Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 6, 2025
The Spanish army, two days afterwards, marched back to Groningen. The page which records their victorious campaign is foul with outrage and red with blood. None of the horrors which accompany the passage of hostile troops through a defenceless country were omitted. Maids and matrons were ravished in multitudes; old men butchered in cold blood.
An ominous remark and a dreary comment on the forty years' war against the Inquisition. And the same scenes that were enacting in Holland were going on in Overyssel and Friesland and Groningen; but with a difference. Here it was the Five Points men who were driven into secession, whose barns were nailed up, and whose preachers were mobbed.
Gelderland, Friesland, Overyssel, Groningen, and Utrecht, five provinces out of the united seven, the prince declared to be chiefly inhabited by Catholics. They had only entered the union, he said, because compelled by force. They could only be kept in the union by force, unless allowed freedom of religion.
Colonel Robles, Seigneur de Billy, formerly much hated for his Spanish or Portuguese blood, made himself very active in this humane work. By his exertions, and those of the troops belonging to Groningen, many lives were rescued, and gratitude replaced the ancient animosity. It was estimated that at least twenty thousand persons were destroyed in the province of Friesland alone.
He therefore convoked a new assembly at Utrecht; and the deputies of Holland, Guelders, Zealand, Utrecht, and Groningen, signed, on the 29th of January, 1579, the famous act called the Union of Utrecht, the real basis or fundamental pact of the republic of the United Provinces. It makes no formal renunciation of allegiance to Spain, but this is virtually done by the omission of the king's name.
The event justified the prophecy. After a few trifling operations before Groningen, Hohenlo was summoned to the neighbourhood of Coewerden, by the reported arrival of Martin Schenck, at the head of a considerable force. On the 15th of June, the Count marched all night and a part of the follow morning, in search of the enemy.
The city very important from its position, being the key to the province of Drenthe as well as one of the safeguards of Friesland had been besieged in vain by Count Renneberg after his treasonable surrender of Groningen, of which he was governor, to the Spaniards, but had been subsequently surprised by Tassis. Since that time it had held for the king.
The Count, accompanied by a few attendants, reached the neighborhood of Heiliger Lee only in time to meet with some of the camp sutlers and other fugitives, from whom he learned the disastrous news of the defeat. Finding that all was lost, he very properly returned to Zuidlaren, from which place he made the best of his way to Groningen.
On the 1st of August however he learned that Spinola had crossed the Meuse and the Rhine, with ten thousand foot and three thousand horse, and that leaving Count Bucquoy with six thousand foot and one thousand five hundred horse in the neighbourhood of the Rhine, to guard a couple of redoubts which had been constructed for a basis at Kaiserswerth, he was marching with all possible despatch towards Friesland and Groningen.
"Both theories, however, might be true," added the conscientious Florentine, "as the French have always claimed to be descended from the relics of Troy." A simpler-minded antiquary might have babbled of green fields, since 'groenighe, or greenness, was a sufficiently natural appellation for a town surrounded as was Groningen on the east and west by the greenest and fattest of pastures.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking