treated her during all the negotiation with such insolence? Were they now
to be permitted to invade neutral territory, to violate public faith, to
act under no responsibility save to their own will? What was left for
them to do except to set up a tribunal in Holland for giving laws to the
whole of Northern Europe? Arrogating to themselves absolute power over
the controverted states of Cleve, Julich, and the dependencies, they now
pretended to dispose of them at their pleasure in order at the end
insolently to take possession of them for themselves.

These were the egregious fruits of the truce, they said tauntingly to the
discomfited Archduke. It had caused a loss of reputation, the very soul
of empires, to the crown of Spain. And now, to conclude her abasement,
the troops in Flanders had been shaven down with such parsimony as to
make the monarch seem a shopkeeper, not a king. One would suppose the
obedient Netherlands to be in the heart of Spain rather than outlying
provinces surrounded by their deadliest enemies. The heretics had gained
possession of the government at Aix-la-Chapelle; they had converted the
insignificant town of Mulheim into a thriving and fortified town in
defiance of Cologne and to its manifest detriment, and in various other
ways they had insulted the Catholics throughout those regions. And who
could wonder at such insolence, seeing that the army in Flanders,
formerly the terror of heretics, had become since the truce so weak as to
be the laughing-stock of the United Provinces? If it was expensive to
maintain these armies in the obedient Netherlands, let there be economy
elsewhere, they urged.

From India came gold and jewels. From other kingdoms came ostentation and
a long series of vain titles for the crown of Spain. Flanders was its
place of arms, its nursery of soldiers, its bulwark in Europe, and so it
should be preserved.

There was ground for these complaints. The army at the disposition of the
Archduke had been reduced to 8000 infantry and a handful of cavalry. The
peace establishment of the Republic amounted to 20,000 foot, 3000 horse,
besides the French and English regiments.

So soon as the news of the occupation of Julich was officially
communicated to the Spanish cabinet, a subsidy of 400,000 crowns was at
once despatched to Brussels. Levies of Walloons and Germans were made
without delay by order of Archduke Albert and under guidance of Spinola,
so that by midsummer the army was