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Alva refused to attack the main army, but Frederic with a force of four thousand men, were alone left on the hither bank, in order to provoke or to tempt the enemy, who as usual, was encamped very near. Alva refused to attack the main army but rapidly detached his son, Don Fredrick, with a force of four thousand foot and three thousand horse, to cut off the rear-guard.
He retreated to Wronne and Nivelles, an assassin, named Heist, a German, by birth, but a French chevalier, following him secretly in his camp, pledged to take his life for a large reward promised by Alva an enterprise not destined, however, to be successful.
The reply returned by the states-general to this absurd suggestion expressed their regret that the son of the Duchess Margaret should have taken part with the enemy of the Netherlanders, complained of the bull by which the Pope had invited war against them as if they had been Saracens, repeated their most unanswerable argument that the Ghent Pacification had established a system directly the reverse of that which existed under Charles the Fifth and affirmed their resolution never more to submit to Spanish armies, executioners, edicts, or inquisitions, and never more to return to the principles of the Emperor and of Alva.
Alva, inflamed, not with ardor for an impending triumph, but with rage, that his sagely-conceived plans could not be comprehended even by his son and by his favorite officers, answered the eager messenger with peremptory violence. "Go back to Vitelli," he cried. "Is he, or am I, to command in this campaign? Tell him not to suffer a single man to cross the river.
Then followed the long, ghastly struggle between the armies raised by the Prince of Orange and his brother, Count Louis of Nassau, who lost his life mysteriously at the battle of Mons, and those of Alva and the other governors-general who succeeded him Don Louis de Requesens, the "Grand Commander," Don John of Austria, the hero of Lepanto, and Alexander Farnese, Duke of Parma.
To make war upon Alva was the leading object of all these freebooters, and they were usually furnished by the Prince of Orange, in his capacity of sovereign, with letters of marque for that purpose. The Prince, indeed, did his utmost to control and direct an evil which had inevitably grown out of the horrors of the time.
At any rate the Duke now sent back Don Bernardino de Mendoza, whom Don Frederic had despatched to Nimwegen, soliciting his father's permission to raise the siege, with this reply: "Tell Don Frederic," said Alva, "that if he be not decided to continue the siege till the town be taken, I shall no longer consider him my son, whatever my opinion may formerly have been.
A sharp skirmish ensued, but the beggars were driven into their entrenchments, with a loss of twenty or thirty men, and nightfall terminated the contest. It was beautiful to see, wrote Aremberg to Alva, how brisk and eager were the Spaniards, notwithstanding the long march which they had that day accomplished. Time was soon to show how easily immoderate, valor might swell into a fault.
Suffice it to say, that, on the recorded boast of Alva himself, he caused eighteen thousand inhabitants of the Low Countries to perish by the hands of the executioner, during his less than six years' sovereignty in the Netherlands. The most important of these tragical scenes was now soon to be acted.
She also despatched the Seigneur de Billy to Spain, for the purpose of making verbal representations to his Majesty upon the inexpediency of sending the Duke of Alva to the Netherlands at that juncture with a Spanish army.
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