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Updated: June 25, 2025
Count Bossu, who had acted as stadholder of Holland and Zealand, under Alva's authority, since the Prince of Orange had resigned that office, was ordered at once to recover the conquered sea-port, if possible.
This certainly was a most sensible reply, but it is instructive to witness the cynicism with which the envoy accepts this position for his master, while coldly recording the results of all these sanguinary conversations. Such was the condition of affairs when the Prince of Orange arrived at Peronne, between Binche and the Duke of Alva's entrenchments.
The Queen retaliated by measures of the same severity against Netherlanders in England. While the Queen and the Viceroy were thus exchanging blows, the real sufferers were, of course, the unfortunate Netherlanders. Between the upper and nether millstones of Elizabeth's rapacity and Alva's arrogance, the poor remains of Flemish prosperity were well nigh crushed out of existence.
Those cowardly troops, however, having thus plunged the city still more deeply into the disgrace which, in Alva's eyes, they had incurred by receiving rebels within their walls after having but just before refused admittance to the Spanish forces, decamped during the night, and left the place defenceless.
Protestant fervour rose steadily among Englishmen as "the best captains and soldiers" returned from the campaigns in the Low Countries to tell of Alva's atrocities, or as privateers brought back tales of English seamen who had been seized in Spain and the New World, to linger amidst the tortures of the Inquisition, or to die in its fires.
Such "justice" passes easily by its own excess into the injustice which dispatches Alva's army or finds bizarre expression in the phrase of "le Roi soleil," "The State? I am the State."
The whole of the Netherlands was seething under Alva's savage rule; trade, already in a fair way to be ruined by the cessation of commerce with England since the seizure of the treasure ships, was being throttled also by the system of taxation which Alva had recently instituted. The capture of Brille fired the train. City after city raised the standard of revolt.
The Prince, although horror-struck and indignant at the royal revelations, held his peace, and kept his countenance. The King was not aware that, in opening this delicate negotiation to Alva's colleague and Philip's plenipotentiary, he had given a warning of inestimable value to the man who had been born to resist the machinations of Philip and of Alva.
It lay by no means in that sovereign's disposition to involve herself at this juncture in a war with Philip, and it was urged upon her government by Alva's commissioners, that the continued countenance afforded by the English people to the Netherland cruisers must inevitably lead to that result.
He eagerly offered, if he were accused or suspected of crime, to surrender himself to imprisonment if he only could be brought to trial. Soon after Alva's arrival in the Netherlands, the first part of this offer was accepted. No sooner were the arrests of Egmont and Horn known in Madrid, than Montigny was deprived of his liberty, and closely confined in the alcazar of Segovia.
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