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The spectacle of Spain sending ambassadors to the Hague to treat for peace, on the basis of Netherland independence, would be a humiliation such as had never been exhibited before.
He was regarded by Viglius as a man who desired to repeat the part which had been played by Juan Vargas in the Blood Council, while the other members, although stanch Catholics, were all of them well-disposed to vindicate the claim of Netherland nobles to a share in the government of the Netherlands. For a time, therefore, the transfer of authority seemed to have been smoothly accomplished.
For their security they erected in 1614, a fort on Castle Island, near fort Orange New Netherland, including the North river, was afterwards offered to the West India Company, who, in the year 1624, two years before Charles I. ascended the throne of England, actually and effectually possessed and fortified the country and planted colonies therein.
I have commenced this chapter with a description of the dikes and other hydraulic works of the Netherland engineers, because both the immediate and the remote results of such operations are more obvious and more easily measured, though certainly not more important, than those of much older and more widely diffused modes of resisting or directing the flow of waters, which have been practised from remote antiquity in the interior of all civilized countries.
"Why, know you not that we have got our Constable de Lacy again, and that he is to grant solemn investiture to the Flemish weavers of all these fine things Harry of Anjou has given? Had Edward the Confessor been alive, to give the Netherland knaves their guerdon, it would have been a cast of the gallows-tree. But come, neighbour, we shall lose the show." So saying, they pressed down the hill.
An iron-clad man, who had scarcely taken harness from his back all his life, he was a type of the Spanish commanders who had implanted international hatred deeply in the Netherland soul, and who, now that this result and no other had been accomplished, were rapidly passing away. He had been baptised Franco, and his family appellation of Verdugo meant executioner.
The kinsmen of the noble host gave gifts in his honor to the strolling folk, as the king commanded: vesture and ruddy gold, steeds and silver, too. Those who there craved gifts departed hence full merrily. Siegfried, the lord from Netherland, with a thousand of his men, gave quite away the garments they had brought with them to the Rhine and steeds and saddles, too.
Not a single woman had been admitted to the distinguished assembly of the States-General, the city magistrates, and illustrious invited guests, who as spectators sat on benches and chairs opposite to the stage, and this placed the kindness of Granvelle, whom the Netherland dignitaries were said to detest, in a still brighter light.
While the soldiers in the pay of Queen Elizabeth were crawling to her palace gates to die of starvation before her eyes; while the veterans of Spain and of Italy had organized themselves into a permanent military, mutinous republic, on the soil of the so-called obedient Netherland, because they were left by their masters without clothing or food; the cavalry and infantry of the Dutch commonwealth, thanks to the organizing spirit and the wholesome thrift of the burgher authorities, were contented, obedient, well fed, well clothed, and well paid; devoted to their Government, and ever ready to die in its defence.
Desultory or semi-civilised warfare, where the play of the human passions is distinctly visible, where individual man, whether in buff jerkin or Milan coat of proof, meets his fellow man in close mortal combat, where men starve by thousands or are massacred by town-fulls, where hamlets or villages blaze throughout whole districts or are sunk beneath the ocean scenes of rage, hatred, vengeance, self-sacrifice, patriotism, where all the virtues and vices of which humanity is capable stride to and fro in their most violent colours and most colossal shape where man in a moment rises almost to divinity, or sinks beneath the beasts of the field such tragical records of which the sanguinary story of mankind is full and no portion of them more so than the Netherland chronicles appeal more vividly to the imagination than the neatest solution of mathematical problems.
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