender, and in pursuance of Alva's common system, his ferocious son caused the governor and the other chief officers to be beheaded; and upward of two thousand of the worn-out garrison and burghers were either put to the sword, or tied two and two and drowned in the lake which gives its name to the town. Tergoes in South Beveland, Mechlin, Naerden, and other towns, were about the same period the scenes of gallant actions, and of subsequent cruelties of the most revolting nature as soon as they fell into the power of the Spaniards. Strada, with all his bigotry to the Spanish cause, admits that these excesses were atrocious crimes rather than just punishments: _non_poena,_sed_flagitium_. Horrors like these were sure to force reprisals on the part of the maddened patriots. De la Marck carried on his daring exploits with a cruelty which excited the indignation of the Prince of Orange, by whom he was removed from his command. The contest was for a while prosecuted with a decrease of vigor proportioned to the serious losses on both sides; money and the munitions of war began to fail; and though the Spaniards succeeded in taking The Hague, they were repulsed before Alkmaer with great loss, and their fleet was almost entirely destroyed in a naval combat on the Zuyder Zee. The count Bossu, their admiral, was taken in this fight, with about three hundred of his best sailors.
Holland was now from one end to the other the theatre of the most shocking events. While the people performed deeds of the greatest heroism, the perfidy and cruelty of the Spaniards had no bounds. The patriots saw more danger in submission than in resistance; each town, which was in succession subdued, endured the last extremities of suffering before it yielded, and victory was frequently the consequence of despair. This unlooked-for turn in affairs decided the king to remove Alva, whose barbarous and rapacious conduct was now objected to even by Philip, when it produced results disastrous to his cause. Don Luis Zanega y Requesens, commander of the order of Malta, was named to the government of the Netherlands. He arrived at Brussels on the 17th of November, 1573; and on the 18th of that following month, the monster whom he succeeded set out for Spain, loaded with the booty to which he had waded through oceans of blood, and with the curses of the country, which, however, owed its subsequent freedom to the impulse given by his intolerable cruelty. He repaired to Spain; and after various fluctuations of favor and disgrace at the hands of his congenial master, he died in his bed, at Lisbon, in 1582, at the advanced age of seventy-four years.
CHAPTER X
TO THE PACIFICATION OF GHENT
A.D. 1573—1576
The character of Requesens was not more opposed to that of his predecessor, than were the instructions given to him for his government. He was an honest, well-meaning, and moderate man, and the king of Spain hoped that by his influence and a total change of measures he might succeed in recalling the Netherlands to obedience. But, happily for the country, this change was adopted too late for success; and the weakness of the new government completed the glorious results which the ferocity of the former had prepared.
Requesens performed all that depended on him, to gain the confidence of the people. He caused Alva's statue to be removed; and hoped to efface the memory of the tyrant by dissolving the Council of Blood and abandoning the obnoxious taxes which their inventor had suspended rather than abolished. A general amnesty was also promulgated against the revolted provinces; they received it with contempt and defiance. Nothing then was left to Requesens but to renew the war; and this he found to be a matter of no easy execution. The finances were in a state of the greatest confusion; and the Spanish troops were in many places seditious, in some openly mutinous, Alva having left large arrears of pay due to almost all, notwithstanding the immense amount of his pillage and extortion. Middleburg, which had long sustained a siege against all the efforts of the patriots, was now nearly reduced by famine, notwithstanding the gallant efforts of its governor, Mondragon. Requesens turned his immediate attention to the relief of this important place; and he soon assembled, at Antwerp and Berg-op-Zoom, a fleet of sixty vessels for that purpose. But Louis Boisot, admiral of Zealand, promptly repaired to attack this force; and after a severe action he totally defeated it, and killed De Glimes, one of its admirals, under the eyes of Requesens himself, who, accompanied by his suite, stood during the whole affair on the dike of Schakerloo. This action took place the 29th of January, 1574; and, on the 19th of February following, Middleburg surrendered, after a resistance of two years. The Prince of Orange granted such conditions as were due to the bravery of the governor; and thus set an example of generosity and honor which greatly changed the complexion of the war. All Zealand was now free; and the intrepid Admiral Boisot gained another victory on the 30th of May—destroying several of the Spanish vessels, and taking some others, with their Admiral Von Haemstede. Frequent naval enterprises were also undertaken against the frontiers of Flanders; and while the naval forces thus harassed the enemy on every vulnerable point, the unfortunate provinces of the interior were ravaged by the mutinous and revolted Spaniards, and by the native brigands, who pillaged both royalists and patriots with atrocious impartiality.