exploits of the podagric Perseus in behalf
of the Flemish Andromeda.

A very daring adventure was however proposed to the archduke. Philip
calmly suggested that an expedition should be rapidly fitted out in
Dunkirk, which should cross the channel, ascend the Thames as far as
Rochester, and burn the English fleet. "I am informed by persons well
acquainted with the English coast," said the king, "that it would be an
easy matter for a few quick-sailing vessels to accomplish this. Two or
three thousand soldiers might be landed at Rochester who might burn or
sink all the unarmed vessels they could find there, and the expedition
could return and sail off again before the people of the country could
collect in sufficient numbers to do them any damage." The archduke was
instructed to consult with Fuentes and Ybarra as to whether this little
matter, thus parenthetically indicated, could be accomplished without too
much risk and trouble.

Certainly it would seem as if the king believed in the audacity,
virility, velocity, alacrity, and the rest of the twenty-eight virtues of
his governor-general, even more seriously than did John Baptist
Houwaerts. The unfortunate archduke would have needed to be, in all
earnestness, a mythological demigod to do the work required of him. With
the best part of his army formally maintained by him in recognised
mutiny, with the great cities of the Netherlands yielding themselves to
the republic with hardly an attempt on the part of the royal forces to
relieve them, and with the country which he was supposed to govern, the
very centre of the obedient provinces, ruined, sacked, eaten up by the
soldiers of Spain; villages, farmhouses, gentlemen's castles, churches
plundered; the male population exposed to daily butchery, and the women
to outrages worse than death; it seemed like the bitterest irony to
propose that he should seize that moment to outwit the English and Dutch
sea-kings who were perpetually cruising in the channel, and to undertake
a "beard-singeing" expedition such as even the dare-devil Drake would
hardly have attempted.

Such madcap experiments might perhaps one day, in the distant future, be
tried with reasonable success, but hardly at the beck of a Spanish king
sitting in his easy chair a thousand miles off, nor indeed by the
servants of any king whatever.

The plots of murder arranged in Brussels during this administration were
on a far more extensive scale than were the militar