Chapter VI: The Prince at Bay

In that July, William moved to Strasburg, steadily and boldly preparing his advance against the Spaniards, his daring inroad into the Netherlands. He had now no allies save his brother Louis, who, in desperate want of money, with mutinous troops, was using all his brilliant audacity and resource to keep his men together in Friesland, where his barren victory of Heiliger Lee had been followed by no fruits save what little money he could wring from the Abbots of Wittewerum and Heiliger Lee and the forced supplies obtained from the inhabitants of the district.

And against this force of ill-disciplined, ill-fed, mutinous, and ill-equipped troops, held together by one man's courage and influence, Alva himself was marching with fifteen thousand of his veteran regiments.

William, pressing forward his own preparations, using all his eloquence, all his energy to raise new levies, to obtain money, hardly dared to think of Louis awaiting the approach of Alva in the marshes of Friesland.

He had heard of the entire failure of the two other expeditions he had so carefully and adroitly planned, the utter annihilation of the forces of De Cocqueville and De Villars, and he had received an even more cruel blow in the news of the death of Adolphus; but in his own task he did not hesitate for a moment in his strenuous preparations, nor in his unfaltering endeavours.

He had now every one against him save his own family and a few faithful friends, such as Hoogstraaten and Culemburg. The Emperor, at first favourable to his enterprise, was now drawing closer in an alliance with Spain, and ordered the Prince to abandon the cause of the Netherlands on pain of forfeiting all his Imperial privileges and dignities; and the German Princes, from whose alliance William had hoped so much, became daily colder and colder in the cause of the unhappy Provinces.

And it was a cause that might seem indeed hopeless; so mighty and terrible was Alva, so supine, so stifled, so exhausted, so crouching the wretched people he had crushed beneath his armed feet and bound and gagged with the chains and bits of the Holy Inquisition.

Since the executions of Egmont and Hoorne the heart of the country seemed to cease to beat. Nowhere was any resistance made; the tyranny was too extensive, the punishment too swift and universal.

The people, drained of blood and money, bowed to the new power, went to mass, and feebly tried to pick up the threads of their former occupations.

No one came forward to join Louis, and fewer and more timid became the promises sent to the Prince.

He continued, however, to plan his own expedition as if all had been so far successful instead of completely disastrous.

The continued campaign of Louis in Friesland was against his advice; he wished his brother to fall back on Cleves instead of awaiting Alva's coming.

He himself had brought his levies from Cleves to Strasburg, where he was nearer the central Provinces and able to retreat into French territory if need were. He had good hopes from the French Huguenots; he was still on friendly territory, though far from Dillenburg and from Louis, whose news reached him slowly, passing as it did from hand to hand by secret agents across a country cowering under the Spanish rule. He was also on the borders of the Palatinate, and the Elector Palatine was warmer in the cause of the Netherlands than the Princes of Hesse or Saxony; the Court of Heidelberg was indeed the sure refuge for any exiled Protestant, and the stern Calvinist Frederic was moved by neither fear of Philip's power nor tolerance towards his faith.

But his present encouragement to William was little more than good wishes, for to him too the Provinces seemed lost.

It was in late July, when William was almost ready to take the field, that a knight with a few attendants rode into Strasburg and demanded to see the Prince of Orange.

He had no difficulty in obtaining his wish, for the German officers recognized him as the Landgrave William, son of Philip of Hesse and cousin to Anne of Saxony.

He found William and Count Hoogstraaten together in an upper chamber of the modest house where they lodged.

It was a sultry night and the windows were wide open; between them sat the Prince at a plain table writing by the light of a little copper lamp.

He was writing to his wife, and the words he penned as the Landgrave entered were these:—

* * * * *

"I go to-morrow, but when I shall return or when I shall see you I cannot, on my honour, tell you with certainty. I have resolved to place myself in the hands of the Almighty that He may guide me where it is His good pleasure that I should go. I see well enough that I am destined to pass this life in misery and labour——"

* * * * *

As he heard the door open, he closed his letter hastily and put it away.

As he rose to greet the Landgrave his eyes shone; he had a moment's hope that Hesse was sending troops to his aid, or at least bringing promises of future assistance.

Count Hoogstraaten also wore an eager look as he saluted the German Prince.

But the appearance of the Landgrave was neither cheerful nor hopeful; he seated himself heavily, took off his black silk hat, and wiped his forehead.

"It is something important," said William quickly, "that has brought you from Hesse here to seek my poor company."

"I came myself," returned the Landgrave, "because my father could think of no better messenger. I have been at Dresden, and bear also the messages of the Elector Augustus."

"Ah!" said William softly.

He seated himself and glanced at Hoogstraaten.

The Landgrave was a man of blunt words and a stern courtesy; without preamble he came to what was the gist of his errand.

"Turn back—wait—leave the Provinces; it is impossible to assist them. No one can withstand Alva and his army."

This was the sum of what the Landgrave William had ridden rapidly from Hesse to say.

The argument was not new to William, already he had heard a great deal of such discouragement; but perhaps it had never before been put to him so weightily by so important a personage. He listened with his elbow on the desk and his chin in his hand, his firm, small-featured profile towards the speaker, his eyes cast down.

So plain was he, so modest were his appointments, that even the unimaginative mind of the Landgrave contrasted him with the gorgeous bridegroom who had come to Leipsic for his marriage seven years before.

"Have you not," he exclaimed, "sacrificed enough already? Are you not sufficiently stripped?"

"I am," answered William, "greatly hampered for want of money."

"How much have you on this enterprise?" asked the Landgrave.

"Everything," said the Prince, "all I and my brothers and my friends possess."

"Then you are ruined men!"

"If we fail, yes," admitted William.

"It is not possible that you can succeed."

"It is not possible to turn back," replied the Prince, not arrogantly but rather gently.

"You defy the Emperor?" demanded the Landgrave hotly.

"I have answered the Emperor—I have answered King Philip—I have explained myself to all Europe." He exerted himself to speak pleasantly, but behind the tolerance of his tone was a certain indignation.

The Landgrave was baffled and irritated.

"You are obstinate, Highness, but that will not save you. What do you hope to do?"

"To enter the Netherlands while Louis holds Alva in check in Friesland."

"And if you fail? Can you pay the troops? Have you a means of retreat?"

"I have not counted the cost so closely," replied William. "I hope that the great cities will open to me and that I shall not lack wherewith to pay my troops—if not, I can but pledge my word that these debts shall be redeemed when I can achieve the means."

"Do you ever hope to obtain your estates again?"

"I hope everything," said William, and he smiled with his unconquerable cheerfulness, which was like the cheerfulness of Louis, impervious to all attacks. Gloom, melancholy, and despondency were unknown to the House of Nassau. "And yet I expect nothing," he added. "I make neither boasts nor prophecies, Landgrave; I but take the instruments to my hand and do what I may with them."

"Your motive?" cried the other. "Is Your Highness ambitious or fanatic?"

The Prince replied rather wearily—

"I have proclaimed my motives again and again, Excellency. I have explained myself at every German Court, before England, before France—I fight Alva and the Spanish rule over the Netherlands."

"You fight King Philip," answered the Landgrave, "though you keep up a fiction of loyalty; and who do you think will unite with you against Spain, who is half the old world and all the new?"

William smiled again.

"Let him keep his new world and his old, I but want the Netherlands. Ah, Excellency," he added, "it is in your power to refuse me help and to turn your back on me—it is not in your power to discourage me nor hold me back."

The Landgrave rose impatiently with a rough gesture.

"You are madmen, you and your brothers, and will meet with the fate of madmen."

The Prince thought of Adolphus, and winced.

"It may well be," he said quietly; "believe that we counted that cost before we undertook our tasks."

"It is useless to speak any more!" exclaimed the Landgrave angrily.

"On this subject, yes."

The Prince rose and held out his hand affectionately. "You will stay with us to-night?" he added with courtesy.

The Landgrave refused.

"I go to my lodging; I will come to-morrow to see if you are in a better frame of mind, Highness."

He saluted both, and abruptly left; the Prince returned to his unfinished letter.

"It is a strange thing," said Count Hoogstraaten, "how many are ready to hold a man back, how few to push him forward! Always these councils of prudence, of caution, of non-resistance, of humility, and cringing!"

And the fiery little soldier went angrily to the window and stared fiercely out on the hot night; there was something lion-like in his slender heavy-shouldered figure, in his blunt-featured face, in his pose of noble anger as he gazed out on the darkness as if it concealed the numberless hosts of his foes.

The Prince finished his letter and joined his friend in the window-place.

"If we live we shall succeed," he said. "If we die as the others died—well, a worse thing might befall us. And what does submission ever gain? Better to fall like Adolphus than like—Egmont."

His voice saddened on his friend's name and his eyes too turned towards the darkness as if he also pictured there the swarming battalions of his mighty enemies.

"We have had our pleasant times, Hoogstraaten," he added; "our gay morning was fair and easy, and now we are men and must take the labour and heat of the day——"

He stopped abruptly; his quick ear had caught the sound of an opening door. It was the Seigneur de Louverwal who entered; he carried dispatches which had, he said, been forwarded to one Van Baren—an agent of the Prince in Brussels—and by him to Strasburg.

The letters were from Count Louis and the agent himself.

William's lips tightened, the blood receded from his dark cheek, and he caught his under lip with his teeth as he read his brother's letter.

It was written from a farmhouse on the German frontier, and announced the Count's pitiable and utter overthrow.

Out-manœuvred by Alva, harassed by mutinous troops, lack of money, and provision, betrayed by his own fiery impatience, Louis had been driven to the village of Jemmingen on the Ems, and there his wretched forces had been wiped out by Alva's splendid army and Alva's cool skill.

Those who had escaped the battle were massacred; the blood of nearly ten thousand rebels had washed from Alva's laurels the stain left by the little victory of Heiliger Lee.

William read the letter over twice, then sank into a chair; he was never sanguine, but he had not been prepared for such a blow as this. He felt his head reel and his heart beat fast; the light of the little lamp grew dim before his eyes and the room dark. It was with an unsteady hand that he handed the letter to Hoogstraaten.

So the third of the armies he had got together with such infinite pains and toil and sacrifice had disappeared before Alva like chaff before a bright flame.

De Cocqueville in Artois, De Villars in Juliers, Louis at Jemmingen—all defeated, utterly, completely, for ever.

A passionate exclamation broke from Hoogstraaten as he and De Louverwal read the dispatch; it roused William, who took up the agent's letter and read it slowly.

This contained fuller details of the disaster brought by a Spanish soldier to Maestricht, where Van Baren had been.

He now wrote to the Prince that only a handful of the rebels had escaped, and that they, with Count Louis, had swum the Ems and fled into Germany. He wrote of the ghastly butchery which had followed the victory, how all the dikes and swamps were red, and the sky red also with burning crops and houses, for Alva had laid waste Friesland from end to end, sparing neither woman nor child.

And against this background of horrors stood out the desperate heroism of Louis who had dashed again and again among his reluctant troops, who had hurled himself single-handed on the enemy, who had, when the gunners had fled, fired his only artillery—the Groningen cannon, the poor spoils of Heiliger Lee—with his own hand, going from one to the other with the firebrand; and that desperate volley had been the last volley of the rebels.

When William read of his brother's piteous and splendid attempts to turn back the dark tides of disaster, when he read of the slaying and burning of his little army ("the dead were so thick they choked the river"), he rose with a movement of intolerable agony, and a sharp sound unconsciously escaped him—the cry of one swiftly and unexpectedly wounded.

"O Christ! O, Christ!" muttered Hoogstraaten, and he looked about him bewildered. "Who will give us levies now? How shall we do anything?"

De Louverwal turned his face away and wept.

The Prince still said nothing; he loosened his falling collar and wiped his face and neck bathed in cold sweat; he put his hand to his throat, and his lips parted as if he stifled; then he closed his mouth firmly and continued to pass the handkerchief over his face.

It was the same unconscious gesture of mental agony that Lamoral Egmont had used on the scaffold.

"Ah, Highness," cried Hoogstraaten—"ah, Highness, what news is this?" and his voice was hoarse with love and pity and wrath.

"Eh?" said the Prince faintly. "Eh?"

He turned to face his friend, and looked at him a moment almost blankly.

Then he spoke.

"We must go on—there is the more need that we go on."

"Is it possible?" broke from De Louverwal.

"Before God, it is very possible," answered William, and his voice was suddenly strong.

He had now recovered complete mastery of himself; he sat down and wrote a letter of consolation and encouragement to Louis.