circumstances conspired both to diminish and dispirit his army. The most discouraging blow of all was the massacre of St Bartholomew, in which, on the night of the 24th of August 1572, more than 60,000 of the Protestants of France perished. By this event, all hope of assistance from France was destroyed; and, after several fruitless engagements with Alva's army, William was obliged to disband his forces, and to retire from active military operation.

The condition of the Netherlands was now as follows:-Alva was nominally their governor; but in the late struggle, no fewer than sixty or seventy towns, principally in Holland, Zealand, and Flanders, had thrown off the yoke, and now bade defiance to the Spanish government. Unless these towns were recovered, Philip could no longer be said to be king of the Netherlands. Alva's exertions were therefore devoted to the recovery of these towns; and his officers were almost all employed in sieges. Mons, Tergoes, Mechlin, Zutphen, and Naerden, were successively reduced; and so dreadful were the enormities perpetrated by the Spanish soldiers, that the citizens, after the surrender of other towns, resolved to exhaust every means of resistance rather than submit. The town of Haarlem distinguished itself by the desperate bravery with which for seven months it stood out against a large army under Alva's son. At length, trusting to a truce with the Spaniard, the famished citizens agreed to surrender. The siege, some accounts say, had cost the Spaniards 10,000 men; and now they took a fearful vengeance. Hundreds of the most respectable citizens were executed; and when the four executioners were tired of their bloody work, they tied their victims two by two together, and flung them into the lake of Haarlem. As showing how deep a hold the great struggle of the sixteenth century has taken of the popular memory, and how many local associations there are connected with it, we may quote the following account of a curious Haarlem custom, the origin of which is traced to the siege of the city in 1572 :-" In walking through the streets of Haarlem, we saw a rather

curious memorial of these disastrous times. At the sides of the doors of various houses hung a small neatly-framed board, on which was spread a piece of fine lace-work of an oval form, resembling the top of a lady's cap with a border: the object, indeed, on a casual inspection, might have been taken for a lady's cap hung out to dry. Beneath it, to show the transparency of the lace, there was placed a piece of pink paper or silk. On asking the meaning of these exhibitions, I was informed that they originated in a circumstance which occurred at the siege of Haarlem. Before surrendering the town, a deputation of aged matrons waited on the Spanish general to know in what manner the women who were at the time in childbirth should be protected from molestation in case of the introduction of the soldiery; and he requested that at the door of each house containing a female

so situated an appropriate token should be hung out, and promised that that house should not be troubled. This, according to the tradition, was attended to; and till the present day, every house in which there is a female in this condition is distinguished in the manner I have mentioned. The lace is hung out several weeks previous to the expected birth, and hangs several weeks afterwards, a small alteration being made as soon as the sex of the child is known. I was further assured, that during the time which is allowed for these exhibitions, the house is exempted from all legal execution, and that the husband cannot be taken to serve as a soldier."*

While Alva was thus engaged in retrieving the revolted districts, his king at Madrid was growing dissatisfied with his conduct. He began to think that he had made an error in sending such a man into the Netherlands, who could scarcely make a discrimination in his cruelties between Protestants and Catholics; and he looked about for a general to succeed him. He found such a person in Don Luis Zanega y Requesens, commander of the order of Malta, a true Catholic, but a man of calm and temperate mind. Requesens accordingly made his entry into Brussels on the 17th of November 1573; and the stern old Alva returned to Spain, to be ill-treated by a master whom he had served too faithfully.

WAR CONTINUED-SIEGE OF LEYDEN.

In the civil government of the country, Requesens pursued quite a different line of policy from his predecessor. He began his rule by breaking down the brass statue which Alva had erected of himself at Antwerp, dissolving the Council of Tumults, abandoning the obnoxious taxes, and publishing an amnesty for past offences committed by the inhabitants of the revolted districts. But while thus changing the whole tone of the government, he was obliged to continue all those military operations which Alva had begun, for the purpose of compelling the rebel cities of Holland and Zealand to reacknowledge the sovereignty of Philip. The first object of his attention was the town of Middleburg in Zealand, which had been kept in a state of close siege by the patriots for about a year and a half, and the loss of which would be a severe blow to the Spanish cause. He caused a large fleet to be collected, and appointing two able admirals to the command of it, he went on board one of the ships himself, and sailed down the Scheldt for the relief of the town. The Prince of Orange, then in Holland, immediately hastened to the critical spot; and by his directions, the fleet of the patriots under Boissot, admiral of Holland, met the Spanish one, and engaging with it on the 29th of January 1574, gained a complete victory, sinking the ship of one of the Spanish admirals, and obliging

*Chambers's Tour in Holland and Belgium.

the other to swim for his life. Requesens himself stood on the dyke of Sacherlo, and witnessed the disaster. After this the town of Middleburg surrendered to the Prince of Orange; and the cause of the patriots in the maritime provinces appeared more hopeful than ever. In the meantime, two of the prince's brothers, Count Louis and Count Henry of Nassau, who had for some time been residing in Germany, advanced at the head of an army in the direction of the Maas, with the intention of exciting the inland provinces to assume a position similar to that which Holland and Zealand were so nobly maintaining, The issue of this attempt was fatal. Requesens had despatched a strong force to oppose them; and on the 14th of April a battle was fought between the two armies near the village of Mooch: the royalists were victorious, and the two brave princes were killed. This defeat, and the death of two men so eminent and so popular, were indeed a heavy blow to the patriots; but its consequences were far less severe than they might have been. The Spanish troops, who had a long arrear of pay due them, became mutinous and unmanageable after the victory, and threatened to pillage Antwerp. Requesens contrived at length to appease them for the time by raising a hundred thousand florins from the citizens, pledging his own jewels, and melting down his plate to raise more, and granting the mutineers a free pardon. But the interval had been of use to the patriots; for a large fleet having been equipped by Requesens, and having been removed, during the mutiny, from Antwerp, where it was lying, a little way down the Scheldt, to be out of the reach of the soldiers, Boissot, the Zealand admiral, boldly sailed up the river, took forty of the ships, and shattered and sunk many more. At length, however, the mutineers returned to their duty; and Requesens, having vainly tried in the first place to end the war by a proclamation of the king's pardon to all his Catholic subjects in the Netherlands, collected his whole force for the siege of the large and populous city of Leyden.

The story of this siege is one of the most spirit-stirring in the annals of heroism. Leyden stands in a low situation in the midst of a labyrinth of rivulets and canals. That branch of the Rhine which still retains its ancient name passes through the middle of it; and from this stream such an infinity of canals are derived, that it is difficult to say whether the water or the land possesses the greater space. By these canals the ground on which the city stands is divided into a great number of small islands, united together by bridges. For five months all other operations were suspended; all the energy of Requesens, on the one hand, was directed towards getting possession of this city; and all the energy of the Prince of Orange, on the other hand, towards assisting the citizens, and preventing it from being taken. The issue depended entirely, however, on the bravery and resolution of the citizens of Leyden themselves. Pent up

within their walls, they had to resist the attacks and stratagems of the besiegers; and all that the Prince of Orange could do, was to occupy the surrounding country, harass the besiegers as much as possible, and enable the citizens to hold out, by conveying to them supplies of provisions and men.

Nobly, nay, up to the highest heroic pitch of human nature, did the citizens behave. They had to endure a siege in its most dreary form, that of blockade. Instead of attempting to storm the town, Valdez, the Spanish general, resolved to reduce it by the slow but sure process of starvation. For this purpose he completely surrounded the town by a circle of forts, more than sixty in number; and the inhabitants thus saw themselves walled completely in from all the rest of the earth, with its growing crops and its well-filled granaries, and restricted entirely to whatever quantity of provisions there chanced to be on the small spot of ground which they walked up and down in. They had no means even of communicating with the Prince of Orange and their other friends outside, except by carrier-pigeons, which were trained for the purpose. One attempt was made by the citizens to break through the line of blockade, for the sake of keeping possession of a piece of pasture-ground for their cattle; but it was unsuccessful; and they began now to work day and night at repairing their fortifications, so as to resist the Spanish batteries when they should begin to play. Like fire pent up, the patriotism of the inhabitants burned more fiercely and brightly; every man became a hero, every woman an orator, and words of flashing genius were spoken, and deeds of wild bravery done, such as would have been impossible except among 20,000 human beings living in the same city, and all roused at once to the same unnatural state of emotion. The two leading spirits were John Van der Does, the commander, better known by his Latinised name of Dousa, as one of the best writers of Latin verse at that time, when so many able men devoted themselves to this kind of literary exercise; and Peter Van der Werf, the burgomaster. Under the management of these two men, every precaution was adopted that was necessary for the defence of the city. The resolution come to was, that the last man among them should die of want rather than admit the Spaniards into the town. Coolly, and with a foresight thoroughly Dutch, Dousa and Van der Werf set about making an inventory of all that was eatable in the town; corn, cattle, nay, even horses and dogs; calculating how long the stock could last at the rate of so much a day to every man and woman in the city; adopting means to get the whole placed under the management of a dispensing committee; and deciding what should be the allowance per head at first, so as to prevent their stock from being eaten up too fast. It was impossible, however, to collect all the food into one fund, or to regulate its consumption by municipal arrangements; and after two

months had elapsed, famine had commenced in earnest, and those devices for mitigating the gnawings of hunger began to be employed which none but starving men could bear to think of. Not only the flesh of dogs and horses, but roots, weeds, nettles, every green thing that the eye could detect shooting up from the earth, was ravenously eaten. Many died of want, and thousands fell ill. Still they held out, and indignantly rejected the offers made to them by the besiegers. "When we have

nothing else left," said Dousa, in reply to a message from Valdez, we will eat our left hands, keeping the right to fight with." Once, indeed, hunger seemed to overcome their patriotism, and for some days crowds of gaunt and famished wretches moved along the streets crying, "Let the Spaniards in; oh, for God's sake let them in." Assembling with hoarse clamours at the house of Van der Werf, they demanded that he should give them food, or else surrender. "I have no food to give you," was the burgomaster's reply, "and I have sworn that I will not surrender to the Spaniards; but if my body will be of any service to you, tear me to pieces, and let the hungriest of you eat me." The poor wretches went away, and thought no more of surrendering.

The thought of the Prince of Orange night and day was how to render assistance to the citizens of Leyden-how to convey provisions into the town. He had collected a large supply; but all his exertions could not raise a sufficient force to break through the line of blockade. In this desperate extremity they resolved to have recourse to that expedient which they kept in reserve until it should be clear that no other was left they would break their dykes, open their sluices, inundate the whole level country round Leyden, and wash the Spaniards and their circle of forts utterly away. It was truly a desperate resource; and it was only in the last extremity that they could bring themselves to think of it. All that vast tract of fertile land, which the labour of ages had drained and cultivated-to see it converted into a sheet of water! there could not possibly be a sight more unseemly and melancholy to a Dutchman's eyes. The damage, it was calculated, would amount to 600,000 gilders. But when the destruction of the dykes round Leyden was once resolved upon, they set to work with a heartiness and a zeal greater than that which had attended their building. Hatchets, hammers, spades, and pickaxes, were in requisition; and by the labour of a single night, the labour of ages was demolished and undone. The water, availing itself of the new outlets, poured over the flat country, and in a short time the whole of the region situated between Leyden and Rotterdam was flooded to a considerable depth. The Spaniards, terror-stricken at first, bethought themselves of the fate of the antediluvians; but at last, seeing that the water did not rise above a certain level, they recovered their courage, and though obliged to abandon those of their forts