cations, the
place being merely an agreeable palatial residence and a thriving mart.
The States-General, not concealing their predilection for Brandenburg,
but under pretext of guarding the peace which they had done so much to
establish, placed a garrison of 1400 infantry and a troop or two of horse
in the citadel of Julich.

Dire was the anger not unjustly excited in Spain when the news of this
violation of neutrality reached that government. Julich, placed midway
between Liege and Cologne, and commanding those fertile plains which make
up the opulent duchy, seemed virtually converted into a province of the
detested heretical republic. The German gate of the Spanish Netherlands
was literally in the hands of its most formidable foe.

The Spaniards about the court of the Archduke did not dissemble their
rage. The seizure of Julich was a stain upon his reputation, they cried.
Was it not enough, they asked, for the United Provinces to have made a
truce to the manifest detriment and discredit of Spain, and to have
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 heretic