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Ostend was the one position in Flanders held by the United Provinces, with a very mixed garrison. The archduke besieged Ostend . Maurice did not attack him, but captured the keys of the debatable land of Cleves and Juliers. The siege of Ostend developed into a tremendous affair, and a school in the art of war.
The city of Groenlo, or Grol, not a place of much interest or importance in itself, but close to the frontier, and to that destined land of debate, the duchies of Cleves, Juliers, and Berg, still retained its Spanish garrison. On the 14th July Prince Maurice of Nassau came before the city with six thousand infantry, some companies of cavalry, and sixteen pieces of artillery.
At Easter they began to move southwards in quest of other victims and other employ. But as they halted between Venlo and Roermond, resistance confronted them. Nassau had arrayed by his side the Archbishop of Cologne and the Dukes of Juliers and Cleves: the gates of the cities were closed and the ferry-boats that would have carried them across the Maas had been kept on the other side.
In vain did the Emperor prohibit the Estates from doing homage to their new masters; in vain did he send his own relation, the Archduke Leopold, Bishop of Passau and Strasburg, into the territory of Juliers, in order, by his presence, to strengthen the imperial party.
It contended, indeed, for Austria, in so far as it fought against the Protestant princes; but Austria herself had soon cause to tremble before it. The arms of the Union had, in the meantime, been tolerably successful in Juliers and in Alsace; Juliers was closely blockaded, and the whole bishopric of Strasburg was in their power. But here their splendid achievements came to an end.
Then, after hovering in apparent uncertainty about the territories of Juliers and Limburg, he suddenly, on a bright moonlight night, crossed the Meuse with his whole army, in the neighbourhood of Stochem. The operation was brilliantly effected.
Mothers scared their children into quiet with the terrible name of Schenk, and farmers and land-younkers throughout the electorate and the land of Berg, Cleves, and Juliers, paid their black-mail, as if it were a constitutional impost, to escape the levying process of the redoubtable partisan.
There was likewise a diet held during the summer of this year, of the circles of the empire nearest to the Netherlands Westphalia, Cleves, Juliers, and Saxony from which commissioners were deputed both to Brussels and to the Hague, to complain of the misfortunes suffered by neutral and neighbouring nations in consequence of the civil war. They took nothing by their mission to the Duke of Parma.
At a council of war held in the camp of the confederates, the duke proposed to attack the enemies' lines between the Mehaigne and Leuwe, and was seconded by the Danish, Hanoverian, and Hessian generals; but the scheme was opposed by the Dutch officers, and the deputies of the states, who alleged that the success was dubious, and the consequences of forcing the lines would be inconsiderable; they therefore recommended the siege of Limburgh, by the reduction of which they would acquire a whole province, and cover their own country, as well as Juliers and Gueldres, from the designs of the enemy.
Neither was their armor nor their weapons of a perfect kind, the latter being a lance like a boar-spear, or a knotted stick pointed with iron, and called in Flemish a "good day." The princes of Juliers and Namur posted their combatants on the road which leads from Courtrai to Ghent, behind a canal that communicated with the river Lys.
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