city of Cologne was held by
the Catholic elector, Ernest of Bavaria, bishop of Liege; but Neusz and
Rheinberg were in the hands of the Dutch republic.

The military operations of the year were, accordingly, along the Meuse,
where the main object of Parma was to wrest Grave From the Netherlands;
along the Waal, where, on the other hand, the patriots wished to recover
Nymegen; on the Yssel, where they desired to obtain the possession of
Zutphen; and in the Cologne electorate, where the Spaniards meant, if
possible, to transfer Neusz and Rheinberg from Truchsess to Elector
Ernest. To clear the course of these streams, and especially to set free
that debatable portion of the river-territory which hemmed him in from
neutral Germany, and cut off the supplies from his starving troops, was
the immediate design of Alexander Farnese.

Nothing could be more desolate than the condition of the electorate. Ever
since Gebhard Truchsess had renounced the communion of the Catholic
Church for the love of Agnes Mansfeld, and so gained a wife and lost his
principality, he had been a dependant upon the impoverished Nassaus, or a
supplicant for alms to the thrifty Elizabeth. The Queen was frequently
implored by Leicester, without much effect, to send the ex-elector a few
hundred pounds to keep him from starving, as "he had not one groat to
live upon," and, a little later, he was employed as a go-between, and
almost a spy, by the Earl, in his quarrels with the patrician party
rapidly forming against him in the States.

At Godesberg--the romantic ruins of which stronghold the traveller still
regards with interest, placed as it is in the midst of that enchanting
region where Drachenfels looks down on the crumbling tower of Roland and
the convent of Nonnenwerth--the unfortunate Gebhard had sustained a
conclusive defeat. A small, melancholy man, accomplished, religious,
learned, "very poor but very wise," comely, but of mean stature,
altogether an unlucky and forlorn individual, he was not, after all, in
very much inferior plight to that in which his rival, the Bavarian
bishop, had found himself. Prince Ernest, archbishop of Liege and
Cologne, a hangeron of his brother, who sought to shake him off, and a
stipendiary of Philip, who was a worse paymaster than Elizabeth, had a
sorry life of it, notwithstanding his nominal possession of the see. He
was forced to go, disguised and in secret, to the Prince of Parma at
Brussels, to ask for assistance,