an army could actually boast, to protect the
cities of the frontier like Zutphen, Lochem, and Doesburg, and to prevent
him from attempting an invasion of the United Provinces in force, by
crossing any of the rivers, either in the autumn or after the winter's
ice had made them passable for the Spanish army-succeeded admirably in
all his strategy. The admiral never ventured to attack him, for fear of
risking a defeat of his whole army by an antagonist whom he ought to have
swallowed at a mouthful, relinquished all designs upon the republic,
passed into Munster, Cleves, and Berg, and during the whole horrible
winter converted those peaceful provinces into a hell. No outrage which
even a Spanish army could inflict was spared the miserable inhabitants.
Cities and villages were sacked and burned, the whole country was placed
under the law of black-mail. The places of worship, mainly Protestant,
were all converted at a blow of the sword into Catholic churches. Men
were hanged, butchered, tossed in sport from the tops of steeples,
burned, and buried alive. Women of every rank were subjected by thousands
to outrage too foul and too cruel for any but fiends or Spanish soldiers
to imagine.

Such was the lot of thousands of innocent men and women at the hands of
Philip's soldiers in a country at peace with Philip, at the very moment
when that monarch was protesting with a seraphic smile on his expiring
lips that he had never in his whole life done injury to a single human
being.

In vain did the victims call aloud upon their sovereign, the Emperor
Rudolph. The Spaniards laughed the feeble imperial mandates to scorn, and
spurned the word neutrality. "Oh, poor Roman Empire!" cried John
Fontanus, "how art thou fallen! Thy protector has become thy despoiler,
and, although thy members see this and know it, they sleep through it
all. One day they may have a terrible awakening from their slumbers . . .
. . . . The Admiral of Arragon has entirely changed the character of the
war, recognizes no neutrality, saying that there must be but one God, one
pope, and one king, and that they who object to this arrangement must be
extirpated with fire and sword, let them be where they may."

The admiral, at least, thoroughly respected the claims of the dead Philip
to universal monarchy.

Maurice gained as much credit by the defensive strategy through which he
saved the republic from the horrors thus afflicting its neighbours, as he
had ever done b