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Moreover, the "very marrow of that treaty" was the-departure of the foreign soldiers, who were even then overrunning the land. The Walloons answered that Alexander had expressly conceded the withdrawal of the troops. "Believe not the fluting and the piping of the crafty foe," urged the patriots. "Promises are made profusely enough but only to lure you to perdition.
The rejection of the Confession of Augsburg by the Calvinists had exasperated all the Protestant princes of Germany, so that no support was to be looked for from the empire. With Count Egmont the excellent army of Walloons was also lost to the cause, for they followed with blind devotion the fortunes of their general, who had taught them at St. Quentin and Gravelines to be invincible.
But the Lorrainers, the remainder of the French troops, the Walloons, and especially the Hungarians whose countrymen and women had been sold into captivity all vied with each other in the invention of cruelties at which the soul sickens, and which the pen almost refuses to depict.
The sweepings of the League Frenchmen, Walloons, Germans, Italians, Spaniards were tossed into Hungary, because for a season the war had become languid in Flanders. And the warriors grown grey in the religious wars of France astonished the pagans on the Danube by a variety of crimes and cruelties such as Christians only could imagine.
The papers which the deputation had brought were finally laid before the states of Artois, and received replies as prompt and bitter as the addresses were earnest and eloquent. The Walloons, when summoned to hold to that aegis of national unity, the Ghent peace, replied that it was not they, but the heretic portion of the states-general, who were for dashing it to the ground.
This was done eloquently and logically. The Walloons were reminded that at the epoch of the Ghent peace the number of Reformers outside of Holland and Zealand was supposed small. Now the new religion had spread its roots through the whole land, and innumerable multitudes desired its exercise.
The same sallow, mournful, ominous countenance, which Harold had before seen in the halls of Westminster, rising deathlike above the serge garb of the Benedict of Caen, now presented itself, and the monk thus spoke: "In the name of William, Duke of the Normans in the field, Count of Rouen in the hall, Claimant of all the realms of Anglia, Scotland, and the Walloons, held under Edward his cousin, I come to thee, Harold his liege and Earl."
And there were men in those galleons who remembered the sack of Antwerp, eleven years before men who could tell, from personal experience, how helpless was a great commercial city, when once in the clutch of disciplined brigands men who, in that dread 'fury of Antwerp, had enriched themselves in an hour with the accumulations of a merchant's life-time, and who had slain fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, brides and bridegrooms, before each others' eyes, until the number of inhabitants butchered in the blazing streets rose to many thousands; and the plunder from palaces and warehouses was counted by millions; before the sun had set on the 'great fury. Those Spaniards, and Italians, and Walloons, were now thirsting for more gold, for more blood; and as the capital of England was even more wealthy and far more defenceless than the commercial metropolis of the Netherlands had been, so it was resolved that the London 'fury' should be more thorough and more productive than the 'fury' of Antwerp, at the memory of which the world still shuddered.
He then selected a band of one hundred musketeers, partly Spaniards, partly Walloons to be followed at a distance by a much, more considerable force; two thousand in number, under Sancho de Leyva: and the Marquis of Renti and appointed the following night for an enterprise against the city, under the guidance of Grimstone.
They were nearly all Walloons, soldiers who had already seen much active service, but unfortunately of a race warlike and fiery indeed, but upon whose steadiness not much more dependence could be placed at that day than in the age of Civilis. Champagny, brother of Granvelle, was Governor of the city. He was a sincere Catholic, but a still more sincere hater of the Spaniards.
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