First Voyages of the French and English to the Eastern Seas. And a Sketch of the Early History of the Netherlands and of the Establishment of the Dutch in India.

SKETCH II.

I.

First Voyages of the French and English to India. Early History of the Netherlands.

The debt which the world owes to the Portuguese for weakening the Mohamedan power and thus preventing the subjugation of a larger portion of Eastern Europe than was actually overrun by the Turks should not be forgotten, but long before the close of the sixteenth century they had ceased to be participants in the great progressive movement of the Caucasian race. Upon a conquering nation rests an enormous responsibility: no less than that of benefiting the world at large. Was Portugal doing this in her eastern possessions to such an extent as to make her displacement there a matter deserving universal regret? Probably her own people would reply that she was, for every nation regards its own acts as better than those of others; but beyond her borders the answer unquestionably would be that she was not. Rapacity, cruelty, corruption, have all been laid to her charge at this period, and not without sufficient reason. But apart from these vices, her weakness under the Castilian kings was such that she was incapable of doing any good. When an individual is too infirm and decrepit to manage his affairs, a robust man takes his place, and so it is with States. The weak one may cry out that might is not right, but such a cry finds a very feeble echo. India was not held by the Portuguese under the only indefeasible tenure: that of making the best use of it; and thus it could be seized by a stronger power without Christian nations feeling that a wrong was being done.

Before recounting in brief the rise of the Northern Netherlands to a proud position among European states, and the commencement of the Dutch conquests in the eastern seas, a glance may be given to the earliest acts of other nations, and especially to those of our own countrymen, in those distant regions.

The French were the first to follow the Portuguese round the Cape of Good Hope to India. As early as 1507 a corsair of that nation, named Mondragon, made his appearance in the Mozambique channel[14] with two armed vessels, and plundered a ship commanded by Job Queimado. He also captured and robbed another Indiaman nearer home. On the 18th of January 1509 a fleet commanded by Duarte Pacheco Pereira fell in with him off Cape Finisterre, and after a warm engagement sank one of his ships and captured the other. Mondragon was taken a prisoner to Lisbon, where he found means of making his peace with the king, and he was then permitted to return to France.

Twenty years later three ships, fitted out by a merchant named Jean Ango, sailed from Dieppe for India. The accounts of this expedition are so conflicting that it is impossible to relate the occurrences attending it with absolute accuracy. It is certain, however, that one of the ships never reached her destination. Another was wrecked on the coast of Sumatra, where her crew were all murdered. The third reached Diu in July 1527. She had a crew of forty Frenchmen, but was commanded by a Portuguese named EstevÃo Dias, nicknamed Brigas, who had fled from his native country on account of misdeeds committed there, and had taken service with the strangers. The ruler of Diu regarded this ship with great hostility, and as he was unable to seize her openly, he practised deceit to get her crew within his power. Professing friendship, he gave Dias permission to trade in his territory, but took advantage of the first opportunity to arrest him and his crew. They were handed over as captives to the paramount Mohamedan ruler, and were obliged to embrace his creed to preserve their lives. They were then taken into his service and remained in India.

Early in 1529 two ships commanded by Jean and Raoul Parmentier, fitted out partly by Jean Ango, partly by merchants of Rouen, sailed from Dieppe. In October of the same year they reached Sumatra, but on account of great loss of life from sickness, on the 22nd of January 1530 they turned homeward. As they avoided the Portuguese settlements, nothing was known at Goa of their proceedings except what was told by a sailor who was left behind at Madagascar and was afterwards found there. This expedition was almost as unsuccessful as the preceding one. On their return passage the ships were greatly damaged in violent storms, and they reached Europe with difficulty.

From that time until 1601 there is no trace of a French vessel having passed the Cape of Good Hope. In May of this year the Corbin and Croissant, two ships fitted out by some merchants of Laval and VitrÉ, sailed from St. Malo. They reached the Maldives safely, but there the Corbin was lost in July 1602, and her commander was unable to return to France until ten years had gone by. The Croissant was lost on the Spanish coast on her homeward passage.

On the 1st of June 1604 a French East India Company was established on paper, but it did not get further. In 1615 it was reorganised, and in 1617 the first successful expedition to India under the French flag sailed from a port in Normandy. From that date onward ships of this nation were frequently seen in the eastern seas. But the French made no attempt to form a settlement in South Africa, and their only connection with this country was that towards the middle of the seventeenth century a vessel was sent occasionally from Rochelle to collect a cargo of sealskins and oil at the islands in and near the present Saldanha Bay.

The English were the next to appear in Indian waters. A few individuals of this nation may have served in Portuguese ships, and among the missionaries, especially of the Company of Jesus, who went out to convert the heathen, it is not unlikely that there were several. One at least, Thomas Stephens by name, was rector of the Jesuit college at Salsette. A letter written by him from Goa in 1579, and printed in the second volume of Hakluyt’s work, is the earliest account extant of an English voyager to that part of the world.[15] It contains no information of importance.

The famous sea captain Francis Drake, of Tavistock in Devon, sailed from Plymouth on the 13th of December 1577, with the intention of exploring the Pacific ocean. His fleet consisted of five vessels, carrying in all one hundred and sixty-four men. His own ship, named the Pelican, was of one hundred and twenty tons burden. The others were the Elizabeth, eighty tons, the Marigold, thirty tons, a pinnace of twelve tons, and a storeship of fifty tons burden. The last named was set on fire as soon as her cargo was transferred to the others, the pinnace was abandoned, the Marigold was lost in a storm, the Elizabeth, after reaching the Pacific, turned back through the straits of Magellan, and the Pelican alone continued the voyage. She was the first English ship that sailed round the world. Captain Drake reached England again on the 3rd of November 1580, and soon afterwards was made a knight by Queen Elizabeth on board his ship. The Pelican did not touch at any part of the South African coast, but there is the following paragraph in the account of the voyage:—

“We ran hard aboard the Cape, finding the report of the Portuguese to be most false, who affirm that it is the most dangerous cape of the world, never without intolerable storms and present danger to travellers who come near the same. This cape is a most stately thing, and the fairest cape we saw in the whole circumference of the earth, and we passed by it on the 18th of June.”

In 1583 four English traders in precious stones, acting partly on their own account and partly as agents for merchants in London, made their way by the Tigris and the Persian gulf to Ormuz, where at that time people of various nationalities were engaged in commerce. John Newbery, the leader of the party, had been there before. The others were named Ralph Fitch, William Leades, and James Story. Shortly after their arrival at Ormuz they were arrested by the Portuguese authorities on the double charge of being heretics and spies of the prior Dom Antonio, who was a claimant to the throne of Portugal, and under these pretences they were sent prisoners to Goa. There they managed to clear themselves of the first of the charges, Story entered a convent, and the others, on finding bail not to leave the city, were set at liberty in December 1584, mainly through the instrumentality of the Jesuit father Stephens and Jan Huyghen van Linscheten, of whom more will be related in the following pages. Four months afterwards, being in fear of ill-treatment, they managed to make their escape from Goa. After a time they separated, and Fitch went on a tour through India, visiting many places before his return to England in 1591. An account of his travels is extant in Hakluyt’s collection, but there is not much information in it, and it had no effect upon subsequent events.

Thomas Candish sailed from Plymouth on the 21st of July 1586, with three ships—the Desire, of one hundred and twenty tons, the Content, of sixty tons, and the Hugh Gallant, of forty tons—carrying in all one hundred and twenty-three souls. After sailing round the globe, he arrived again in Plymouth on the 9th of September 1588, having passed the Cape of Good Hope on the 16th of May.

The first English ships that put into a harbour on the South African coast were the Penelope, Merchant Royal, and Edward Bonaventure, which sailed from Plymouth for India on the 10th of April 1591, under command of Admiral George Raymond. This fleet put into the watering place of Saldanha, now called Table Bay, at the end of July. The crews, who were suffering from scurvy, were at once sent on shore, where they obtained fresh food by shooting wild fowl and gathering mussels and other shell-fish along the rocky beach. Some inhabitants had been seen when the ships sailed in, but they appeared terrified, and at once moved inland. Admiral Raymond visited Robben Island, where he found seals and penguins in great numbers. One day some hunters caught a Hottentot, whom they treated kindly, making him many presents and endeavouring to show him by signs that they were in want of cattle. They then let him go, and eight days afterwards he returned with thirty or forty others, bringing forty oxen and as many sheep. Trade was at once commenced, the price of an ox being two knives, that of a sheep one knife. So many men had died of scurvy that it was considered advisable to send the Merchant Royal back to England weak handed. The Penelope, with one hundred and one men, and the Edward Bonaventure, with ninety-seven men, sailed for India on the 8th of September. On the 12th a gale was encountered, and that night those in the Edward Bonaventure, whereof was master James Lancaster—who was afterwards famous as an advocate of Arctic exploration, and whose name was given by Bylot and Baffin to the sound which terminated their discoveries in 1616—saw a great sea break over the admiral’s ship, which put out her lights. After that she was never seen or heard of again.

The appearance of these rivals in the Indian seas caused much concern in Spain and Portugal. There was as yet no apprehension of the loss of the sources of the spice trade, but it was regarded as probable that English ships would lie in wait at St. Helena for richly laden vessels homeward bound, so in 1591 and again in 1593 the king directed the viceroy to instruct the captains not to touch at that island.

At this time a new state, the republic of the United Netherlands, had recently come into existence in Europe. It was a state full of life and vigour, though its territory was even smaller than that of Portugal. Constantly battling with the ocean that threatened to submerge the land, breathing an invigorating air, coming from an energetic and self-respecting stock, its people were the hardiest and most industrious of Europeans. They were also attached to freedom, and ready to part with property and life itself rather than submit to tyranny or misrule. A brief outline of their history will show how they came to contend with Portugal at the close of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth for the commerce of the Indian seas.[16]

The territory that now forms the kingdom of the Netherlands was the last part of the continent of Europe to be occupied by human beings. For untold ages the Rhine, the Maas, and the Schelde had been carrying down earth and the ocean had been casting up sand, until at last a tract of swampy but habitable ground appeared where previously waves had rolled. That was not many centuries before the commencement of the Christian era, and so no traces of palÆolithic man are found there such as are found in all other parts of Europe, and in great abundance in some parts of modern Belgium close by. The most ancient relics of man discovered in the northern Netherlands are comparatively recent flint implements, tumuli containing funeral urns, and the so-called hunebedden, sepulchres of men of note, roughly built of stone taken from boulders carried from the Scandinavian peninsula by ice in glacial times, and deposited on the banks not yet risen to the surface of the sea. These hunebedden are found chiefly in the present province of Drenthe, and may not date much further back than Roman times.

The Batavi, a Nether Teuton tribe, driven westward by war, about a century before the birth of Christ found their way into the island enclosed by the North sea and the extreme forks of the Rhine, which was then a waste of morasses, lakelets, and forests. It had previously been occupied by a Celtic population, that had abandoned it not long before on account of disasters from floods. The position of the forks of the Rhine was probably different from what it is to-day, for the whole face of the country has undergone a great change since the Batavians first saw it. Large tracts of land have been reclaimed, and still larger tracts have been lost by the sea washing over them. Thus in the thirteenth century of our era the very heart of the country was torn out by the ocean, and villages and towns and wide pastures were buried for ever under the deep waters since termed the Zuider Zee. In 1277 the Dollart was formed between Groningen and Hanover, and in 1421 the Biesbosch between Brabant and Holland took the place of habitable land.

Farther north than the Batavians, the Frisians, also a Nether Teuton people, occupied a great extent of country, but it is impossible to say when they first took possession of it. These Batavians and Frisians were the nearest blood relations of the Angles and Saxons who at a later date conquered England and part of Scotland, and their language was so nearly the same that our great Alfred could with little difficulty have understood it.

The southern part of what is now the kingdom of Belgium and the adjoining districts of France were inhabited at this time by a Celtic people, who had long before replaced the early palÆolithic savages. Between them and the Batavians and Frisians was a broad tract occupied by Teutons and Celts mixed together, who do not appear, however, to have blended their blood to any great extent. This was the condition of the country at the beginning of the Christian era, and it was its condition more than fifteen centuries later, when Philippe II was king of Spain and Elizabeth Tudor was queen of England.

CÆsar conquered the Celts and compelled the Frisians to pay tribute, but he admitted the Batavians to an alliance, and thereafter for hundreds of years they voluntarily supplied the Roman army with its bravest soldiers. They gave their blood for Rome, and in return received civilisation. During this period they learned to construct dykes to prevent the ocean and the rivers from overflowing the land, to dig canals, to make highways, and to build bridges.

Then came the outpouring of the northern nations upon the western empire, and when it ceased the power that had overshadowed the earth had gone. In its stead the Franks were masters of the Celtic portion of the Netherlands, where the Latin tongue was spoken, and tribes akin to the Frisian had mixed with the occupants of the north. The Batavians remained, but their distinctive name had disappeared, and so the racial division of the land was as it had been before.

Some of the Frisians had been converted to Christianity by Anglo-Saxon missionaries, and in A.D. 750 the whole of them, after a crushing defeat by Charles Martel, accepted that religion. In A.D. 785 their conquest was completed by Charlemagne, and the whole region then became a section of the dominions of that able and powerful ruler. The bishopric of Utrecht was founded at this time. Extensive domains were attached to the see, and the bishop, besides the ecclesiastical authority which he exercised over the whole of the Frisians, was temporal ruler of a territory constantly varying in size, sometimes covering several of the modern provinces.

Charlemagne left the local customs of the people of the Netherlands undisturbed, and sent officials to govern them according to their own laws, though in his name. Under his feeble successors the country was broken up into a number of practically petty sovereignties by the descendants of his officials, who now claimed hereditary authority and ruled as despots. They called themselves dukes, counts, marquises, or lords, and often quarrelled with each other. Most of them nominally admitted the precedence in rank of the head of the Holy Roman Empire, as the counts of Flanders and Artois did that of the kings of France, but this was the full extent of their submission.

The Scandinavian pirates sailed up the rivers and made frequent attacks upon the towns and villages on their banks, they plundered and murdered many of the people, but they did not form permanent settlements as they did in the more attractive lands of Normandy and Sicily.

The country not being capable of supporting its inhabitants by agriculture and cattle breeding alone, manufactures and commerce were necessary, and in addition the fisheries became a means of living for many. They traded with England, buying wool, with the coast of the Baltic, selling woollen and linen cloths, and with all north-western Europe, selling Indian products, of which Bruges was the emporium for the Italian merchants. So towns grew and prospered, and in course of time obtained municipal charters from their sovereigns. In A.D. 1217 the first of these in the present kingdom of the Netherlands was granted by Count William the First of Holland and Countess Joanna of Flanders to the town of Middelburg in Zeeland. It did not indeed confer great privileges, but it was the beginning of a system which had most important effects upon the country. The crusades tended to hasten this movement. The petty sovereigns who took part in them were very willing to sell privileges for ready money, which they needed for their equipment, and their subjects were quite as willing to buy.

So the towns grew in number and in size, and succeeded in obtaining, usually by purchase, a large amount of self-government and the right of sending deputies to the estates or parliaments, who sat with the nobles to confer upon general affairs. Just as the various kings of the Saxon states in England, the petty sovereigns were continually quarrelling with each other, and their number varied from time to time, as one or other got the mastery over his neighbours. Not the least prominent or quarrelsome among them was the bishop of Utrecht, whose dominions contracted or expanded with the fortunes of diplomacy or war. The estates of his province consisted of deputies from the towns, the nobles, and abbots, over whom he presided as a sovereign. In some of the little dominions the privileges of the towns were much greater than in others, in several indeed the cities were practically little short of being independent republics. Unfortunately they were so jealous of each other that they could not unite in carrying out any policy that would have benefited the whole province, and there was no tie whatever that bound the different provinces together. Each city with a little domain around it stood alone, and though it might enjoy self-government, its position was precarious, for it could not depend upon anything outside of itself to assist it if necessary to maintain its rights against an aggressor.

This was the condition of affairs political when, owing partly to the extinction of some of the ruling families, partly to purchase, and partly to fraud and force, in 1437 a majority of the provinces—among them Holland and Zeeland—came under the dominion of Philippe, the powerful duke of Burgundy. They continued, however, to be independent of each other, and were governed by him as distinct states, of one of which he was termed duke, of another count, and so on, though he established a council at Mechlin, which acted as a court of appeal for them all. He was married to the youngest daughter of JoÃo I of Portugal and Philippa of Lancaster, Isabella by name, whose nephew, Affonso V, in 1466 made her a present of the Azores or Western Islands. A considerable number of families from the Netherlands, whose descendants can still be distinguished there, then migrated to the Flemish islands, as they were long thereafter termed. These dependencies shared the fate of the other dominions of the house of Burgundy until 1640, when they reverted to Portugal.

Philippe suppressed much of the freedom that had been gained, but he encouraged and protected commerce and manufactures, and under his rule the provinces increased greatly in material wealth. He died in 1467, and was succeeded by his son Charles the Headstrong, a perfectly reckless and unprincipled ruler, who endeavoured to crush out all the acquired freedom of the people, and nearly succeeded in establishing himself as an absolute despot. His first wife was Catherine of Valois, by whom he had only one daughter. After her death he married, on the 3rd of July 1468, Margaret of York, sister of Edward IV of England, but had no children by her. Like his father, he governed the Netherlands by means of officials termed stadholders, who acted as his representatives and carried out his instructions. The first standing army in the country was stationed there by him. Charles was killed in battle with the Swiss in 1477, and as he left no son, his daughter, Mary of Burgundy, claimed the right of succeeding him as sovereign of all the provinces he had ruled over.

Louis XI of France, however, on the ground that the Salic law was applicable in this case, took possession of Burgundy, and cast longing eyes on the Netherlands as well. In this hour of danger, the estates of all the provinces came together at Ghent, when the lady Mary voluntarily restored all the privileges and rights that her father and grandfather had annulled. She even went further, and granted the “Groot Privilegie,” which conferred such extensive authority upon the estates that under its clauses despotism or even misgovernment would be impossible, for no taxes could be imposed and no war undertaken without their consent, and edicts of the sovereign were to be invalid if they conflicted with the privileges of the towns. Only natives of the particular province could be appointed to offices in any of them, thus a native of Brabant or Namur could not fill an office in Flanders or Holland. Persons charged with crime were to be brought to trial speedily, and no citizen could be arbitrarily imprisoned by the ruler. A more liberal constitution could hardly have been imagined at that time nor indeed even at present.

The estates were then ready to support the lady Mary, they acknowledged her as their sovereign, and with their approval she married Maximilian of Hapsburg, son of the German emperor. Five years later she was killed by a fall from her horse, leaving a son, Philippe by name, then four years of age, as heir to her sovereignty of the Netherlands. Maximilian claimed to act as regent and guardian of his son, and was accepted as such by all of the provinces subject to Burgundy except Flanders, which he got possession of by force. He disowned the “Great Privilege,” as did his son Philippe, when in 1494 at seventeen years of age he assumed the government.

In 1496 Philippe married Joanna, eldest daughter of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile. Her sister Catherine was destined at a later date to play an important part in English history as the spouse of King Henry the Eighth. From the union of Philippe and Joanna was born in the year 1500 a son, who as the emperor Charles V was the most powerful monarch in Europe. From his mother he inherited the sovereignty of Spain, of portions of Italy, and of the greater part of the New World, with the title of king, from his father he inherited the sovereignty of all the Netherlands except Gelderland, Utrecht, the Frisian provinces, and Liege, with the titles of count and duke, and by election of the German princes he became the head of the Holy Roman Empire, with the title of emperor. His father Philippe died in 1506, and the Netherlands became the first portion of his vast inheritance that fell to him. To those provinces that had been dependencies of Burgundy, he was able to add Friesland in 1524, Utrecht and Overyssel in 1528, and Groningen and Drenthe in 1536, all obtained by cession after long civil war, when the bishop of Utrecht, who was unable to protect himself from the duke of Gelderland, resigned his temporal authority. In 1543 he conquered Gelderland, and in the following year he compelled the king of France, to whom his father Philippe had done homage for Flanders and Artois, to renounce the suzerainty of those provinces, so that the entire country, Liege only excepted, came under his undisputed sovereignty. In this manner the provinces became united with Spain under one ruler, though their governments remained distinct.

Under Charles just as much or as little freedom as he pleased was left to the people of the Netherlands, for he regarded his edicts as superior in authority to all charters or customs, and he inflicted terrible vengeance upon the city of Ghent, his own birthplace, for daring to resist the payment of an amount of money that he arbitrarily demanded. He professed to regard the provinces with favour, but he drew largely upon their resources to enable him to carry on wars in which they had no interest whatever.

And now another factor came into play, which tended very greatly to increase the bitterness of the people at the diminution of freedom. The reformation had commenced, and its principles were spreading in the Netherlands. Charles, who regarded schism as even more criminal than rebellion, attempted to stamp out the new teaching, and for this purpose introduced the inquisition. His sister Mary, dowager queen of Hungary, acted as regent of the country for twenty-five years, and carried out his instructions in letter and in spirit. Many thousands of people perished by various forms of death, but wretched as the condition of the unhappy Netherlanders was, a still darker day was about to dawn upon them.

It is generally affirmed that there were seventeen distinct provinces at this time, but in fact the number seventeen was derived from the titles of the sovereign and the accidental circumstance that there were seventeen separate estates present at the abdication of Charles V,[17] though these did not correspond exactly with the titles. For instance, one of the titles was count of Zutphen, but Zutphen had for centuries been part of Gelderland; another of the titles was marquis of Anvers or Antwerp, but Antwerp was a city of Brabant. On the other hand Lille with Douai and Orchies, though cities of Flanders, had separate estates, but did not furnish a title, the same was the case with Valenciennes, a city of Hainaut, while Mechlin, in the very heart of Brabant, had separate estates and furnished the title lord of Malines or Mechlin.

What would be termed provinces to-day were the duchies of Gelderland, Brabant, Limburg, and Luxemburg, the counties of Holland, Zeeland, Flanders, Namur or Namen, Hainaut or Henegouwen, and Artois, and the lordships of Utrecht, Friesland, Groningen with Drenthe, Overyssel, and Mechlin or Malines.[18] To make seventeen, the county of Zutphen and the marquisate of Antwerp must be added if titles alone are considered, or if states present at the abdication of Charles V be taken as a guide, Lille with Douai and Orchies and Tournai with the Tournaisis[19] must be included. Only five of these—Holland, Utrecht, Friesland, Groningen, and Overyssel—remain on the map to-day as they were in the middle of the sixteenth century. Of them all, Brabant was the most important at that time, Flanders came next, and Holland, soon to take the leading place, was regarded as only the third.[20]

On the 25th of October 1555 in presence of the estates of seventeen provinces assembled at Brussels, the emperor Charles the Fifth, worn out with disease and infirmity, abdicated the sovereignty, and his son Philippe became ruler in his stead. The change was all for the worse. Charles had been a despot, it is true, but he was by birth a Netherlander, he spoke the language of the people, and took an interest in their commerce and their manufactures; Philippe was a Spaniard, ignorant of Flemish (i.e. Dutch) and of French, and without a particle of sympathy with them in any particular.

For the first four years of his reign Philippe resided in the Netherlands, though he appointed the duke of Savoy regent of the country. They were years of war between Spain and France, and the Netherlands were obliged to aid their sovereign very largely with money and with men. Under the count of Egmont as their general, the combined Spanish and Flemish forces won the great battles of Saint Quentin and Gravelines, but the French were compensated by taking Calais from the English, for Queen Mary Tudor had provoked attack by giving assistance in the war to her husband King Philippe.

Peace having been concluded, in 1559 the king prepared to return to Spain, where his surroundings would be much more congenial. He appointed Margaret of Parma, a natural daughter of the emperor Charles the Fifth and consequently his own half sister, regent of the Netherlands, but all real authority was confided to the bishop of Arras, afterwards widely known as Cardinal Granvelle. This man was a staunch absolutist in politics, and could be depended upon to carry out the king’s wishes to the utmost of his ability. And the dearest wish of the king was to extirpate the new doctrines in religion, which he clearly saw would tend to produce a far more liberal system of government than he approved of. Among the appointments made before he left was that of William prince of Orange to be stadholder of the provinces of Holland, Zeeland, and Utrecht, but subject to the authority of the duchess of Parma, who was to be guided by the bishop of Arras.

Against the entreaties and protests of the estates, Philippe left in the Netherlands four thousand Spanish soldiers, the most highly disciplined troops in Europe at that time.

Previous to this date, excepting the sovereign bishop of Liege,[21] whose territory was independent and therefore not then included in the provinces, there had only been four bishops in the whole of the Netherlands: one in Utrecht in what is now the kingdom of Holland, one at Tournai in the present kingdom of Belgium, and two at Arras and Cambrai in territory since annexed to France. Philippe obtained from the pope a bull increasing the number to three archbishops and fifteen bishops, of whom one archbishop at Utrecht and six bishops at Haarlem, Middelburg, Leeuwarden, Groningen, Deventer, and ’s Hertogenbosch, were to be stationed in the northern provinces, now the kingdom of Holland. Each was to have inquisitors serving under him.

These measures gave intense dissatisfaction to the whole body of the people, nobles, burghers, and artisans alike. There was not a single Protestant noble in the country at the time, and the great majority of the people were still adherents of the Roman church, but Catholics and Calvinists alike were opposed to persecution in matters of faith and to the erection of ecclesiastical power upon the ruins of civil liberty. Still the king[22] would not yield, and the people were as yet indisposed to resist in arms. Perhaps they did not know their own strength, and over-estimated that opposed to them. There was no such thing either as political union among them. Seventeen states jealous of each other, and each important state containing rival towns, presented to a despot a field that could be easily worked. Still greater suffering was needed before the people could unite against the murderous hand that was raised to crush them.

After a time the Spanish soldiers, who were needed elsewhere, were withdrawn, but matters went on no better afterwards. The whole hatred of the country was turned against Cardinal Granvelle, who was believed to be the instigator of all the evil, and at length the duchess Margaret grew to detest him also, so that Philippe was obliged to recall him. He left the Netherlands in March 1564, and after a short period of retirement, was employed by the king in still higher offices.

The government of the duchess Margaret was corrupt, though perhaps not more so than that of some other administrations of the time. Offices were sold to the highest bidder by her secretary, and she as well as he profited by such transactions. Under such circumstances the courts of law were venal, and judgment in civil cases was usually in favour of him who had the longest purse. A man who had to pay a large sum of money for his office was obliged to try to recover his capital by some means, and as that could not be done honestly, he was open to receive bribes. In the great agony caused by the inquisition, however, this evil was hardly considered as one of importance, and is only casually referred to by the chroniclers of the time.

The great number of persons burnt, buried alive, and strangled by the inquisitors had the opposite effect to that which King Philippe intended. Instead of stamping out the reformation, its doctrines were spreading more rapidly month after month, until mass meetings of thousands of people were openly held in the fields outside the towns to listen to the preaching of some earnest and eloquent reformer. The men on such occasions usually went armed and determined to defend their pastors and themselves, but if need should be, they were ready to face death in its most appalling forms for the sake of what they believed to be truth.

Another effect of the inquisition was to destroy the material prosperity of the country. Flanders had long been the leading cloth manufactory of Europe, it was there that wool, imported chiefly from England, was converted by spinning wheels and handlooms into the choicest cloths. Nowhere else were spinning, weaving, dyeing, and pressing so well understood or so skilfully practised as in the Flemish towns. But now persecution drove those industrious artisans out of the country. They fled to England, where Queen Elizabeth permitted them to settle, and it was they who in East Anglia gave to the country that adopted and protected them the preËminence in woollen manufactures which she retains to this day. A very few years later, instead of exporting raw wool and importing cloth, England was sending to Flanders the products of Anglo-Flemish looms. This was not the only industry that persecution drove from the provinces to other lands, but it was the most important.

All parties in politics and in religion find it necessary to adopt an expressive name, under which their adherents can rally, and it was at this time that the opponents of despotic government took to themselves the renowned title of Beggars, that was to be heard as a war cry on land and sea long years afterwards. On the 8th of April 1566 three hundred gentlemen presented a petition to the duchess Margaret, when a member of her council spoke of them as beggars. That evening at a banquet Count Brederode proposed that the title should be adopted, which was enthusiastically agreed to by those present, and quickly spread over the provinces. At first it had no religious signification, for both Catholics and Protestants who favoured the preservation of constitutional rights termed themselves Gueux, but in course of time it was applied almost exclusively to the adherents of the reformed or Calvinistic faith.

In such circumstances as those in which the Netherlands were then placed, excesses are usually committed by the most fanatical section of the suffering party, and it was so in this instance. In August 1566 a disorderly mob took possession of the great cathedral of Antwerp, one of the most beautiful and stately buildings in Europe, threw down all the statues in it, broke the stained glass windows, demolished the ornaments of every kind, and generally wrecked the interior of the edifice. Only a few hundred men were actually engaged in the work of destruction, but many thousands looked on with indifference, and many more with satisfaction, accounting the decorations of the cathedral as symbols of the terrible inquisition. This example was followed throughout the southern provinces, and a great number of churches were treated in the same manner as Antwerp cathedral had been. Yet there was not a single instance of violence offered to any individual, or of plunder of any article whatever. The gold and silver implements of the churches were battered and made useless, but were then thrown on the floors and left.

The fury of Philippe was now thoroughly aroused, and means were forwarded to the regent Margaret to raise a body of troops and suppress disorder. The most powerful of the southern nobles ranged themselves on the side of despotism. On the 13th of March 1567 a body of three thousand Beggars who were posted near Antwerp was utterly annihilated, and on the 23rd of the same month the ancient city of Valenciennes, which had defied the government, was taken and reduced to submission. The factions in Antwerp were ready to spring at each other’s throats, but were induced by the prince of Orange to keep the peace. The regent Margaret agreed to conditions which gave the Protestants some protection, but her word was not to be depended upon, and much less was that of King Philippe, who was the very incarnation of deceit and treachery. For a few weeks now there was an appearance of calm, but it was only the prelude to the most terrible storm that ever swept over any portion of modern Europe.

Ten thousand veteran Spanish troops, the most highly disciplined and best armed soldiers in the world, were sent by Philippe as the nucleus of a powerful army to subjugate the Netherlands. At their head was the bloodthirsty duke of Alva, then sixty years of age, whose life had been spent in war, and who was the most skilful strategist of his day. Alva! what a curse rests upon his name in all countries where men set a value upon justice and freedom! As pitiless as Tshaka in South Africa, as treacherous as Dingan, he stands out in the history of the Netherlands as a cold-blooded murderer, a malignant fiend in human form. His commission as the king’s captain-general was issued on the 31st of January 1567, and his instructions were in keeping with his disposition and character.

The nucleus or advance guard of the army was assembled in Italy, and marched by way of Mont Cenis and through Savoy, Burgundy, and Lorraine to Thionville, then a town of the Netherlands, now included in France. In August 1567 it crossed the border, and continued its march to Brussels, meeting with no opposition on the way. Alva at once placed garrisons in the principal towns, and commenced the erection of fortresses to overawe them, the principal of which was the famous citadel of Antwerp. He sent letters to the different cities, signed by the king, commanding them to render absolute obedience to him. The next step was the arrest and close confinement of as many of the nobles as he could get hold of who had at any time opposed any arbitrary act of the sovereign. The counts Egmont and Hoorn were entrapped by letters to them from the king, praising their conduct and declaring his confidence in them. Conscious of having done no wrong, and lulled into a feeling of security by these assurances from Philippe, they placed themselves in the power of Alva, and found themselves his prisoners.

Then was established that murderous mockery of a tribunal, known as the Council of Blood. It was composed of a number of creatures of Alva, some of whom were Flemish nobles of the worst type ready to pour out the blood of their countrymen at his bidding, others Spaniards of the same character. It dispensed with legal formalities, and made nought of charters and privileges. The whole population of the Netherlands was at its mercy. Its agents sent in lists of names, and with hardly a pretence of examination, men, scores of men at a time, were sentenced to confiscation of all their property and death on the scaffold. This infamous Council of Blood met for the first time on the 20th of September 1567 in an apartment of Alva’s residence in Brussels. His intention was to crush out all opposition to absolutism, to exterminate all adherents of the reformed religion, and to raise a large revenue by confiscation of property.

Everyone who valued freedom and could flee from the provinces did so now without delay. The neighbouring German states were crowded with refugees, and in many Flemish and Dutch towns industry entirely ceased, for artisans and mechanics had abandoned them in despair. It is highly probable that the larger number of those so-called Germans who settled in South Africa in later years were really descendants of Netherlanders who left their fatherland at this time.

Margaret of Parma was nominally regent still, but on the 9th of December 1567 she resigned, and the monster Alva became governor-general of the provinces.

The prince of Orange, his brothers Louis and Adolf of Nassau, Count Hoogstraaten, and several other nobles of less note had retired into Germany before the arrival of the Spanish troops. Alva confiscated their property in the Netherlands, but they had possessions beyond the border which he could not reach. They had been faithful subjects of Philippe to this time, though they had striven by peaceful means to preserve the constitutions of the provinces, but now they could not look calmly on while the very life was being trampled out of their country. In April 1568 Orange engaged troops in Germany, and sent three small armies into the Netherlands in hope that the people would rise in a body and assist to drive the Spaniards out. But he was disappointed. The people were for the moment completely cowed. Two of his armies were utterly annihilated by the disciplined Spanish troops, and though the third, commanded by his brother Louis, gained a victory at Heiligerlee, near Winschoten, in the province of Groningen, it led to no substantial result. Count Adolf of Nassau fell in this battle. So the war for freedom began, a war that was carried on without intermission for forty-one years.

Alva with an overpowering force marched against Count Louis, and on the 21st of July 1568 attacked him at Jemmingen, a village on the left bank of the Ems near its entrance into the Dollart, within the German border. It was not so much a battle as a slaughter that followed. Of ten thousand men under his command, the count lost seven thousand slain, and with difficulty made his escape from the disastrous field while the remainder were scattering in every direction. Alva then proceeded to Utrecht, where he reviewed an army of thirty thousand infantry and seven thousand cavalry, a force that he believed sufficient to overawe the whole of the northern provinces.

Early in October the prince of Orange invaded Brabant from Germany with thirty thousand men, of whom nine thousand were cavalry. Many of these were undisciplined refugees, but some were trained German soldiers. Several smaller bands joined the prince subsequently, though not a city opened its gates to him, so great was the terror that Alva inspired. The difficulty of providing food for such a number of men for any length of time was insurmountable, and the Spanish general therefore did not choose to risk an engagement, but watched his opponent closely. On one occasion, on the 20th of October, he was able to cut off a rearguard of three thousand men under Count Hoogstraaten, and nearly exterminated them. Hoogstraaten himself escaped, but died of a wound a few days afterwards. The prince of Orange, disappointed in his expectation of a general rising, and without a single stronghold as a base of operations, was obliged to retreat to Germany and disband his troops. He had spent all the money he could raise, and was heavily in debt. Nothing could have been gloomier than the prospect then before him, but he still cherished hope and trusted in God. He had passed through different stages of religious belief, but did not openly join the Calvinist church until October 1573.

The first campaign in the war of freedom had thus terminated entirely in favour of the Spaniards.

On the 5th of June of this year 1568 an event took place which more than all the blood of humble citizens that had been shed drew the attention of civilised Europe to what was transpiring in the Netherlands. This was the death on the scaffold in the great square of Brussels of the counts Egmont and Hoorn, who had been condemned by the Council of Blood for having been somewhat dilatory in upholding despotism. They were both earnest Catholics, and Egmont in particular had rendered great services to the king. He was the general who had won the victories of Saint Quentin and Gravelines. But the death of these prominent noblemen was resolved upon by Philippe, because it would strike terror into all classes, and would prove that the least hesitation to carry out any of his wishes would meet with the most terrible punishment. All their possessions were confiscated. Their death had no effect upon the patriotic cause, except for the horror which it created abroad, as they were not the men to throw in their lot with William of Orange in resistance to tyranny.

The baron Montigny, brother of Count Hoorn, had been sent with the marquis Berghen to Madrid in May 1566 by the regent Margaret of Parma to represent to Philippe the ruin which the inquisition was bringing upon the Netherlands and the difficulty caused by it to her administration. They were instructed to suggest its abolition and the modification of the king’s edicts. Both of these noblemen were devout Catholics, and were most faithful subjects of their sovereign. They might have reasoned that if his sister and representative was compelled by force of circumstances to pause in the deadly work, they could not be blamed for acting under her instructions. The king received them apparently in a friendly manner. But they were not permitted to return, and after a time were placed in confinement. Berghen died, it was reported of home sickness, but many believed by violent means. Montigny was kept a prisoner more than four years, was then in his absence condemned to death by the Council of Blood for favouring heresy, and on the 16th of October 1570 was strangled privately by order of the king.

An awful calamity, but not by the hand of man, overtook the Northern Netherlands in the year 1570. In a gale of tremendous violence on the first and second of November of this year the sea was driven high upon the coast, the dykes burst in many places, and the waters poured over the land. Fully a hundred thousand persons were drowned, and property to an immense amount was destroyed.

And now came another trouble. Alva had been disappointed in his expectations of an abundant revenue from the confiscation of property, for much as he gathered by that means, the cost of maintenance of his army and the charges of his administration were so enormous that his treasury was always empty, and creditors had become clamorous. To remedy this defect, he imposed taxes of one per cent of the value of all property in the country, to be paid only once, of five per cent transfer duty on all land and houses sold thereafter, and of ten per cent on every movable article that should be sold. This last tax was regarded by the people as equivalent to a prohibition to carry on trade of any kind, it affected every one, and in many of the towns the shops as well as the wholesale stores, even the breweries, the butcheries, and the bakeries were closed. The streets swarmed with mendicants, and riots were only suppressed by military force. If he had tried to compel the people to take part with William of Orange, the governor-general could not have devised a more efficient plan.

II.
The War in the Netherlands to the Union of Utrecht.

Many of the men who had been obliged to leave their homes had turned to the sea for refuge. Legitimate commerce could not absorb them all, even if it had been flourishing as formerly, and so in their desperate condition they became buccaneers. The prince of Orange took advantage of this, and issued a commission to a reckless fugitive noble named William de la Marck to act as his admiral and attack Spanish ships wherever he could find them. De la Marck was a distant relative of Egmont, and had sworn not to clip his hair or beard till he had avenged the count’s death. In March 1572 he was lying at anchor at Dover with a fleet of twenty-four vessels, when by order of Queen Elizabeth all supplies of provisions were refused to him. He was then compelled to do something desperate at once, or starve, so he resolved to sail to Enkhuizen, and try to get possession of that port. The wind failed him, however, so on the 1st of April he put into the Maas and anchored in front of Brill (Brielle), a walled and fortified town on the island of Voorne. The Spanish garrison had just been sent to Utrecht. The Sea Beggars were only a few hundred in number, but Pieter Koppelstok, who was sent by De la Marck to demand the surrender of the town, when questioned as to their strength replied about five thousand. The authorities and adherents of the government fled in fear, and the half-famished rovers battered in the gates and took possession of the place. This was the beginning of the second campaign against the Spaniards.

It could not be expected that the Sea Beggars, after their wrongs and their sufferings, would act very gently with their opponents, but the ferocity which they displayed on this occasion cannot be excused or passed lightly over. They broke all the altars, statues, and ornaments in the churches, dressed themselves in clerical robes, and barbarously put to death thirteen priests and monks who had not been able to make their escape. A Spanish force was sent from Utrecht to recover Brill, but was beaten off with considerable loss. De la Marck was then of opinion that the place should be abandoned, but Captain Treslong, whose father had once been governor of the town, induced him to continue to hold it and to rally the patriots around him there, who quickly came in and joined him.

As soon as intelligence of the repulse of the Spaniards from Brill reached Flushing (Vlissingen), that important town declared for the prince of Orange, and sent to De la Marck to beg for assistance. Two hundred Sea Beggars, all in clerical garments, were thereupon forwarded in three vessels, and quickly reached their destination. Here also an act of inexcusable barbarity took place. The engineer who had constructed the citadel of Antwerp, Pacheco by name, had just arrived in Flushing to erect a fortress there. He was seized and at once hanged with two other Spanish officers. With the town half the island of Walcheren went over to the patriot cause, and very shortly a strong force of Beggars, aided by some French soldiers and English volunteers, assembled there to protect it.

The example thus set was speedily followed by most of the towns that were not overawed by powerful Spanish garrisons in the provinces of Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht, Gelderland, Overyssel, and Friesland. Amsterdam, Middelburg, Goes, Arnemuide, Utrecht, and a few others were too strongly garrisoned to be able to rise. In some of the towns the change was made without bloodshed, in others the most barbarous cruelties were practised on both sides, for passion had taken the place of reason and charity. The revolted towns declared that they remained faithful to King Philippe as count of Holland, etc., that the ancient charters conferring rights and privileges were restored, that there was perfect freedom for both the Roman Catholic and Reformed religions, that they accepted the prince of Orange as stadholder for the sovereign of the provinces of Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht, and Friesland, and that they repudiated the duke of Alva, the inquisition, and the tax on commerce.

Other successes awaited the patriot cause. On the 24th of May 1572 Count Louis of Nassau with a small band obtained possession of the important town of Mons in Hainaut. And on the 10th of June a richly laden Spanish fleet from Lisbon arrived at Flushing and cast anchor, being unaware of what had occurred there. Most of the ships were captured, a thousand Spanish soldiers on board were made prisoners, five hundred thousand crowns of gold sent by Philippe for his army chest and a large quantity of ammunition became prize to the Beggars, and much spice and other valuable merchandise was secured.

On the 15th of July the estates of Holland, consisting of the nobles and deputies from eight cities, met at Dordrecht. The prince of Orange was in Germany, where he had engaged an army of fifteen thousand infantry and seven thousand cavalry, besides three thousand refugee Walloons. The estates adopted measures for raising all the money that they could to pay these troops for three months, and Orange then entered the southern provinces. His first object was to relieve Mons, which was besieged by a strong Spanish army, and to effect a junction with Admiral Coligny, who with the approval of the king of France was to aid him with ten thousand Huguenots. After crossing the border, town after town opened its gates to him, and received the garrisons he placed in them. Everything looked bright before him, when suddenly, without the slightest warning, a thunderbolt fell which utterly destroyed his hopes and those of the patriot party.

A contingent of Huguenots was cut to pieces when attempting to enter Mons, but the main body under Coligny was believed to be ready to advance, when tidings were received of the fearful Massacre of Saint Bartholomew on the 24th, 25th, and 26th of August 1572. The treacherous Charles IX of France, by an act of savage cruelty without parallel in a Christian state, had betrayed the cause it was his interest to favour, and had murdered a hundred thousand of his Protestant subjects. Admiral Coligny was among the victims. Orange realised at once that his cause was shattered, his German troops had not been fully paid, and were almost mutinous, so he was obliged to retire and disband them. The towns that had welcomed him now hastened to disown him, and returned to their obedience to Alva. On the 20th of September Mons capitulated on honourable terms, which were not, however, faithfully observed by the conquerors, and all the southern provinces were again under the Spanish yoke.

Alva had reinforced his army very largely with German mercenaries, the same class of men that Orange had raised his forces from, and he had enlisted a great many Walloons. He was without money to pay either them or his Spanish veterans. He gave them instead the city of Mechlin to plunder for three days, the Spaniards to have it for the first day, the Germans for the second, and the Walloons for the third. Mechlin was almost entirely a Catholic city, but it had welcomed the prince of Orange, and had received a garrison from him. This was to be its punishment by Alva. The horrors of the sack of the doomed city cannot be fully told, but they can be imagined. The Spaniards knew that the richest spoil would be found in the churches, and they resolved not to leave it for others. In their lust for spoil the churches, the monasteries, and the convents of Mechlin were treated by these Catholics as the cathedral of Antwerp had been by the fanatic Protestants. Then the citizens were tortured and murdered, and nameless horrors were perpetrated upon females, until the first day ended. On the second day the Germans, and on the third the debased Walloons, followed in the sack of Mechlin, leaving it desolate, plundered, and utterly forlorn. Such was Alva’s punishment of a disobedient city.

The tide of fortune was now setting as strong against the patriot cause as it had been in its favour during the earlier months of the year. On the 26th of August the Beggars laid siege to Goes in Zeeland, which was defended by a Spanish garrison, but must have fallen if it had not been relieved on the 21st of October by an army that had made a wonderful march through shallow water. The besiegers were then obliged to flee, but they were pursued, and their rearguard was completely destroyed.

Alva now sent a strong army under his son Don Frederic de Toledo to reduce the northern provinces to subjection. Don Frederic directed his march to Gelderland, where the town of Zutphen attempted to resist him. It was easily taken, however, when all its adult male inhabitants were put to the sword, and most of its buildings were destroyed by fire. The whole of the provinces east and south of the Zuider Zee now submitted to Alva, only Holland and Zeeland still holding out, and even of these the largest towns—Amsterdam and Middelburg—were occupied by Spanish garrisons. There was no national army in existence, and each town was politically isolated from all the others, a condition of things which made defence extremely difficult.

Don Frederic now marched towards North Holland, meeting no opposition until he reached the little town of Naarden, on the shore of the Zuider Zee, south-east of Amsterdam. Naarden offered a feeble resistance, but on a verbal promise from General Julian Romero that life and property would be spared, it surrendered. Every man in the place and nearly every woman was put to death, and the little town was set on fire and razed to the ground.

A more memorable siege than any which had yet taken place was that of the town of Haarlem. On the 11th of December 1572 Haarlem was beleaguered by an army of thirty thousand Spaniards, Germans, and Walloons, commanded by Don Frederic de Toledo. The duke of Alva had his headquarters in the neighbouring city of Amsterdam, whence supplies of provisions, ammunition, and whatever else was needed could be forwarded to the camps without delay. Within the walls of the town were only four thousand fighting men, so that the Spanish commander could reasonably hope that a few days would suffice for its reduction. But the people of Haarlem were stouthearted as ever were Greeks in the olden time, they hated the Spanish yoke as that of the foul fiend, and they had made up their minds to resist to the very last. Assault after assault was made upon their walls, and whenever a breach was effected the enemy came storming upon it, but only to be beaten back. In the night the breaches were repaired, the women and children assisting in the work. A band of three hundred women, led by the widow Kenau Hasselaer, did as much and as splendid service fighting in the breaches and on the walls as any men could have done. The children too did what they could by carrying powder and food from place to place.

So month after month passed away, and heroic Haarlem still held out. The prince of Orange from Delft used almost superhuman exertions to get men together and to throw reinforcements and provisions into the beleaguered town, but they all failed in getting through the encircling bands. At last food, even of the most disgusting kind, entirely failed, and when many had died of actual starvation, those who could no longer fight from weakness submitted on a promise of lenient treatment. It was on the 12th of July 1573, seven months and two days after the commencement of the siege, that Haarlem fell. The promise of lenity was kept by the plunder of the town being commuted for a sum of money to be paid in four instalments, so that the horrors which Mechlin had witnessed were spared to Haarlem, but two thousand three hundred of the inhabitants were put to death after the surrender. The besiegers had paid dearly for the town, for they had lost no fewer than twelve thousand men in combat or by disease in those seven months of desperate fighting.

Alkmaar, a small though important town in North Holland, was then summoned to submit, but declined to do so. The prince of Orange had managed to obtain eight hundred soldiers, who were sent to assist the burghers, thirteen hundred in number, to defend it. On the 21st of August 1573 Don Frederic de Toledo invested the town with sixteen thousand veteran troops, and immediately began to attempt to batter down part of the wall. On three occasions breaches were made, and storming parties tried to effect an entrance, but were driven back by boiling oil, tarred and burning hoops, and other missiles of the kind being thrown upon them. The soldiers then refused to storm again, and the only course left was to wait for famine to do its work. But some letters of the prince of Orange fell into Don Frederic’s hands, from which he learned that the dykes were to be cut and the land flooded, when he resolved to raise the siege rather than risk the loss of his whole army by drowning. On the 8th of October the people of Alkmaar had the happiness of seeing from their walls the Spanish army with all its appurtenances in full retreat towards Amsterdam.

Another triumph for the patriot cause followed quickly, to Alva’s intense discomfiture. He had purchased some ships and built others at Amsterdam, until he had a fleet of thirty men-of-war, which he equipped in the most efficient manner known in those days. The largest carried thirty-two cannon, and was manned by one hundred and fifty seamen, besides having on board over two hundred veteran Spanish soldiers under the captains Alonzo de Conquera and Fernando Lopez. She was named the Inquisitie, and carried the flag of Admiral Maximilian de Henniu, count of Bossu. This fleet was intended by Alva to command the Zuider Zee, and was regarded by him as an invincible armada.

The Sea Beggars, to oppose this formidable armament, collected together twenty-four vessels of inferior size, which were placed under the command of a valiant seaman named Cornelis the son of Dirk, who was styled admiral of North Holland.

Bossu plundered and laid waste some villages along the coast, but at length the son of Dirk resolved boldly to attack him. He tried to keep the Sea Beggars at a distance and destroy them with his artillery, while they, who were but ill supplied with cannon or powder, were determined to grapple with his ships and fight him hand to hand. In the first and second days’ manoeuvring they succeeded in this manner in overmastering one of his ships, when they made the officers prisoners, and put to death all the others on board. Then for more than a week the weather prevented anything further being done, and both parties remained inactive.

On the 11th of October 1573 the great battle took place. The Sea Beggars closed with their opponents, and after desperate fighting succeeded in sinking one of Bossu’s ships and overmastering five others. They had grappled with the Inquisitie herself, when the remainder of the fleet gave up the contest and set sail for Amsterdam, throwing their cannon overboard to enable them to pass some shoals. Night was setting in, and there were so many wounded in the patriot ships that it was considered imprudent to follow the fugitives. Four small vessels were made fast to Bossu’s ship. One was beaten off, but the other three clung to her like leeches. She drifted on a sandbank off Hoorn, but so fierce was the fighting that no one seemed to notice that they were no longer in motion. Bossu in a coat of mail stood on her deck and directed the soldiers, and the Sea Beggars scrambled up her sides and attacked like demons. Boats put out from Hoorn bringing volunteers to aid in the struggle, and taking the wounded ashore to be cared for. At short intervals for twenty-eight hours the hand to hand contest lasted on the deck of the Inquisitie, till only fourteen or fifteen men remained unwounded to defend her. Bossu could hold out no longer. He surrendered on condition that he and his officers should be honourably treated as captives, and that the soldiers and sailors should either be exchanged or pay only one month’s wages as ransom. The prisoners were taken to Hoorn, and were kept as hostages, which prevented the putting to death of many prominent patriots then in the power of the Spanish authorities.

Such was the first important battle on the sea won by the sturdy Hollanders, and it was to be a beginning of a series of victories which in later years shed deathless renown on them and the land they so bravely fought for. Surnames had not then come into common use for humble folk, and it is only as Cornelis the son of Dirk that the valiant admiral of North Holland can be mentioned in history.

The sanguinary government of Alva in the Netherlands now drew to its close. He had requested to be relieved, and the king was not unwilling to try if some one else could not manage affairs better, or at least without such constant demands upon the revenue of Spain. On the 17th of November 1573 his successor Don Luis de Requesens y Cuniga, Grand Commander of St. Iago, and recently governor of Milan, arrived in Brussels, and on the 29th of the same month assumed duty as governor and captain-general of the Netherlands.

The complete absence of honour or principle in Alva was illustrated by the manner in which he left Amsterdam. He was heavily in debt in that city both privately and for the government, so he called for all accounts to be sent in on a certain day, and during the preceding night departed stealthily. On the 18th of December he left the Netherlands, taking with him the curses of the unhappy people. It was reported, though perhaps incorrectly, that he boasted of having caused through his infamous Council of Blood eighteen thousand six hundred people to lose their lives at the stake or on the scaffold during the six years of his administration.[23] No wonder that successive generations of Netherlanders taught their children to regard him, not as a man, but as an absolute devil in human form, the incarnation of all that was false, and treacherous, and cruel.

The condition of affairs in the Netherlands when the Grand Commander Requesens assumed the administration was about as bad as well could be. Only parts of the provinces of Holland and Zeeland were in open revolt, but everywhere the country was seething with discontent. There was a standing army of sixty-two thousand men—Spaniards, German mercenaries, and Walloons—engaged in suppressing the disposition to rise in arms, £1,300,000 was due to them as arrears of pay, the cost of maintaining them was £120,000 a month, and there was not a single sixpence in the treasury. Already £8,000,000 had been received from Spain, and had been spent to no purpose. So many soldiers were needed to garrison the towns that only a sufficient number could be spared to besiege Leyden, none were available to reduce any of the other revolted towns or even to relieve Middelburg, which was beleaguered by the patriots. The mighty Spanish empire, with the gold and silver of America at its disposal, with some of the fairest provinces of Italy at its command, was held at bay by parts of two little provinces, under the direction of William prince of Orange.

Under these circumstances the king spoke of his willingness to bring about a reconciliation of the people to his rule and to pardon them for their past resistance, but he laid down two indispensable conditions; that they should admit his absolute authority, and that they should return to the Roman Catholic faith.

The patriots too were desirous of putting an end to the long and bitter strife, but they also claimed conditions which they could not forego: the recognition of constitutional rights, entire freedom of conscience, and the withdrawal of all foreign troops from the country. The two positions were irreconcilable, and so the war went on. Holland and Zeeland now contained very few Catholics, for Alva had made the religion that he professed almost as hateful as he was himself.

Middelburg, the principal city in the province of Zeeland, was besieged by the patriots and such troops as the prince of Orange could engage in his cause; but was defended with the utmost skill and bravery by the Spanish garrison under Colonel Christopher Mondragon. Provisions, however, were running short, and it became evident that if relief was not speedily afforded, the place would be lost to the king. Requesens therefore collected seventy-five ships of different sizes at Bergen op Zoom and thirty more at Antwerp, which were laden with stores of food and munitions of war, all the soldiers that he could engage or spare with any degree of prudence were embarked in them, and they were directed to drop down to Flushing, to unite there, and to succour Middelburg. By the time they were ready the soldiers and townspeople were in the utmost extremity of hunger.

While Requesens was thus engaged, the prince of Orange and the Sea Beggars were not idle. A fleet was collected at Flushing, and was placed under the command of Louis Boisot, a Zeelander of noble birth and a brother of the governor of the town. He had the title of admiral of Zeeland conferred upon him. Boisot did not wait to be attacked, but on the 20th of January 1574 sailed up the Schelde to meet the larger of the two squadrons, which was commanded by Julian Romero, and which had just set sail when he met it. He at once grappled with his opponents, and a desperate combat took place, which lasted two hours. One of Romero’s vessels was sunk, another was blown up, and fifteen were captured. Twelve hundred of his sailors and soldiers were killed fighting, or were thrown overboard and drowned, and it would have gone hard with the others if they had not put back to Bergen op Zoom. Requesens, standing on a dyke at Bergen, was a spectator of the discomfiture of his fleet. The patriots’ loss was much less than that of their enemy, but several of the captains were killed and Boisot himself received a wound in the face which deprived him of an eye.

The Antwerp squadron, commanded by Sancho d’Avila, had meantime arrived off Flushing, but when intelligence of Romero’s defeat was received, it at once put about and returned.

This event decided the fate of Middelburg. The last cat and dog in the town had been eaten, when on the 18th of February 1574 Mondragon capitulated on condition that his troops should be permitted to leave with their arms and personal property, and the town gave in its adhesion to the prince of Orange.

On both sides now great exertions were made to raise troops, the difficulty in the way being the want of money. Men in any number could always be had in Germany, provided the means of equipping and paying them were forthcoming. The jealousy of Spain which pervaded the French court enabled Louis of Nassau to obtain a considerable sum, with which he enrolled an army of three thousand cavalry and six thousand infantry, and entered the province of Limburg. His intention was to take possession of Maastricht, and then to effect a junction with his brother the prince of Orange, who had collected six thousand infantry at the isle of Bommel.

But a terrible disaster overtook Count Louis. Requesens was able to engage some Germans, and he drew every man that was available from the Netherlands garrisons. Even the siege of Leyden was raised, and the troops that had beleaguered that city since the 31st of October 1573 broke up their camps an the 21st of March 1574, and joined the main army. The garrison of Maastricht was strengthened, and the way was blocked by which the junction of the two forces in the service of Orange could be effected. The cavalry of Count Louis began to desert, and soon that arm of his force was reduced to two thousand men. On the 14th of April 1574 a battle was fought at a little village named Mookerheyde, on the bank of the Maas, in which the army of Count Louis was utterly defeated, and it was annihilated by a massacre after the engagement was over. Both Count Louis and his younger brother Count Hendrik perished, no one knew exactly when or how, for their bodies were never seen again.

Requesens, however, was unable to gather the full harvest of the victory, for the day after the battle the Spanish troops mutinied. Their pay was three years in arrear. They marched to Antwerp, which city they took possession of on the 26th of April, and quartered themselves on the wealthiest inhabitants. There they remained until the municipal authorities provided Requesens with money to pay them their arrears, when he granted them a full amnesty, and they returned to obedience. Just as this was effected Admiral Boisot made his appearance at Antwerp, and burned or sank fourteen ships of Sancho d’Avila’s squadron that had returned from Flushing three months before.

Requesens was now able to resume the siege of Leyden, and on the 26th of May 1574 the second investment was commenced by General Francisco Valdez with eight thousand German and Walloon soldiers. Spanish and Italian troops afterwards arrived, and a chain of forts was completed right round the walls, which prevented ingress or egress. The villages in the neighbourhood were also occupied, and Leyden was completely isolated from the rest of the country. The residents knew that if the city was taken, the whole of Holland must fall, and they had resolved to die rather than surrender. There was no possibility of raising an army to relieve them.

The prince of Orange took up his headquarters at Delft, and bent all his energy to save the devoted city in the only way in which it could be done. He got together more than two hundred flat-bottomed vessels, the largest drawing when laden not more than two feet of water, armed some of them with such cannons as were then in use, and provided all of them with oars for rowing. The relief of Leyden was to be entrusted to the Sea Beggars, the men who knew no fear, who hated the Spaniards with such a deadly loathing that they would neither ask nor give quarter. On the 1st of September Admiral Louis Boisot arrived from Flushing to take command of the flotilla, and with him came forty officers and eight hundred of the hardiest and roughest of the Zeeland Beggars, burning with a desire to harpoon Spanish soldiers as if they were devil-fish. Already two thousand four hundred men, mostly sailors or canal workers, but a few French and German soldiers with even a sprinkling of Englishmen and Scotchmen, were on board, and a large quantity of provisions had been shipped. With Boisot’s arrival all was complete.

The outer dyke was now cut, and the sea rushed over the land, sweeping away farmhouses and cultivated fields and rich meadows, but opening a way towards Leyden. On went Boisot with the flotilla till the next of the dykes which lay between him and Leyden was reached. He had expected to find it defended, but the Spaniards had neglected it, and so it was cut and he went farther on. The next dyke was held by the Spaniards, but the fierce Zeelanders drove them from it and harpooned them to their hearts’ content.

Meantime the heroic defenders of Leyden were in the very last stage of distress. Everything that under ordinary circumstances would be considered eatable had been consumed, and nothing remained but dried hides, rats, mice, the leaves of the trees, and the weeds of the ground. They were dying of hunger, and pestilence arising from want of food carried off from six to seven thousand of them. But still they held out. A few indeed in their despair upbraided the burgomaster Van der Werf with consigning them to death, but when he replied that he would never surrender Leyden, though they might cut him to pieces and eat him if they chose, they desisted and even applauded him.

The flotilla was aground, and a strong easterly wind was blowing, which drove the waters back and day after day caused Boisot and his gallant followers almost to abandon hope of success. A great and apparently impregnable fortress was in front of them, and it would have to be passed before the starving city could be reached. Then in man’s deepest extremity came God’s hand to aid the cause of freedom. During the night of the 1st of October a violent gale set in from the north-west, which drove gigantic waves along the coast of Holland, then the wind veered round to the south-west and sent the heaped up water through the broken dykes, and soon the flotilla was free again. Valdez was a brave soldier, but he felt unequal to a contest with the rising flood and the Sea Beggars on their own element. During the night of the 2nd of October he abandoned his camps, withdrew the garrison from the great fort Lemmen, and fled in the darkness. That same night part of the city wall fell down with a crash, which would have given him an entrance had it happened a few hours sooner.

In the early morning of the 3rd of October 1574 Boisot, finding all impediments removed, swept with his flotilla into the canals of Leyden, and the city after its great agony was saved. He had lost only forty men in this marvellous feat, surely one of the most wonderful events recorded in history, while of his enemy over a thousand were slain or drowned. Property to the value of over a million gulden—£83,333—had been destroyed by cutting the dykes, but what was that compared with the rescue of Leyden from the Spaniards!

The relief of Leyden gave renewed hope to the patriot cause. On the 12th of November 1574 the estates of Holland, assembled at Delft, conferred almost dictatorial power upon the prince of Orange, and voted him as large a sum of money as they could raise to carry on the war. That amount was only £45,000 a year, but it was a very considerable sum for one small province to contribute, especially when it is considered that the cities of Amsterdam and Haarlem were in the hands of the Spaniards, and Leyden, with the territory adjoining it, was too impoverished to give any aid. On the 4th of June 1575 the province of Zeeland united with Holland in a kind of loose confederation, the principal bond being that the prince of Orange was the head of both.

An attempt to bring about a state of peace was made again, and commissioners from both sides sat at Breda from the 3rd of March to the 13th of July 1575; but as Philippe would only allow those of the reformed religion to sell their property and leave the country, the negotiations came to nothing. Bigotry and intolerance were not confined to one side, however. Some revolting cruelties practised by Diederik Sonoy, governor of North Holland, upon Roman Catholics at Alkmaar, equalled, if they did not surpass, the most fiendish tortures of the inquisition. The prince of Orange did everything in his power to suppress such barbarities, while Philippe countenanced them: otherwise one party was as vindictive as the other.

On the 19th of July 1575 the little town of Oudewater in South Holland, close to the border of Utrecht, was besieged by a Spanish force, and was taken by assault on the 7th of August. The men were all butchered, the women met with a worse fate, and the houses, after being pillaged, were burned to the ground.

The memorable siege of Zierikzee, the principal town on the island of Schouwen, in Zeeland, followed. The island of Tholen was the only part of Zeeland held by the Spaniards, and there a force of three thousand men was got together, who during the night of the 27th of September 1575 actually waded across the channel that separates Tholen from Duiveland. There were some French, English, and Scotch troops in the service of Orange at Duiveland, but they retreated at once, and threw themselves into Zierikzee. The invaders, consisting of Spanish, German, and Walloon soldiers, followed quickly, and laid siege to the town. The villages of Brouwershaven and Bommenede on the same island of Schouwen were also attacked, and for a time were wiped out of existence. Then the whole force, under Colonel Mondragon, sat down and pressed the siege of Zierikzee.

Requesens had no money with which to raise more troops, and Orange was in the same position, so the siege dragged on month after month. On the 15th of June 1576 Admiral Louis Boisot with a few ships tried to force a passage through a barrier into the harbour, but his own vessel, that was leading the way, ran aground, and the others drew off. The ship was got afloat again, but was sunk by a Spanish battery, when three hundred of her crew went down.[24] The admiral and the remainder of the crew jumped overboard, and tried to escape by swimming. Some of them succeeded in doing so, but the gallant Boisot, to the great loss of the patriot cause, was drowned. Zierikzee held out until the 21st of June 1576, when it capitulated on honourable terms, and escaped being sacked and burned by the payment of a ransom of £16,666. The Spaniards did not long remain in possession of it.

To the prince of Orange it had now become apparent that the only chance of securing constitutional government and freedom of conscience was the renunciation of Philippe and the choice of some other sovereign able to protect the country. The farce of fighting against the count of Holland and at the same time of transacting all business in his name could no longer be carried on. On the 1st of October 1575 the estates of Holland and Zeeland met at Rotterdam, when the prince laid a proposal to this effect before them. They adjourned for a few days in order to consult the cities, and then assembled again at Delft and unanimously adopted the prince’s proposal. Then commenced a long series of negotiations with Elizabeth of England and a brother of the king of France, but all failed, because it was generally believed that if either accepted, he or she would at once have the other, combined with Spain, as an enemy. So the struggle had to be carried on unaided, except with a little secret assistance given now and then.

On the 5th of March 1576 the Grand Commander Requesens died after only four days’ illness, and the Council of State, a weak and vacillating body, assumed the administration until a successor should be appointed. This Council was at the head of affairs when a fresh disaster fell upon the country.

Immediately after the fall of Zierikzee the Spanish and Walloon troops who had so long been investing that town broke out in open mutiny. They demanded their arrear pay, and when this was not forthcoming they deposed their officers, elected others, and levied contributions upon the country just as a band of avowed robbers would do. From Zeeland they marched into Brabant, where they took possession of the little town of Herenthals, and after consuming everything there, directed their devastating course southward to the environs of Brussels. The inhabitants of the capital were in great alarm, but they prepared for defence with such spirit that the mutineers did not attack them. They seized instead the little town of Assche close by, and next the larger town of Alost. Here they committed frightful atrocities, murdering every one who resisted them.

On the 26th of July the mutineers were declared outlaws by the Council of State, but this had no effect upon them, and now the garrisons of other towns began to join hands with them. Like robber bands, which indeed they were, they marched about, levying contributions wherever they chose, and murdering all who opposed them. Their discipline was so perfect that in every encounter with parties of citizens, however large, they came off victorious.

The city of Antwerp, with a population of two hundred thousand souls, was the commercial metropolis of Europe. It was adorned with beautiful buildings, among which the cathedral and the townhouse were considered as rivalling the most stately structures in Christendom. The citadel built by Alva was an impregnable fortress, and at this time the renowned Sancho d’Avila was in command of it. He sided with the mutineers, and became their head, but his troops, who were partly German mercenaries, were divided in opinion, and one strong regiment remained faithful. Upon this wealthy and beautiful city the mutineers now cast their eyes. The Council of State collected as many soldiers as could be obtained, and five thousand infantry and twelve hundred cavalry, mostly Walloons, were sent to aid in the defence.

In the morning of Sunday the 4th of November 1576 the Spanish troops from various quarters arrived at Antwerp, and stormed a barricade which the citizens had hastily thrown up. The Walloons, who had been sent to aid in the defence, fled almost without attempting to resist, and upon the citizens and the faithful German regiment devolved the almost impossible task of protecting the city. They fought splendidly, but could not hold their ground. Driven from the streets they took refuge in houses, which were at once set on fire by the Spaniards, and presently a vast conflagration raged in the fairest part of the city. The magnificent town house was reduced to bare and blackened walls. When night fell resistance had ceased, and the Spanish fiends were in possession of Antwerp. Throughout Monday and Tuesday the work of pillage was carried on, when those who were suspected of having concealed money or valuables were tortured till they died or produced the treasure, all kinds of horrors were perpetrated, Catholic priest and Protestant maid were treated alike with brutal ferocity, and every restraint was set aside. In those three days of horrors eight thousand people perished, property to the value of half a million pounds sterling was destroyed by fire, and at least as much more was taken possession of by the Spanish demons. The event was ever afterwards known as the Spanish Fury of Antwerp. The soldiers of Philippe had obtained their arrears, and thereafter returned to obedience.

The conduct of the mutinous Spanish troops had the effect of drawing the different provinces together more closely than ever before. By advice of the prince of Orange, deputies were appointed by a number of the estates and cities, who met with the representatives of Holland and Zeeland, and debated upon what had best be done. They soon arrived at a decision, and on the 8th of November 1576 the important arrangement thereafter known as the Pacification of Ghent was signed by Holland and Zeeland on one side, and by the representatives of the provinces of Brabant, Flanders, Artois, Hainaut, and eight cities, of which Utrecht was one, on the other. It provided for a close and faithful friendship between them all, for the expulsion of the Spanish forces from the Netherlands, for an assemblage of the estates-general of all the provinces as soon as the foreigners were out of the country, for the suppression of persecution for religion and the suspension of all edicts relating to this subject, and for the abstention by Holland and Zeeland of interference with the Roman Catholic religion in the other fifteen provinces. Throughout the whole country this arrangement was received with acclamation, and the seventeen provinces, without in any degree becoming amalgamated into one, were yet united for the purpose of expelling the foreign troops, and to that extent were all in rebellion against the king of Spain. The prince of Orange was the soul of this movement, though he remained only stadholder of Holland and Zeeland.

Another actor appeared at this time on the scene. This was Don John of Austria, a natural son of the emperor Charles V, who had been appointed by Philippe governor-general of the Netherlands. Don John, though still a young man, had acquired great renown as a commander in war, having crushed the revolt of the Moors in Granada and destroyed the Turkish fleet in the famous battle of Lepanto. He arrived at Luxemburg unattended by troops on the 3rd of November 1576, and learning there what was taking place in the provinces, he sent to Brussels to demand hostages for his personal safety before he proceeded farther. He had been instructed by the king to conciliate the Netherlands, and was at liberty to make any concessions, provided the absolute authority of the crown and the exclusive practice of the Roman Catholic worship should be strictly conformed to.

By advice of the prince of Orange, the representatives then at Brussels resolved to demand conditions from Don John before they should acknowledge him as governor. These were the immediate departure of all foreign troops from the country, an oath to maintain all the rights and privileges of the provinces and towns, the appointment of a new council of state by the estates-general, the right of the estates-general to meet whenever they chose, and to regulate all affairs, the demolition of the citadels that had been built to overawe the towns, and the maintenance of the Pacification of Ghent. A deputation was sent to Luxemburg with these demands, which were presented to Don John on the 6th of December. No decision was arrived at then, and negotiations were continued for months thereafter, though the conditions laid down by the king and those of the estates seemed to be irreconcilable.

Early in January 1577 another document, termed the Union of Brussels, came into existence. It was a compact to expel the Spaniards immediately and to uphold the Pacification of Ghent, to maintain the Catholic as the state religion in the fifteen provinces not under the government of Orange, to acknowledge the king’s authority as a constitutional sovereign, and to defend the various charters. This document was generally signed by people of every class throughout all the provinces except Luxemburg. It marks another stage in the struggle between despotism and liberty.

Towards the close of this month Don John removed from Luxemburg to the little town of Huy, on the right bank of the Maas, in the province of Liege, hoping that by placing himself thus chivalrously in the power of the people he would command their respect. At the same time it must not be forgotten that there was a party of considerable strength in the southern provinces, consisting of the nobles and their adherents, who were as much opposed to popular liberty as Philippe himself was, and that Don John could rely upon them to support him.

The negotiations were now so far successful that on the 12th of February 1577 an agreement was signed by Don John, and on the 17th of the same month received the signatures also of the authorities in Brussels. It ratified the Pacification of Ghent, it required all foreign troops to be sent out of the country without delay, but the estates-general were to pay the German soldiers before leaving. All the privileges, charters, and constitutions of the Netherlands were to be maintained, as was also the Catholic religion. The estates were to disband the troops in their service, and Don John was to be received as governor-general immediately after the departure of the Spanish and Italian soldiers. This agreement was confirmed by Philippe, and took the name of the Perpetual Edict. It was not, however, approved by the estates of Holland and Zeeland, nor by the prince of Orange, who put no confidence in the promises, written or verbal, of either the king or his representatives.

Don John now moved from Huy to Louvain, near Brussels, and towards the close of April 1577 the Spanish and Italian troops set out on their march from the Netherlands to Lombardy. That condition having been carried out, the governor-general entered Brussels, and on the 3rd of May took the oaths of office, just six months after his arrival on the frontier. There were still from ten to fifteen thousand German mercenary soldiers in the king’s service in the country, and the southern nobles were at his beck and call, so that the patriotic party soon had cause for alarm.

Don John, after a residence of less than two months in Brussels, became apprehensive for his personal safety, and fled first to Mechlin, and then to Namur, a town at the confluence of the Sambre and the Maas, not far from the frontier of France. There was a strong fortress in Namur, which the governor-general got possession of by stratagem, and in which he placed a garrison when he went to reside there. He next made an attempt to get possession of the citadel of Antwerp, but failed, and the German troops who occupied it fled on the approach of a fleet of the Sea Beggars and surrendered to the estates.

On the 26th of August the estates addressed a demand to Don John, in which they called upon him to disband all the troops in his service and to send the German mercenaries instantly out of the country, to dismiss every foreigner from office, whether civil or military, and to renounce his secret alliance with the duke of Guise, the head of the Catholic League in France. They required him to govern thenceforth only with the advice and consent of the Council of State, to carry out whatever should be determined on by a majority of that body, and to regard neither measures as binding nor despatches as authentic unless decided upon or drawn up in that Council. This was a demand for parliamentary or what is now termed responsible government in its widest sense, and the representative of King Philippe could not agree to it.

The inhabitants of Antwerp now rose in a body and razed to the ground the side of the citadel which commanded the city, so that it was no longer a menace to them. The people of Ghent also broke down their castle, and remodelled the government of that city in a democratic manner. The estates invited the prince of Orange to visit Brussels and give them advice, and on the 23rd of September he made his appearance there.

Don John now retired from Namur to Luxemburg, and waited in that city until the king should provide him with an army strong enough to conquer the country. The estates on their part commenced to levy troops, for negotiations had quite ceased. On the 7th of December they declared Don John no longer governor-general, but an enemy of the Netherlands.

The prince of Orange was elected ruward of Brabant, a post which gave him great power in that province, and his influence was enormous throughout the whole country. By his advice a new act of union was signed at Brussels on the 10th of December, by which the adherents of the Roman Catholic church and the Protestants bound themselves to respect each other and to protect one another from all enemies whatever. But this was a step too far in advance of the times to be permanent, for it was an age of bitter intolerance.

Queen Elizabeth of England, fearing that French influence would prevail in the Netherlands if she did not aid the struggling country at this critical time, resolved to give the estates some assistance. On the 7th of January 1578 she entered into an engagement in London to endorse their obligations to the extent of one hundred thousand pounds sterling, and to supply five thousand infantry and one thousand cavalry, who should, however, be paid by them. This was not regarded as making war against Spain, because at the same time the Catholic League in France was sending a much greater number of well trained men to assist Don John of Austria.

While the armies on both sides were gathering, another factor, that might have caused much confusion, was introduced. A party of nobles, in order to thwart the prince of Orange, invited the archduke Matthias of Hapsburg, brother of the emperor, to fill the post of governor-general. The young man accepted the invitation, and came to the Netherlands, but the prince of Orange and his adherents managed things so adroitly that Matthias, though inaugurated as governor-general on the 18th of January 1578, had really no power conferred upon him, and Orange himself as lieutenant-general retained all authority.

Both parties had by this time collected considerable forces, Don John at Luxemburg, the estates at Namur, but the armies were very differently composed. Philippe had sent several veteran regiments of Spaniards and Italians, the most highly disciplined troops in the world, commanded by Alexander Farnese, prince of Parma, and to these had been added some well-trained French battalions, making altogether a compact army of about twenty thousand men. The army of the estates was equal in number, but was a motley assemblage of Germans, French, Netherlanders, English, and Scotch.

On the 31st of January 1578 these forces met at Gemblours, fourteen kilometres from Namur, and the result was the total annihilation of the States army, with hardly any loss at all on Don John’s side. Seven or eight thousand men were killed on the field, six hundred were made prisoners and were immediately hanged or drowned, and the remainder were dispersed. All their baggage, ammunition, weapons, and stores of every kind fell into the hands of the victors, and the patriot cause seemed doomed to ruin.

A great many small towns in the southern provinces were immediately occupied by the king’s troops, terrible atrocities being perpetrated wherever resistance was offered. Brussels, however, the seat of government, was put in a thorough condition for defence, and the States set about organising another army as rapidly as possible.

On the other hand, in the north, a great augmentation of the power of the prince of Orange was taking place. Haarlem had been recovered for the patriot cause, the province of Utrecht had accepted the prince as stadholder, and on the 8th of February 1578 the important city of Amsterdam was gained, so that the provinces of Holland, Zeeland, and Utrecht were wholly animated by the same spirit. Then, on the 11th of March the estates of Gelderland elected as governor of that province Count John of Nassau, the only surviving brother of William of Orange, which was almost equivalent to electing the prince himself. The Reformed religion was making very rapid progress in Utrecht and Gelderland, but was not yet as exclusively the faith of the people as in Holland and Zeeland. In June of this year 1578 the second provincial synod of the Reformed churches was held at Dordrecht, the first having met at Hoorn in 1572, a proof how entirely the inquisition had failed to extirpate freedom of conscience in that part of the country.

The cord that bound the seventeen provinces together was so weak that it was liable to snap at any time, and it was therefore rather to foreign assistance than to their own unaided exertions that the leading men looked to rescue the land from Spanish tyranny. They had appointed the emperor’s brother Matthias their governor-general in name, but that had not brought them the material aid which they needed. A considerable number of the nobles were now intriguing with the worthless duke of Anjou, brother of the king of France, leading him to believe that if he would bring a strong army into the field they would elect him their sovereign in place of Philippe. Even the prince of Orange favoured this scheme, and Anjou actually invaded the country and occupied Mons with a considerable force. The effect was that Queen Elizabeth of England, in her jealousy of France, gave greater assistance in men and money than before, and Anjou disbanded his troops and returned to Paris.

Don John was again helpless for want of money. Philippe had sent him nearly £400,000 from Spain with the troops under Alexander Farnese, and had promised him more, but the money was expended, and the promise was unfulfilled. Without the means of procuring the material of war he could do nothing. Then a pestilence broke out in his main army, and in a few weeks over a thousand men died. Worn out with care and anxiety, after a severe attack of illness, on the 1st of October 1578 Don John of Austria expired in his camp near Namur, after appointing on his deathbed Alexander Farnese, prince of Parma, his successor until the king’s pleasure should be known. The temporary appointment was confirmed, and the ablest of all of Philippe’s representatives was free to try what he could do towards settling the great controversy between despotism and liberty in the Netherlands.

Alexander Farnese was the only son of the duke of Parma and Piacenza and of the regent Margaret, who preceded Alva in the administration. He was thirty-three years of age, and had been left a widower by the decease of his wife, a princess of Portugal. He found the country distracted with religious feuds, in which the Protestants were as violent as the Catholics. In Ghent the turbulence of a fanatical party was uncontrollable even by the prince of Orange, and the destruction of statues and ornaments in the churches was accompanied with such atrocious treatment of the leading adherents of the ancient faith that the Walloon provinces of the south, which were ardently Catholic, were exasperated to the last degree. On the 6th of January 1579 an alliance between Hainaut, Artois, and Lille with Douai and Orchies was entered into for the defence and exclusive maintenance of the Catholic church. The nobles in these provinces were timeservers, and Parma soon found that they could easily be bribed by offices and money to abandon the patriot interests. For this purpose Philippe could open his purse widely, though he neglected to pay his soldiers.

On the 17th of May 1579 the estates of the three provinces above named signed at Arras a formal treaty of reconciliation with the king of Spain, and were for ever lost to the Netherlands cause. Several towns in Brabant and Flanders shortly afterwards followed this example. The question of religion being settled to Philippe’s satisfaction, they were allowed to retain their charters subject to the prerogative of the sovereign.

On the other hand, on the 23rd of January 1579 the foundation of the Netherlands Republic was laid by an agreement termed the Union of Utrecht, which was proclaimed on the 29th of the same month. The union was a loose one, for it left to each province and each city its own constitution unaltered, and only provided for a general assembly of deputies from the estates of the different provinces, in which each should have the same voting power, no matter how many deputies it should send. The object was defence against a common foe. It guaranteed to every man liberty of conscience, but it could not secure liberty of public worship where passion was running high, it could merely prevent inquisition whether Catholic or Protestant. It founded a new State, but the men who concluded it did not realise that this would be the result, they professed that they still adhered to the agreement with the other provinces, only making that agreement a little more binding in their own case. No supreme head was appointed, though Orange was practically in that position, and Matthias was not deprived of his title of governor-general, nor was Philippe formally deposed as sovereign of the provinces outside of Holland and Zeeland. The bishopric of Utrecht now ceased to exist.

The Union of Utrecht was signed by Count John of Nassau for himself and as stadholder of Gelderland, by the deputies of Holland, Zeeland, and Utrecht, by the deputies of the province of Groningen excluding the capital, by the deputies of Brill and the land of Voorne as a particular district though united with Holland, and further by a minority of the deputies of Friesland, the majority objecting to it. It was open to any other provinces or towns to join the Union, and on the 1st of March 1580 Overyssel gave in its adhesion, but the town of Groningen did not do so until 1595, and the complete province of Friesland not before 1598. Various nobles subsequently joined the Union, as did also the city of Ghent on the 4th of February 1579, the city of Antwerp on the 28th of July 1579, the city of Bruges on the 1st of February 1580, and several others later. Each city came to be practically an independent unit in the province in which it was situated, and could therefore make what alliances it chose. But owing to this circumstance the government of the Union was exceedingly weak, for no resolutions of the states-general were binding upon any town whose deputies did not agree to them.

The provinces Holland, Zeeland, since enlarged by the addition of a small part of Flanders, the northern part of Gelderland including the county of Zutphen, Overyssel, Friesland, and Groningen, together with Drenthe, cover the whole territory of the present kingdom of the Netherlands except North Brabant and Limburg. Drenthe was a dependency of the bishopric of Utrecht from 1024 to 1537, when it became a direct fief to the emperor Charles V. It remained subject to the Spanish government until 1594, when it was overrun by the States forces, and thereafter it was a dependency of either Friesland or Groningen until 1813, when it became a separate province of the kingdom of the Netherlands.

III.
Continuation of the War in the Netherlands until 1606.

The most exciting part of the scene now changes to the town of Maastricht, an important strategical position in the present province of Limburg. Maastricht contained thirty-four thousand inhabitants, and there was a garrison of a thousand soldiers within its walls. On the 12th of March 1579 Parma laid siege to the town with an army of twenty to twenty-five thousand men, and completely enclosed it. Two or three thousand peasants of both sexes, whose homes had been ravaged, managed to get in before it was surrounded, and they were of great service in the defence. The resistance was desperate, men and women fighting side by side whenever breaches were made in the walls and the soldiers tried to enter, as also in excavating passages by which the Spanish mines were destroyed. The carnage on both sides was frightful. On one occasion five hundred soldiers were hurled into the air and killed by a single explosion of a mine. An attempt to relieve the town was made by the prince of Orange, but it failed, for it was impossible to raise an army strong enough for the purpose. At last, on the 29th of June, Maastricht was taken, and then an indiscriminate massacre followed. On the first day four thousand men and women were butchered, and their dead bodies were flung into the streets. Three days the massacre continued, and then the few survivors fled from their old homes and tried to find a refuge in the country. Maastricht was depopulated, and after everything of value had been removed, it was repeopled by strangers.

Possession of Mechlin was obtained by Parma through the treachery of its governor De Bours, who introduced Spanish troops secretly, but six months later it was recovered by surprise by Van der Tympel, governor of Brussels.

Another serious disaster befel the patriot cause in the far north. In November 1579 Joris Lalain, count of Renneberg, stadholder of Groningen and its dependency Drenthe, sold himself to Parma for office and a sum of money. During the night of the 3rd of March 1580 he caused all the leading men of the patriot party in the town of Groningen to be arrested in their beds and committed to prison, and before dawn on the 4th his adherents were in possession of the town. The States tried to recover the place, and a small army laid siege to it, but Parma sent a stronger force to the north, by which the patriots were almost annihilated. Then for some time there was a series of petty operations in the Frisian districts, in which nothing decisive was effected on either side, but much property was destroyed, and much misery was caused.

In 1580 Philippe II added Portugal to his dominions. At the time there was no thought that by this union the Portuguese possessions in the eastern seas would be laid open to conquest by the Netherlands, but that was the result. Before the close of the century the provinces within the Union of Utrecht were destined to become the foremost sea power of the world, and then the addition of Portugal to their foes was simply the addition of a vast amount of valuable spoil for them to gather. Meantime much that is interesting and instructive was to transpire in the provinces.

On the 15th of March 1580 Philippe, by advice of Cardinal Granvelle, issued a ban declaring the prince of Orange an outlaw, and offering twenty-five thousand crowns of gold, pardon for any crime however great, and a title of nobility to anyone who should assassinate him. He was regarded as the very soul of the struggle for liberty of conscience and political freedom, as indeed he was, and if he could be got out of the way, the king believed that the fourteen still defiant provinces would return like Artois, Hainaut, and Lille to the Catholic church and to perfect obedience.

This was the final grievance which led to the absolute renunciation of the sovereignty of Philippe by the disaffected provinces. Hitherto, though they were fighting against him, all acts of government were carried out in his name except in Holland and Zeeland, but on the 26th of July 1581 their estates, assembled at the Hague, formally and solemnly abjured him. His seals were broken, and every one was absolved from oaths of allegiance taken to him.

But there was no intention on the part of the people to change the form of their government, what they desired was to preserve their ancient charters, not to destroy them. The bond of union between the provinces was that one individual had been sovereign of them all, and now that Philippe had been abjured they must choose another in his stead, or break into fragments. The general choice fell upon the prince of Orange, but he emphatically refused to accept the position, because he would not have it said that personal ambition had influenced his conduct. Holland and Zeeland, however, would have no other, and after much hesitation he consented to become their head temporarily. The archduke Matthias, who was of no account, laid down his office as governor-general, and shortly afterwards retired to Germany.

By the influence of Orange the worthless duke of Anjou was chosen sovereign of the other twelve provinces. He was a brother of the king of France, who promised to assist him with money and men to defend the country against Spain. It was believed that he was about to wed Queen Elizabeth of England, and she certainly did all that she could to favour his election by the estates. He agreed to all the conditions required of him, though they bound him to constitutional government as closely as the king of England is bound to-day. He would have agreed to anything at all, in fact, but his promise, or his signature, or his oath was of no value whatever. Fortunately for England his insignificant person and his repulsive features prevented the great queen from espousing him.

He was in England when the final arrangements were made, but on the 10th of February 1582 he arrived at Flushing with a brilliant train of English and French noblemen. The queen had requested that he might be treated with the same respect as herself, and so he was received with all possible honour. On the 17th of the same month he reached Antwerp, and was inaugurated with much ceremony as sovereign duke of Brabant. In July he was installed at Bruges as sovereign count of Flanders, and at the same time the estates of Gelderland formally accepted him as duke of that province, and those of Friesland pledged him obedience as their lord. He did not visit the other provinces in order to be installed with ceremony, but took up his residence at Antwerp, and was generally accepted as sovereign. To support him he had a strong French army, which was supposed to be a movable force, while troops raised by the States were stationed as garrisons in the towns.

The prince of Parma meantime was far from idle. Reinforcements of Spanish and Italian troops were constantly arriving, until at the end of August 1582 he was at the head of an army fully sixty thousand strong and largely composed of veteran soldiers. Using the obedient provinces of Artois and Hainaut as a base of operations, he sent out detachments to surprise cities that were not thoroughly on their guard, and as he had bribed many of the nobles, he was always well-informed on this point. So he got possession among various places of Oudenarde in Flanders on the 5th of July 1582, and a little later of Steenwyk in Friesland, of Eindhoven in Brabant, and of Nieuwpoort in Flanders.

The duke of Anjou had sworn to maintain the constitutions of the provinces and freedom of conscience, but the brother of the king of France and the son of Catherine of Medici could not long bear restraint. He wished to make himself an absolute sovereign and to suppress Protestantism, and without reflecting what the consequence must be of attempting to oppose Parma and the people of the Netherlands at the same time, on the 15th of January 1583 by his order detachments of French troops took possession of Dunkirk, Ostend, Dixmuyde, Denremonde, Alost, and Vilvoorde, and ejected the Netherlands garrisons. A similar attempt upon Bruges failed, as the city authorities closed the gates in time against the French soldiers.

The duke resided in Antwerp, and at Borgerhout close by there was a camp of French troops. On the 17th of January at mid-day he rode through the gate leading to Borgerhout, when his bodyguard attacked the burgher watch, killed every man of them, and took possession of the archway and the drawbridge. Six hundred cavalry and three thousand infantry from Borgerhout then poured into the city, where they divided, and some began to plunder. But the burghers sprang quickly to arms, the leading sections of the French were overwhelmed, and those behind commenced to retreat in a panic. The burghers pressed on, killed over two thousand of the French, and made prisoners of all the others. Fewer than a hundred burghers lost their lives on this occasion.

Anjou fled with the remainder of his troops from Borgerhout, but a dyke was cut in his passage, and another thousand soldiers were drowned. He succeeded, however, in escaping to a place of safety, where he collected various scattered detachments about him, and formed a new camp. There he entered into correspondence with Parma on one side and with the States on the other, trying to make terms with each.

The position was one of extreme peril. Owing to the jealousy between the provinces and the cities and to the rivalry between Catholics and Protestants, they could not stand alone. To pursue the miscreant Anjou any further would be to incur the hostility of France, and that would most certainly bring ruin upon the country. Queen Elizabeth wrote strongly urging a reconciliation with him, and that was also in the opinion of the prince of Orange the wisest course to adopt. So an arrangement was made with him, by which on the 28th of March 1583 he surrendered the cities that he had seized, and the States released their French prisoners and restored to him the plate and furniture he had left behind in Antwerp. He was to wait at Dunkirk until some plan could be devised by which he might be restored to the dignity he had forfeited, but on the 28th of June he left to visit Paris, and never returned. He died in France on the 10th of June 1584.

The treachery of Anjou was imitated by more than one of the Netherlands nobles. On the 22nd of September 1583 the town of Zutphen in Gelderland was betrayed to the Spaniards by Count Van den Berg, and on the 20th of May 1584 Bruges in Flanders was given up to Parma by the prince of Chimay, who was governor of that important city. Then Ypres in Flanders was besieged and forced to surrender, and as in Bruges all Protestants were expelled. Most of these took refuge in the northern provinces, so that the line of separation between the two opposing religions was constantly becoming more clearly defined.

At this critical time in the history of the provinces the great man whose name will ever be associated with all that is best and noblest in their struggle for liberty was taken from them by the pistol of an assassin. The ban of Philippe II had at last produced the effect for which it was designed. There had been many attempts to murder the prince of Orange and secure the king’s reward, but hitherto all had failed. The most serious of these took place on the 18th of March 1582, when he had been wounded, at first it was believed mortally, but he had recovered, though his wife died from the shock. And now, on the 10th of July 1584, in his own house at Delft he was shot by a fanatic Burgundian Catholic named Balthazar GÉrard, who under pretence of being a Calvinist in distress had obtained admittance to his service. The Father of his Country, as he was deservedly called, expired almost immediately. The murderer was seized, and died under the most excruciating tortures that the ingenuity of man could devise, but he remained callous to the last. The sorrowing people laid the corpse of him they had such good reason to mourn for in the new church at Delft, and raised a stately tomb over it, where few Dutch speaking South Africans who visit Europe fail to pay their respects to the memory of the illustrious dead. Thus William of Orange passed away.

The real murderer, Philippe the Second of Spain, rewarded the parents of his tool with patents of nobility and with three seignories or rich estates in Franche ComtÉ, taken from the confiscated property of his victim.

For a short time the country was paralysed by the death of its great leader, but soon in the northern provinces a general resolution was taken to prosecute the war more vigorously than ever. It now became almost purely a strife of religion. The prince of Orange had favoured toleration, but when he was removed the enmity between the Catholics and the Protestants showed itself so strong that a united country was no longer possible. It was not recognised at the time, but it can now be seen, that the position of the dividing line was the object striven for, and consequently the central provinces, Flanders, Brabant, Mechlin, Gelderland, and Limburg, where the Teutons and Celts were intermixed, were to be the principal scene of operations.

The states-general, exercising supreme power, appointed an executive council to raise forces and carry on the war until a sovereign should be chosen. This council consisted of eighteen members, four representing Holland, three Zeeland, three Friesland, three Brabant, two Utrecht, two Flanders, and one Mechlin. As its president the states-general appointed Maurits of Nassau, second son of the murdered prince of Orange, his eldest son Philip having long been a prisoner in Spain. It was a clumsy instrument for carrying on a war, with a president only seventeen years of age, and depending for funds upon the states-general, that it was required to convoke at least twice a year; but it was the only possible machinery that could be created at the time. The States’ movable army consisted of three thousand infantry and two thousand five hundred cavalry, the burghers being relied upon for the defence of the towns.

On the other side was the astute and active Parma, with a field force of over eighteen thousand veterans, besides garrisons in all the towns he had taken. He was provided with gold to bribe the corrupt nobles, and he was skilful in using it. The disparity between the two parties was so great that it was not surprising that towns of mixed population should waver when plausible overtures were made to them, rather than risk being attacked and treated as Maastricht had been. Dendermonde was the first to give way. On the 17th of August 1584 it was reconciled to the Spanish king, and lost for ever to the patriot cause. The fatal example was followed by Vilvoorde on the 7th of September, and on the 17th of the same month by the all-important city of Ghent. The terms of reconciliation were that the municipal institutions were to be respected, and that the Protestants were to be allowed two years within which either to conform to the Catholic worship or to dispose of their property and go into exile. This was at least much better than to be burnt or buried alive. Emigration to Holland and Zeeland followed on a very large scale, and before the expiration of the two years Ghent in particular lost nearly half of its former inhabitants. Thus Protestantism gained in the north and Catholicism in the south of the country.

The eyes of the great powers of Europe were now more intently fixed upon the Netherlands than ever before, but it was difficult to assist them. Neither Germany, France, nor England was willing to enter openly into war with the powerful Spanish empire in order to preserve constitutional government and Calvinistic doctrine. The states actually offered the sovereignty of the provinces to the contemptible Henry III, who sat upon the throne of France, if he would pledge his word to maintain their charters and their religion, and he declined to accept the offer, though he had every reason to be hostile to Spain. Elizabeth of England favoured a joint protectorate of the Netherlands by France and herself, but was naturally unwilling to see them absorbed by her neighbour, and was not inclined to assist them alone. And so in their time of greatest need they had only themselves to depend upon.

It was fortunate for the northern provinces that Parma was not receiving reinforcements, or the whole country would soon have been overrun. Philippe was closely engaged in fomenting civil war in France and in planning the conquest of England, subjects which occupied his mind and drew upon his purse to such an extent that he neglected the Netherlands and failed to furnish money to maintain and pay even the limited number of soldiers he had there. He was the real head of the so-called holy league, that under the nominal leadership of the duke of Guise was in arms to establish absolutism and extirpate Protestantism in Europe. Parma was left mainly to his own resources, but he possessed military and diplomatic ability of the highest order, and could do with his slender army what ordinary generals could not have done with forces twice as strong.

If he could obtain possession of Brussels and Antwerp the backbone of the rebellion would be broken, he believed, and in the autumn of 1584 he commenced operations to that end. His plan was to construct a fortified bridge over the Schelde below Antwerp, which would prevent succour being sent up the river from Zeeland, and thus the cities would be starved out, for the open country was in his hands. There was one way by which this plan could be frustrated, and that was by cutting the great dykes and letting the sea roll over the land, but the patriots hesitated to destroy so much property. When at last they tried to do it they were too late, for Parma had fortified the dykes and held them with an iron hand. During the winter of 1584-5 famine was so severe in Brussels that people died of hunger, and on the 13th of March 1585 the city capitulated. Mechlin held out until the 19th of July, when it too fell.

The siege of Antwerp was one of the most celebrated events in the history of the Netherlands. The city was then much less populous than it had formerly been, but it still contained ninety thousand inhabitants, the most turbulent though the most energetic and industrious in Europe. It was the most important commercial city in the country. If there had been union of counsel and obedience to a single authority, Antwerp need not have feared anything that Parma with his eleven or twelve thousand soldiers could do, but all was discord and confusion within the walls. And without was one strong clear-headed man, with a genius for war, in command of soldiers devoted to him, a man who could construct a strong fortified bridge seven hundred and thirty-two metres in length over a deep tidal river in the winter season and in the face of a far superior number of combatants, a feat deemed by most people utterly impossible until it was accomplished. The sufferings of Antwerp were less than those of Leyden, but on the 17th of August 1585 the city capitulated. Life and property were to be respected, a ransom of only £33,000 was to be paid, no other than the Roman Catholic worship was to be publicly observed, but Protestants were allowed two years in which to dispose of their property and leave.

Immediately a stream of emigration set out towards the north. Amsterdam especially benefited by refugee merchants and artisans from Antwerp settling there, and very shortly became the first commercial city of Europe. Middelburg too and many other towns of Holland and Zeeland received a large access of population from the fugitive Protestants of Brabant and Flanders. The old cities immediately lost their former importance, Antwerp sank into a small place, the citadel was rebuilt and a foreign garrison was stationed in it, but beyond the soldiers and the members of the Company of Jesus who were stationed there as instructors of the young, no new residents were attracted to take the place of the Protestants who moved away.

During the siege of Antwerp the states-general were making every effort in their power to obtain assistance from England. Queen Elizabeth realised the necessity of supporting the Netherlands against Philippe II, who was her enemy as well as theirs, but she was unwilling to give more than was absolutely necessary. She had to be on her guard against other enemies than Spain, and she could not afford to spend money freely. The states offered her the sovereignty of the provinces, which she declined, and the negotiations for an alliance were so protracted that when an agreement was finally arrived at, it was too late to save Antwerp.

On the 10th of August 1585 a treaty between the queen and the states was signed, by the terms of which Elizabeth was to furnish and pay during the war five thousand infantry and one thousand cavalry to assist in the defence of the provinces,[25] and was to receive the town of Flushing and the fortress of Rammekens in Zeeland and the town of Brill and two fortresses in Holland as pledges for the payment of all expenses when the war was over. She was to provide these places with suitable garrisons, but was not to interfere in any way with the civil government or the customs and privileges of the inhabitants.

The earl of Leicester was appointed lieutenant-general of the English forces, and with a brilliant staff of nobles landed at Flushing on the 19th of December 1585. The chivalrous and virtuous Sir Philip Sidney was placed in command of the English garrison of Flushing.

The states-general, realising that under the existing form of government it was impossible to act with vigour against the enemy, appointed Leicester governor and captain-general of the united provinces, and on the 4th of February 1586 he was inaugurated at the Hague in that capacity. On the 6th a proclamation was issued by the states,[26] giving him “supreme command and absolute authority over all the affairs of war by sea and land, ... the administration and direction of government and justice over all the said united provinces, cities, and associated members, ... and special power to levy, receive, and administer all the contributions granted and appointed for carrying on the war.” The queen, however, was incensed by his acceptance of such extensive power, and he did not afterwards receive her support as freely as before. In particular the English soldiers in the Netherlands were left without pay or proper maintenance, and it might have gone hard with them if Parma’s forces had not been in the same condition. Philippe, who was hastening on the preparation of the great armada which he intended for the invasion and conquest of England, was trying to gain time and conceal his operations by pretending to enter into negotiations for peace, and so nothing decisive was done on either side.

What was effected during the year 1586 was more advantageous to the Spaniards than to the Dutch and English. In January of this year Parma laid siege to the town of Grave, on the Brabant bank of the Maas, and though in April the garrison was strengthened and a great quantity of provisions thrown in by the patriots, on the 7th of June the place was surrendered by its weak-minded commandant. On the same day Megen and Batenburg were given up to Parma, and on the 28th of June Venlo capitulated, when only the towns of Geertruidenberg, Heusden, Bergen op Zoom, and Willemstad were left in Brabant to the patriot cause. All the territory south of the lower Schelde had now been recovered by the Spaniards except a little slip in the north of Flanders and along the seacoast. This little slip was slightly enlarged, however, by the seizure on the 17th of July of the fortified town of Axel by a combined English and Dutch expedition.

In Gelderland Nymegen on the Waal and Zutphen on the Yssel with some villages in the neighbourhood of each were held by the Spaniards, and Leicester resolved to attempt to get possession of them. On the 12th of September after a short siege he occupied Doesburg, eight kilometres from Zutphen, and then proceeded to beleaguer the city. Parma, with six thousand five hundred soldiers, immediately marched to its relief, and on the 2nd of October succeeded in forcing a way in with a great convoy of provisions. In the action when endeavouring to prevent him from doing so, the chivalrous Sir Philip Sidney received a wound from which he died. Parma, after strengthening the garrison, marched to disperse some German troops in the service of the States, and Leicester, having placed large garrisons in Deventer, Doesburg, and a very strong fort close to Zutphen, retired to the Hague. On the 24th of November he left the Netherlands to return to England, but did not resign his office, thus causing great confusion.

He had been at variance with the states-general, and had been disposed to carry out his views with a high hand, though he was exceedingly generous with his wealth and spent large sums of money of his own in the service of the country. Two parties had arisen: one, that may be termed oligarchal, favouring the existing form of town and provincial governments and wide toleration in matters of religion; the other, that called itself democratic, appealing to the sovereignty of the people at large, but without explaining how that sovereignty was to be manifested, and desiring to exclude rigidly all religious practices except those of the Reformed church. The earl of Leicester was the head of the last named of these parties. He left Sir John Norris in command of the English troops in the Netherlands, and professedly delegated his own authority to the state council, though secretly he issued commissions that greatly impaired the power of that body and of the English general.

Soon after his departure a series of deplorable events occurred. Sir William Stanley, who was in command of the garrison of Deventer, betrayed that important city to Colonel Tassis, who held Zutphen for Parma, and with an Irish regiment under his orders went over to the service of Spain. On the same day, 29th of January 1587, Colonel Rowland York betrayed to Tassis the great fortress close to Zutphen, of which he was in command. The northern provinces were thus cut in two, and the Spaniards were able to ravage large portions of Gelderland and Overyssel. Then Wauw, a castle about four kilometres from Bergen op Zoom, was sold to Parma by its commandant, and a little later the town of Gelder was similarly sold by Commandant Aristotle Patton.

These acts of treachery created a strong feeling of distrust of the whole of the English forces in the country, especially as it was known that Queen Elizabeth was extremely desirous of concluding peace with Spain, and was at this very time corresponding with the duke of Parma on the subject. The states-general took advantage of this feeling and attempted to recover the authority which they had ceded to the earl of Leicester, but did not fully succeed in doing so.

The preparations of Philippe for the invasion of England were rapidly advancing, and it had been arranged between him and Parma that a powerful army was to be massed in Flanders and Brabant, which should be embarked in small vessels and convoyed across the straits by a great fleet to be sent from Spain. Until all was ready, the queen was to be kept unsuspicious of danger by pretended negotiations for peace, which were never to be more than a blind.

To carry out this scheme Parma needed a capacious and convenient harbour. Those he possessed were useless for his purpose, because the English held Flushing at the mouth of the Schelde and Dutch armed ships were constantly cruising almost up to Antwerp, so at the beginning of June 1587 he laid siege to Sluis in north-western Flanders with all the forces he could muster. The town had a garrison of eight hundred English and eight hundred Dutch soldiers, and not only the burghers but the women aided heroically in its defence. The importance of preventing such a harbour from falling into the hands of the Spaniards was realised at once in England, and Leicester was directed to return to the Netherlands without delay. On the 7th of July he reached Flushing with three thousand raw recruits, but the bickering between him and the states was so great that united action was impossible, and his attempt to relieve Sluis was an utter failure. The garrison was so reduced in number that it could resist no longer, and the burghers and women were quite worn out, when at the beginning of August Sluis capitulated on honourable terms, and Parma came into possession of an excellent base for the invasion of England.

That invasion, however, was deferred for a time, and the pretence of negotiating for peace was to be continued many months longer, owing to the action of the daring sea captain Sir Francis Drake. Drake sailed from Plymouth on the 2nd of April 1587 with four men-of-war and twenty-four ships fitted out by private adventurers, and seventeen days later entered the harbour of Cadiz and pillaged, burned, and destroyed some hundred and fifty vessels that he found there. He then sailed to Lisbon, and destroyed a hundred transports and provision ships that were lying in the Tagus. At first sight this looks something like piracy, for there had been no declaration of war between England and Spain. But what were all those vessels lying off Cadiz and Lisbon destined for? For the invasion of England, and this it was that justified Drake in destroying them as he so bravely did.

Leicester remained nearly six months in the Netherlands on his second visit, and then, finding it impossible to recover his former authority, he returned to England. On the 27th of December 1587 he attached his name to a document resigning his office, but it did not reach the states-general until April 1588. In the interim a condition of affairs that can almost be termed civil war prevailed. The officials and commanders of garrisons who had taken an oath of fidelity to Leicester refused to obey any other authority, and young Maurits of Nassau, who had been appointed by the states captain-general, was obliged to coerce them by force of arms. At last Leicester’s resignation was received, and on the 12th of April 1588 the states-general issued a placaat[27] absolving all persons from their oaths of fidelity to him, when something like harmony was restored. The baron Willoughby now became the commander of the English troops in the Netherlands.

Warlike operations in that country were, however, almost stayed for a while, owing to Parma’s whole attention being occupied with preparations for the invasion of England and deceiving the English commissioners who were treating for peace. He was building great numbers of small transports, collecting vast stores of provisions and munitions of war, and providing for sixty thousand soldiers, some of whom were intended to hold his conquests during his absence and others to go with him to England when the invincible armada should arrive from Spain with additional forces and convoy his vessels across the channel.

At last in July 1588 the armada, consisting of a hundred and thirty-four ships of war, with twenty thousand soldiers on board, sailed from CoruÑa, and on the 29th of that month came in sight of the English coast. Never in the world’s history were more important issues in the balance than those dependent on that mighty fleet. Absolutism or political liberty, iron bound religious conformity or freedom of conscience, these were the issues at stake, not only for England and Holland, but for mighty nations still unborn. It is not necessary to relate the history of the armada here, every schoolboy knows how it came to anchor in Calais roads, how the Sea Beggars of Holland and Zeeland prevented Parma from joining it, how the English fleet under Howard and Drake and Hawkins and other ocean heroes followed and worried it, how they sent fireships that frightened it in confusion from Calais roads, how it fled into the North sea with the English grappling every galleon that lagged behind, how God sent a great storm that dispersed it, and how finally only fifty-three out of the hundred and thirty-four huge fighting ships reached the Spanish coast again, and these little better than disabled wrecks. The invincible armada was no more, and England and Holland were saved.

Parma had a great army under his command, but sickness was wasting it away, and he had not the means of maintaining it properly. So much had been expended upon the armada that it was impossible for Philippe to send him the money he needed. He was in chronic ill-health and seemed to have lost heart too by the failure of the mighty effort that had been made, and so for a time took no action commensurate with what might have been expected of him. He indeed laid siege to Bergen op Zoom, which was garrisoned by five thousand Dutch and English soldiers under Colonel Morgan, but he did not press it with his old vigour, and during the night of the 12th of November 1588 he abandoned it. Then for months he did nothing, until on the 10th of April 1589 he obtained possession of Geertruidenberg, a town on the Brabant side of the Maas.

Philippe’s views were now directed more to France than to the Netherlands. After the assassination of Henry III the two parties in that kingdom appealed to arms, and Parma was directed to assist the duke of Mayenne, who was at the head of the Catholic league, against Henry of Navarre, then a Huguenot, the legitimate heir to the throne. Accordingly, in March 1590 he began to send troops to Mayenne, and in August he followed in person with twelve thousand infantry and three thousand cavalry, but after breaking the blockade of Paris, then besieged by Navarre, he returned to the Netherlands, leaving a strong division of his forces in France. His soldiers were dying rapidly from disease, they were unpaid and half mutinous, and neither money nor sufficient provisions could be obtained in the exhausted Spanish provinces. Under these circumstances Parma, notwithstanding the large number of men nominally at his disposal, was really almost helpless.

Maurits was not slow to take advantage of this condition of things. He had a regular army of only ten thousand infantry and two thousand cavalry, but his troops were properly paid and well disciplined, and he was rapidly advancing in military knowledge and skill. He had also the assistance of a small English contingent. On the 4th of March 1590 he got possession of the important town of Breda in Brabant. During the night of the 3rd seventy Hollanders concealed in a turf boat gained entrance to the castle, and attacked the garrison of Italian soldiers six times their number, who were seized with a panic and fled into the town. Before dawn of the 4th a body of patriot troops, with Maurits at their head, arrived, and Breda was gained. Within a few months eight other towns in Brabant, though all of less importance than Breda, were wrested from the Spaniards.

During 1591 some great successes were gained by Maurits. On the 23rd of May the great fort at Zutphen was taken, and on the 30th the town capitulated. On the 10th of June Deventer was surrendered, and thus the important cities lost by the treachery of Stanley and York were recovered. On the 2nd of July Delfzyl, far north in Groningen, capitulated, and on the 24th of September Hulst, in the north of Flanders, was obliged to do the same. On the 21st of October Nymegen was taken, so that the year was a most fortunate one for the patriot cause. The Spanish garrisons of all these towns had made a stout resistance, and some had held out for a long time, but none of those scenes of massacre that characterised Spanish victories obscured the successes of Maurits. The soldiers were permitted to march away unharmed, and the result was that afterwards they did not fight so desperately as they would have done if they had believed that to submit would be followed by their butchery. As to religion, the same system was introduced in the recovered towns as was observed in South Africa during the greater part of the rule of the East India Company: only the Reformed worship could be practised publicly, but there was no inquisition in matters of conscience, and in their own houses men could worship as they pleased.

During 1592 less was accomplished. From January to June Parma was in France, and when he left that country his ill health prevented him from making much exertion. Philippe, without the slightest cause, had become suspicious of his fidelity, and had resolved to disgrace him. From this indignity he was spared by his death at Arras on the 3rd of December 1592. The old count Pieter Ernest Mansfeld then acted as governor-general of the submissive Netherlands until January 1594, when the archduke Ernest, brother of the emperor of Germany and nephew of King Philippe, arrived at Brussels and assumed the duty. He was a man of no account, and played a very unimportant part until his death on the 20th of February 1595. The count of Fuentes then acted as head of affairs until the 29th of January 1596, when the cardinal archduke Albert, youngest brother of the late Ernest, took over the charge.

At this time the war against Spain was chiefly confined to France, where both the English and the Dutch were aiding the king of Navarre against Philippe and the Catholic league. In July 1593 the king of Navarre was reconciled to the Catholic church, and on the 26th of February 1594 was crowned at Chartres as Henry IV, king of France. Still the English and Dutch continued to help him against Spain, and the Spanish forces, except the garrisons of the towns, were withdrawn from the Netherlands to oppose him, so that Maurits was able with his little army and a few English auxiliaries to do something. He laid siege to Steenwyk, in the north of Overyssel, which surrendered on the 4th of July 1592, and to Koevorden, in Drenthe, which capitulated on the 12th of September of the same year. Next he laid siege to Geertruidenberg, which capitulated on the 22nd of June 1593, and to Groningen, which fell into his hands on the 22nd of July 1594. The remainder of the district, then termed the Ommelanden, was already a party to the union of Utrecht, and the city now at once gave in its adhesion, so that the province of Groningen thereafter took rank as a sister state of Holland and the others.

In 1595 nothing of much note occurred, and in 1596 the most important military event was the recovery of Hulst by the archduke on the 18th of August. But in this year an act of the king of Spain had very serious consequences for the Netherlands. This was the repudiation by Philippe of the public debt of his empire, which at this time was actually so great that nearly the whole of his revenue was needed to pay the interest alone. So reckless was the expenditure of the lord of Spain, Portugal, Italy, the obedient Netherlands, America, and India! Twice before, in 1557 and 1575, he had suspended payment to the national creditors, and now, on the 20th of November 1596, he freed himself of the whole burden by simply disowning it. The ruin of his creditors was not more complete than the ruin of his credit thereafter. The obedient provinces were so exhausted that the cardinal archduke could not raise sufficient revenue from them to meet the cost of administration, much less maintain the army, and the soldiers at once lost all heart.

On the 31st of October of this year 1596 a treaty of alliance between Henry IV of France, Elizabeth of England, and the States-General of the seven United Provinces—Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht, Gelderland, Overyssel, Friesland, and Groningen with Drenthe—was entered into at the Hague, to defend themselves against Spain.[28] The oligarchal republic was thus formally admitted into the sisterhood of nations.

There were four thousand of the very best of the Spanish infantry and several squadrons of cavalry encamped at Turnhout in Brabant, where on the 24th of January 1597 Maurits with a much inferior force attacked them. They actually fled in a panic, and in the pursuit two thousand were slain and five hundred were made prisoners. It was the most notable victory ever won over Spanish veterans. Turnhout was occupied by the patriots, and Maurits began to prepare for an extensive campaign.

In August 1597 he attacked the Spanish garrisons in the towns along the Rhine on the eastern border of the United Provinces, and by the end of October he had reduced nine of them. Five thousand Spanish soldiers surrendered, who were allowed to march away unharmed, to add to the troubles of the cardinal archduke, whose army was now and long afterwards in a state of organised mutiny and a terror to the obedient provinces. The patriot cause would have made great progress at this time, but on the 2nd of May 1598 Henry IV seceded from the triple alliance between England, France, and the United Provinces, and signed a treaty of peace with Spain.

Four days after the conclusion of this treaty, on the 6th of May 1598, Philippe II transferred the sovereignty of the Netherlands to his favourite daughter Isabella, who was to marry the cardinal archduke Albert. He was physically unable to carry on the government longer himself, and on the 13th of September 1598 he died of a loathsome and painful disease. On his deathbed he declared that he did not know of ever having done anyone a wrong, so firmly convinced was he that all the murders committed and all the blood that had been shed by his orders tended to the glory of God and the promotion of true religion. Such a man in his position is a greater enemy to mankind than an avowed infidel could be, whether he gives others the choice of the koran or the sword, adherence to any form of Christianity or death. He arrogates to himself the power of defining the will of the Almighty God in matters of faith, and of compelling others to profess to believe as he does, surely a position that angels might shudder to take. The dead king was succeeded by his son, Philippe III of Spain, who had none of his father’s patience or industry, who was satisfied with his title, and left the administration entirely to his favourite the duke of Lerma, the real master of the Spanish realms.

The cession of the Netherlands to Isabella nominally severed the provinces from Spain, but if she should leave no issue, it was provided that they should return to their former condition. She was to have all the assistance that Spain could afford to give, so that practically the position was not greatly altered.

The republic was now left to defend itself almost unaided, for on the 16th of August 1598 a treaty of alliance with England was concluded at Westminster, which provided for the payment of £800,000 to the queen for the expenses incurred by her, and for her keeping eleven hundred and fifty soldiers in the cautionary towns until the debt should be paid. The second article of the treaty was: “The foresaid Lords the States, confiding in the good Affection and Favour of her Majesty, for the Preservation of the State of the foresaid United Provinces, shall be contented with such aids as her Majesty shall please to give them, and to continue the War, with the Assistance of God, the best they can.”[29]

Very little that was of permanent importance transpired in the Netherlands for some time after the conclusion of this treaty. The cardinal archduke was without money, and his soldiers were mutinous, so that he could not undertake any military operations. He was preparing too to become a layman and to wed the infanta Isabella, which event took place in April 1599.

The Dutch, as henceforth the people of the republic of the United Netherlands can be termed in contradistinction to the Belgians, or the inhabitants of the obedient provinces, were superior to the Spaniards on the sea, and were victorious in every naval engagement where the enemy was not more than three to one against them, still privateers under the Spanish flag frequently made sudden darts from Dunkirk and Nieuwpoort and did much damage to Dutch trading vessels and fishing smacks. To prevent this, the states-general resolved to send a strong expedition against those places. Accordingly, in June 1600 Maurits with an army thirteen thousand six hundred strong invaded Flanders and marched to Nieuwpoort. The archduke Albert upon this appealed in stirring words to his mutinous troops, and made such promises to them that twelve thousand veterans agreed to return to duty. They reached the environs of Nieuwpoort a few hours after Maurits, and there in the sand dunes on the 2nd of July 1600 was fought a pitched battle, which, though the Dutch lost very heavily in a preliminary encounter, ended in a complete victory in their favour. Three thousand Spaniards were killed, and six hundred were made prisoners, among whom was the ferocious admiral of Aragon. The Dutch lost two thousand men killed. Nieuwpoort, however, was so strongly garrisoned that Maurits did not think it prudent to lay siege to it, and so he returned to Zeeland.

Ostend was the only place on the coast of Flanders held by the Dutch, and as soon as the archduke could get a sufficient force together he laid siege to it. It was only a fishing village of three thousand inhabitants, but as it formed a base from which expeditions could be sent to any part of Flanders, it was an important position. Its siege was one of the most memorable events of the long war, for it lasted over three years, from the 5th of July 1601 to the 20th of September 1604. Being open to Dutch shipping, reinforcements of men and supplies of provisions were constantly thrown in, while on the other side every soldier that the archduke Albert could engage was employed in the siege. During those three years more than a hundred thousand men lost their lives by pestilence or in the attack or defence of that village. The struggle would have continued even longer, had it not been that a Genoese volunteer of immense wealth and a perfect genius for war offered his services and his money to Philippe III on condition of having the supreme command of the army in Flanders, which offer had been accepted. In October 1603 the marquis Ambrose Spinola took command at Ostend, and he it was who brought the siege to a conclusion. He gained possession of heaps of rubbish, but not a single building intact, and when the garrison retired with the remnant of the fishing population, only one man and one woman remained where Ostend had been.

In the meantime Maurits took advantage of the archduke’s whole attention being occupied with Ostend to recover Grave, which surrendered to him after a siege lasting from the 18th of July to the 18th of September 1602, and Sluis—a much more important place than Ostend—which fell into his hands by capitulation on the 18th of August 1604.

The death of Queen Elizabeth on the 24th of March 1603 was a great loss to the republic. She had always realised that the Dutch cause against Spain was England’s cause also, and though she had not given much assistance of late, she had afforded some, and down to the fall of Ostend a considerable number of Englishmen fought and fell side by side with the sturdy republicans. Her successor, James I, was without her ability. Soon after his accession he promised indeed to follow her policy, but very shortly a project of alliance between the royal houses of Spain and England took possession of his mind, and then he adopted the opposite course. On the 30th of July 1603 at Hampton Court he signed a treaty of alliance with Henry IV of France for the defence of the United Provinces against Spain, and in the following year, 1604, he entered into a treaty of perpetual peace and alliance with Philippe III of Spain and the archduke and archduchess Albert and Isabella,[30] in which he abandoned the Dutch cause. Thereafter his subjects were strictly prohibited from aiding the enemies of Spain in any manner whatever. He kept possession of the cautionary towns until June 1616, when a compromise was made regarding the debt, and they were restored to the republic.

No military event of any importance occurred after this until Spinola’s sudden dash upon the eastern border, and the surrender to him of Grol or Groenlo in Gelderland on the 14th of August 1606. Spinola’s funds were now exhausted, and as means for carrying on the war could not be raised either in the Belgic provinces or in Spain, hostilities on land practically ceased.

IV.
The War on the Sea between Spain and the Netherlands.

It was on the ocean that the Dutch were carrying on the war, and that with marvellous success, for they were already beginning to drive the Portuguese from their most valuable possessions in the eastern seas and to found for themselves a vast colonial realm.

During the early years of the war trade was carried on between them and the Spaniards just as in times of peace. The Hollanders and Zeelanders indeed regarded Philippe’s subjects in Spain and Italy as their best customers, and relied upon the profit on commerce with them for means to carry on the war. On various occasions the king tried to check this trade, and the English were loud in denouncing it, still it went on, though always diminishing in bulk, until 1598, when an edict was issued by Philippe declaring all Dutch ships found in his ports confiscated and their crews prisoners.

For some time this had been foreseen, and the merchants of Amsterdam and Middelburg were intent upon seeking new markets to replace the old ones that would be lost. They were of opinion that a short passage to China might be found by way of the sea north of Europe and Asia, and a man thoroughly qualified to make the effort to look for it was soon found in the person of Willem Barendszoon, a seaman of great courage, patience, and skill. On the 5th of June 1594 Barendszoon sailed from Texel with three ships fitted out respectively by the cities of Amsterdam and Enkhuizen and the province of Zeeland. He was also provided with a yacht to explore in advance of the larger vessels. With him as supercargo of the Enkhuizen ship was Jan Huyghen van Linschoten, of whom much will presently be said. Barendszoon sailed north of Nova Zembla with the Amsterdam ship and the yacht, while the other two vessels tried to pass through the Waigats between Nova Zembla and the mainland. But ice blocked the passage of them all, and they were obliged to return unsuccessful to Amsterdam, where they arrived on the 16th of September.[31]

The states-general then resolved to send another expedition to prosecute the search for a passage, and on the 2nd of July 1595 seven ships sailed from the Maas for that purpose under the leadership of the dauntless Willem Barendszoon. There was another man in that fleet whose name stands high on the roll of Dutch heroes, Jacob van Heemskerk, who went on this occasion as supercargo of a ship of Amsterdam. But ice again obstructed the passage, and having done all that was possible to get through it, the explorers were compelled to put about and entered the Maas on the 18th of November.

Barendszoon was now of opinion that by sailing much farther north an open sea might be found, and as several geographers and travellers of note supported him in this view, the city of Amsterdam fitted out two ships, in which he and Heemskerk sailed from Vlieland on the 18th of May 1596. On this occasion Barendszoon visited Spitzbergen and reached 80° north latitude, but ice still blocked the road to China. One of the ships then returned home, the other was frozen fast and wrecked on the coast of Nova Zembla. The crew built a hut on the shore, and passed the winter in it, living largely on Arctic foxes and using the skins for clothing. In the spring they launched their two boats, in which they fortunately reached a Russian settlement on the mainland, and ultimately Heemskerk and eleven others reached the Maas, 29th of October 1597. Brave Willem Barendszoon died of exhaustion on the journey. In our own time the hut on Nova Zembla was found intact, having stood nearly three centuries on the frozen shore, and the relics it contained are now preserved in the national museum.

When the first of these expeditions had failed, and while the result of the second was still unknown, some merchants of Amsterdam fitted out a fleet of four vessels, which in the year 1595 sailed to India by way of the Cape of Good Hope. Before this date, however, a few Netherlanders had visited the eastern seas in the Portuguese service, and among them was one in particular whose writings had great influence at that period and for more than half a century afterwards.

Jan Huyghen van Linschoten was born at Haarlem, in the province of Holland. He received a good general education, but from an early age he gave himself up with ardour to the special study of geography and history, and eagerly read such books of travel as were within his reach. In 1579 he obtained permission from his parents, who were then residing at Enkhuizen, to proceed to Seville, where his two elder brothers were pushing their fortunes. He was at Seville when the cardinal king Henrique of Portugal died, leaving the succession to the throne in dispute. The duke of Alva with a strong Spanish army won it for his master, and shortly afterwards Linschoten removed to Lisbon, where he was a clerk in a merchant’s office when Philippe made his triumphal entry and when Alva died.

Two years later he entered the service of a Dominican friar, by name Vicente da Fonseca, who had been appointed by Philippe primate of India, the see of Goa having been raised to an archbishopric in 1557. In April 1583 with his employer he sailed from Lisbon, and after touching at Mozambique—where he remained from the 5th to the 20th of August, diligently seeking information on that part of the world—he arrived at Goa in September of the same year. He remained in India until January 1589. When returning to Europe in the ship Santa Cruz from Cochin, he passed through a quantity of wreckage from the ill-fated SÃo ThomÉ, which had sailed from the same port five days before he left, and he visited several islands in the Atlantic, at one of which—Terceira—he was detained a long time. He reached Lisbon again in January 1592, and eight months later rejoined his family at Enkhuizen, after an absence of nearly thirteen years.

Early in 1595 the first of Linschoten’s books was published, in which an account is given of the sailing directions followed by the Portuguese in their navigation of the eastern waters, drawn from the treatises of their most experienced pilots. This work shows the highest knowledge of navigation that Europeans had then acquired. They had still no better instrument for determining latitudes than the astrolabe and the cross staff, and no means whatever for ascertaining longitudes other than by dead reckoning. The vicinity of the Cape of Good Hope was known by the appearance of the sea-birds called Cape pigeons and the great drifting plants that are yet to be seen any day on the shores of the Cape peninsula. The different kinds of ground that adhered to the tallow of the sounding leads to some extent indicated the position, as did also the variation of the magnetic needle, but whether a ship was fifty or a hundred nautical miles from any given point could not be ascertained by either of these means. When close to the shore, however, the position was known by the appearance of the land, the form of the hills and mountains, and the patches of sand and thicket, all of which had been carefully delineated and laid down in the sailing directions.

Linschoten’s first book was followed in 1596 by a description of the Indies, and by several geographical treatises drawn from Portuguese sources, all profusely illustrated with maps and plates. Of Mozambique an ample account was given from personal observation and inquiry. Dom Pedro de Castro had just been succeeded as captain by Nuno Velho Pereira, who informed the archbishop that in his three years’ term of office he would realise a fortune of about nine tons of gold, or £75,000 sterling, derived chiefly from the trade in the precious metal carried on at Sofala and in the territory of the monomotapa. Fort SÃo Sebastio had then no other garrison than the servants and attendants of the captain, in addition to whom there were only forty or at most fifty Portuguese and half-breed male residents on the island capable of assisting in its defence. There were three or four hundred huts occupied by negroes, some of whom were professed Christians, others Mohamedans, and still others heathens. The exports to India were gold, ivory, ambergris, ebony, and slaves. African slaves, being much stronger in body than the natives of Hindostan, were used to perform the hardest and coarsest work in the eastern possessions of Portugal, and—though Linschoten does not state this—they were employed in considerable numbers in the trading ships to relieve the European seamen from the heavy labour of pumping, hauling, stowing and unstowing cargo, cleansing, and so forth. These slaves were chiefly procured from the lands to the northward, and very few, if any of them, were obtained in the country south of the Zambesi.

It serves to show how carefully and minutely Linschoten elicited information at Mozambique, that he mentions a harbour on the coast which is not named by any of the Portuguese writers of the time except Dos Santos, whose book was not then published, and who only refers to it incidentally, though it is now known to be the best port between Inhambane and the Zambesi. This is Beira, as at present termed, then known to the sailors of the pangayos that traded to the southward as Porto Bango. Linschoten gives its latitude as 19½°, half a league north of Sofala. He mentions also Delagoa Bay, that is the present Algoa Bay, and gives its latitude as 33½°. He describes the monsoons of the Indian ocean, and states that ships from Portugal availed themselves of these periodical winds by waiting at Mozambique until the 1st of August, and never leaving after the middle of September, thus securing a safe and easy passage to the coast of Hindostan.

He frequently refers to the gold of Sofala and the country of the monomotapa, of which he had heard just such reports as Vasco da Gama had eagerly listened to eighty-six years before. Yet he did not magnify the importance of these rumours as the Portuguese had done, though it was mainly from his writings that his countrymen became possessed of that spirit of cupidity which induced them a few years later to make strenuous efforts to become masters of South-Eastern Africa.

Linschoten’s treatises were collected and published in a single large volume, and the work was at once received as a text-book, a position which its merits entitled it to occupy. The most defective portion of the whole is that referring to South Africa: and for this reason, that it was then impossible to get any correct information about the interior of the continent below the Zambesi west of the part frequented by the Portuguese. Linschoten himself saw no more of it than a fleeting glimpse of False Cape afforded on his outward passage, and his description was of necessity based upon the faulty maps of the geographers of his time, so that it was full of errors. But his account of India and of the way to reach its several ports was so correct that it could serve the purpose of a guide-book, and his treatise on the mode of navigation by the Portuguese was thus used by the commander of the first Dutch fleet that appeared in the eastern seas.

The four vessels which left Texel on the 2nd of April 1595 were under the general direction of an officer named Cornelis Houtman. In the afternoon of the 2nd of August the Cape of Good Hope was seen, and next day, after passing Agulhas, the fleet kept close to the land, the little Duifke sailing in front and looking for a harbour. On the 4th the bay called by the Portuguese Agoada de SÃo Bras was discovered, and as the Duifke found good holding ground in nine or ten fathoms of water, the Mauritius, Hollandia, and Amsterdam entered and dropped their anchors.[32]

Here the fleet remained until the 11th, when sail was again set for the East. During the interval a supply of fresh water was taken in, and some oxen and sheep were purchased from the inhabitants for knives, old tools, and pieces of iron. The Europeans were surprised to find the sheep covered with hair instead of wool, and with enormous tails of pure fat. No women or habitations were seen. The appearance of the Hottentots, their clothing, their assagais, their method of making a fire by twirling a piece of wood rapidly round in the socket of another piece, their filthiness in eating, and the clicking of their language, are all correctly described; but it was surmised that they were cannibals, because they were observed to eat the half-raw intestines of animals, and a fable commonly believed in Europe was repeated concerning their mutilation in a peculiar manner of the bodies of conquered enemies. The intercourse with the few Hottentots seen was friendly, though at times each suspected the other of evil intentions.

A chart of the inlet was made,[33] from which it is seen to be the one now called Mossel Bay. A little island in it was covered with seals and penguins, some of each of which were killed and eaten. The variation of the compass was observed to be so trifling that the needle might be said to point to the north.

From the watering place of SÃo Bras Houtman continued his voyage, and reached Sumatra safely. He next visited Bantam in the island of Java, where, owing to the influence of Portuguese traders, he and several of his attendants were made prisoners and were only released on payment of a ransom of £400. Some other ports of Java were visited, as were also Madura and Bali, and a small quantity of spice was purchased, but there were many quarrels and some combats with the natives. So many men died that it was necessary to burn the Amsterdam, which ship was much decayed, and strengthen the crews of the other three vessels. Houtman then left to return home, and reached Texel on the 14th of August 1597, after an absence of over twenty-eight months.

Financially the first venture of the Dutch to the Indies was not a success, but the spirit of enterprise was excited by it, and immediately trading companies began to be formed in different towns of Holland and Zeeland, and fleets were fitted out with the object of opening up an eastern trade. It will not be necessary to give an account of all these companies, but mention must be made of some of the fleets.

On the 15th of March 1598 two ships, the Leeuw and the Leeuwin, sailed from Vlissingen under command of Cornelis Houtman. In the Leeuw the famous English seaman John Davis was chief pilot, that is sailing master. They put into the watering place of Saldanha for refreshment, where Davis, in his account of the voyage, says that the Hottentots fell by surprise upon the men who were ashore bartering cattle, and killed thirteen of them. In his narrative Davis says that at Cape Agulhas the magnetic needle was without variation, but in his sailing directions, written after another voyage to India, he says: “At False Cape there is no variation that I can find by observing south from it. The variation of Cape Agulhas is thirty minutes from north to west. And at the Cape of Good Hope the compass is varied from north to east five and twenty minutes.” At Atchin about a hundred and fifty tons of pepper were purchased and taken in, but on the 1st of September 1599 a party of Sumatrans went on board the two ships and suddenly drew their weapons and murdered Cornelis Houtman and many others. In both ships they were ultimately driven off with heavy loss. Some men were on shore at the time, and they also were attacked, when eight were made prisoners and the others were killed. Altogether sixty white men lost their lives on this occasion. There was no further attempt to trade or to explore, and after a voyage marked by loss the expedition reached home again on the 29th of July 1600.

On the 1st of May 1598 Jacob van Nek sailed from Texel with six large ships and two yachts. Second in command was Wybrand van Waerwyk, and third in rank was Jacob van Heemskerk, who had only returned from his terrible sojourn in the polar sea six months before. This voyage was an eminently successful one. Four of the ships were speedily sent home fully laden with pepper and valuable spices obtained at Bantam; two others purchased cargoes at Banda, and when they sailed left twenty men behind with money and goods to trade until the arrival of another fleet; and the remaining two procured cargoes at Ternate, and left six men there to trade when they sailed. All reached home in safety, with the most valuable cargoes that had ever entered a Netherlands port.

On the 13th of September 1598 Olivier van Noort sailed from Goeree with two ships and two yachts, having in all two hundred and forty-eight souls on board, with the intention of ascertaining whether a western route to India would not be preferable to that round the Cape of Good Hope. It was necessary to burn one of the yachts on the passage, and one of the ships parted company after passing through the straits of Magellan and was never seen again. On the western coast of South America Van Noort destroyed several trading vessels, and then set his course for Manilla. Off that harbour, on the 14th of December 1600, two large galleons attacked him, when the yacht Eendracht sailed away, drawing one of the galleons in pursuit. The Mauritius engaged the other, and after a stubborn combat succeeded in sinking her. As she was going down some two hundred men jumped overboard, but instead of attempting to rescue them, the crew of the Mauritius pushed those who swam alongside their ship underneath the water with poles. After the engagement there were only forty-eight men left in the Dutch ship. The yacht escaped, and reached Ternate, from which island her crew proceeded to Bantam. Van Noort continued his westward course, and was the first Netherlander to sail round the world. He reached Rotterdam on the 12th of August 1601.

On the 26th of April 1599 Stephen van der Hagen sailed from Texel with three ships, the Zon, the Maan, and the Morgen Ster. The people of Amboina were then at war with the Portuguese, and Van der Hagen entered into an agreement with their ruler to assist him in return for a monopoly of the sale of cloves at a fixed price. In accordance with this agreement, in September 1600 under Van der Hagen’s direction a fort was built at Amboina, and when he sailed he left twenty-seven Dutch volunteers under Jan Dirkszoon Sonneberg to aid in guarding it.

No fresh discoveries on the African coast were made by any of the fleets sent out at this time, but to some of the bays new names were given.

In December 1599 four ships fitted out by an association at Amsterdam calling itself the New Brabant Company sailed from Texel for the Indies, under command of Pieter Both. Two of them returned early in 1601, leaving the Vereenigde Landen and the Hof van Holland under charge of Paulus van Caerden to follow as soon as they could obtain cargoes. On the 8th of July 1601 Van Caerden put into the watering place of SÃo Bras on the South African coast, for the purpose of repairing one of his ships which was in a leaky condition. The commander, with twenty soldiers, went a short distance inland to endeavour to find people from whom he could obtain some cattle, but though he came across a party of eight individuals he did not succeed in getting any oxen or sheep. A supply of fresh water was taken in, but no refreshment except mussels could be procured, on account of which Van Caerden gave the inlet the name Mossel Bay, which it has ever since retained.

On the 14th the Hof van Holland having been repaired, the two ships sailed, but two days later, as they were making no progress against a head wind, they put into another bay. Here some Hottentots were found, from whom the voyagers obtained for pieces of iron as many horned cattle and sheep as they could consume fresh or had salt to preserve. For this reason the commander gave it the name Flesh Bay.

On the 21st sail was set, but the Hof van Holland being found leaky again, on the 23rd another bay was entered, where her damages were repaired. On account of a westerly gale the ships were detained here until the 30th, when they sailed, but finding the wind contrary outside, they returned to anchor. No inhabitants were seen, but the commander visited a river near by, where he encountered a party from whom he obtained five sheep in exchange for bits of iron. In the river were numerous hippopotami. Abundance of fine fish having been secured here, the commander gave the inlet the name Fish Bay.

On the 2nd of August the ships sailed, and on the 27th passed the Cape of Good Hope, to the great joy of all on board, who had begun to fear that they might be detained much longer on the eastern side by adverse winds.

On the 5th of May 1601 a fleet of three vessels, named the Ram, the Schaap, and the Lam, sailed for the Indies from Vere in Zeeland, under command of Joris van Spilbergen. On the 15th of November the fleet put into St. Helena Bay, where no inhabitants were seen, though smoke rising from many fires was observed inland. The only refreshment procurable was fish, which were caught in great quantities.

On the 20th Spilbergen sailed from St. Helena Bay, and beating against a head wind, in the evening of the 28th he anchored off an island, to which he gave the name Elizabeth. Four years later Sir Edward Michelburne termed it Cony Island, which name, under the Dutch form of Dassen, it still bears. Seals in great numbers, sea-birds of different kinds, and conies were found. At this place he remained only twenty-four hours. On the 2nd of December he cast anchor close to another island, which he named Cornelia. It was the Robben Island of the present day. Here were found seals and penguins in great numbers, but no conies. The next day at noon Spilbergen reached the watering place of Saldanha, the anchorage in front of Table Mountain, and gave it the name Table Bay, which it still bears.

The sick were conveyed to land, where a hospital was established. A few inhabitants were met, to whom presents of beads were made, and who were understood to make signs that they would bring cattle for sale, but they went away and did not return. Abundance of fish was obtained with a seine at the mouth of a stream which Spilbergen named the Jacqueline, now Salt River; but, as meat was wanted, the smallest of the vessels was sent to Elizabeth Island, where a great number of penguins and conies were killed and salted in. The fleet remained in Table Bay until the 23rd of December. When passing Cornelia Island, a couple of conies were set on shore, and seven or eight sheep, which had been left there by some previous voyagers, were shot, and their carcases taken on board. Off the Cape of Good Hope the two French ships of which mention has been made were seen.

Spilbergen kept along the coast, noticing the formation of the land and the numerous streams falling into the sea, but was sorely hindered in his progress by the Agulhas current, which was found setting so strong to the south-westward that at times he could make no way against it even with the breeze in his favour. On the 17th of January 1602, owing to this cause, he stood off from the coast, and did not see it again.

On the 23rd of April 1601 Wolfert Hermanszoon sailed for the Indies with a fleet of five ships. On reaching Palembang in Sumatra he learned from the Chinese crew of a trading vessel that a Portuguese fleet of eight large galleons and twenty-two smaller ships, under AndrÉ Furtado de MendoÇa, was besieging Bantam with a view of punishing its ruler for having traded with the Dutch. MendoÇa was a man of renown in the East,[34] having been a successful commander in many wars, and his force was apparently so enormous in comparison with that under Hermanszoon that at first sight it would seem foolhardy to contend with it. But the Sea Beggars were not given to be afraid of anything on their own element, and they realised the importance of relieving Bantam and establishing their reputation for valour in the eyes of the Indian rulers. Accordingly Hermanszoon prepared his ships for action, sailed to Bantam, and on the 25th of December 1601 boldly attacked the great galleons.

It was soon seen that the battle was not such an unequal one after all. MendoÇa had eight hundred Portuguese soldiers in his fleet, but the crews of his ships were all lascars or slaves, who were almost useless in battle. Hermanszoon could choose his position, deliver his fire, and then stand off and prepare for another attack. His ships, clumsy as they would appear to our eyes, were to those of the Portuguese like what modern gunboats under steam would be to three-deckers of the last century. At nightfall MendoÇa drew his ships close together under an island, and arranged them to act as a great fort. On the 26th the weather was stormy, so that nothing could be done. On the 27th Hermanszoon attacked again, and succeeded in overmastering and burning two of the smaller ships of war after nearly every one on board was killed. MendoÇa used three more of his frigates as fire ships, but the Dutch vessels were too swift for him and were out of harm’s way before they exploded. He did not wait to be attacked again, and on the morning of the 28th his armada was seen to be in full flight and Bantam was relieved.

The Dutch were received with transports of joy by the ruler and people of the place, and a commercial treaty greatly to their advantage was entered into. At Banda also a similar treaty was concluded. When returning home, a Portuguese carrack or freight ship of the largest size, with a valuable cargo on board, was captured off St. Helena, so that the voyage was a very profitable one.

MendoÇa, after his flight from Bantam, directed his course to Amboina, where he inflicted heavy punishment upon the natives for trading with the Dutch, and cut down all the clove trees in the neighbourhood of the principal town. He then placed a garrison in the fort there, and took his departure.

Jacob van Heemskerk left Holland in company with Hermanszoon on the 23rd of April 1601 on his second voyage to India as admiral of a fleet of eight ships. In June 1603 he captured a carrack very richly laden with silk, porcelain, and other Chinese productions, on her way from Macao to Malacca. A few weeks later another carrack similarly laden was captured at Macao without resistance by a fleet under Cornelis van Veen.

Altogether between 1595 and 1602 sixty-five ships sailed from Holland and Zeeland for India, of which only fifty-four returned. By this time it had become evident that large armed fleets were necessary to secure safety and to cope with the Portuguese there if a permanent trade was to be established. The rivalry too between the little companies was raising the price of spices so greatly in the East and lowering it in Europe that it was feared there would soon be no profit left. For these reasons, and to conduct the Indian trade in a manner the most beneficial to the people of the whole republic, the states-general resolved to unite all the small trading associations in one great company with many privileges and large powers. The first step to this end was to amalgamate the various companies in each town, and when this was effected, to bring them all under one directorate. The charter, or terms upon which the consolidated Company came into existence, was dated at the Hague on the 20th of March 1602, and contained forty-six clauses, the principal of which were as follows:—

All of the inhabitants of the United Netherlands had the right given to them to subscribe to the capital in as small or as large sums as they might choose, with this proviso, that if more money should be tendered than was needed, those applying for shares of over two thousand five hundred pounds sterling should receive less, so that the applicants for smaller shares might have the full amounts asked for allotted to them.

The chambers, or offices for the transaction of business, were to participate in the following proportion: that of Amsterdam one-half, that of Middelburg in Zeeland one-quarter, those of Delft and Rotterdam, otherwise called of the Maas, together one-eighth, and those of Hoorn and Enkhuizen, otherwise called those of the North Quarter or sometimes those of North Holland and West Friesland, together the remaining eighth.

The general directory was to consist of seventeen persons, eight of whom were to represent the chamber of Amsterdam, four that of Middelburg, two those of the Maas, two those of the North Quarter, and the seventeenth was to be chosen alternately by all of these except the chamber of Amsterdam. The place of meeting of the general directory was fixed at Amsterdam for six successive years, then at Middelburg for two years, then at Amsterdam again for six years, and so on.

The directors of each chamber were named in the charter, being the individuals who were the directors of the companies previously established in those towns, and it was provided that no others should be appointed until these should be reduced by death or resignation: in the chamber of Amsterdam to twenty persons, in that of Zeeland to twelve, and in those of Delft, Rotterdam, Hoorn, and Enkhuizen each to seven. After that, whenever a vacancy should occur, the remaining directors were to nominate three qualified individuals, of whom the states of the province in which the chamber was situated were to select one.

To qualify an individual to be a director in the chambers of the North Quarter it was necessary to own shares to the value of £250 sterling, and double that amount to be a director in any of the other chambers. The directors were to be bound by oath to be faithful in the administration of the duties entrusted to them, and not to favour a majority of the shareholders at the expense of a minority. Directors were prohibited from selling anything whatever to the Company without previously obtaining the sanction of the states provincial or the authorities of the city in which the chamber that they represented was situated.

All inhabitants of the United Provinces other than this Company were prohibited from trading beyond the Straits of Magellan, or to the eastward of the Cape of Good Hope, during the period of twenty-one years, for which the charter was granted, under penalty of forfeiture of ship and cargo. Within these limits the East India Company was empowered to enter into treaties and make contracts in the name of the states-general, to build fortresses, to appoint governors, military commanders, judges, and other necessary officers, who were all, however, to take oaths of fidelity to the states-general or high authorities of the Netherlands, who were not to be prevented from making complaints to the states-general, and whose appointments were to be reported to the states-general for confirmation.

For these privileges the Company was to pay £12,500 sterling, which amount the states-general subscribed towards the capital, for the profit and at the risk of the general government of the provinces. The capital was nominally furnished in the following proportions: Amsterdam one-half, Zeeland one-fourth, the Maas one-eighth, and the North Quarter one-eighth; but in reality it was contributed as under:—

		£	s.	d.
Amsterdam		307,202	10	0
Zeeland		106,304	10	0
The Maas	Delft	38,880	3	4
	Rotterdam	14,546	16	8
The North Quarter	Hoorn	22,369	3	4
	Enkhuizen	47,380	3	4
Total working capital		536,683	6	8
The share of the states-general		12,500	0	0
Total nominal capital		549,183	6	8

The capital was divided into shares of £250 sterling each. The shares, often sub-divided into fractions, were negotiable like any other property, and rose or fell in value according to the position of the Company at any time.

The advantage which the State derived from the establishment of this great association was apparent. The sums received in payment of import dues would have been contributed to an equal extent by individual traders. The amounts paid for the renewal of the charter—in 1647 the Company paid £133,333 6s. 8d. for its renewal for twenty-five years, and still larger sums were paid subsequently—might have been derived from trading licenses. The Company frequently aided the Republic with loans of large amount when the State was in temporary need, but loans could then have been raised in the modern method whenever necessary. Apart from these services, however, there was one supreme advantage gained by the creation of the East India Company which could not have been obtained from individual traders. A powerful navy was called into existence, great armed fleets working in unison and subject to the same control were always ready to assist the State. What must otherwise have been an element of weakness, a vast number of merchant ships scattered over the ocean and ready to fall a prey to an enemy’s cruisers, was turned into a bulwark of strength.

In course of time several modifications took place in the constitution of the Company, and the different provinces as well as various cities were granted the privilege of having representatives in one or other of the chambers. Thus the provinces Gelderland, Utrecht, and Friesland, and the cities Dordrecht, Haarlem, Leiden, and Gouda had each a representative in the chamber of Amsterdam; Groningen had a representative in the chamber of Zeeland; Overyssel one in the chamber of Delft, &c. The object of this was to make the Company represent the whole Republic.

Notwithstanding such regulations, however, the city of Amsterdam soon came to exercise an immoderate influence in the direction. In 1672 it was estimated that shares equal to three-fourths of the whole capital were owned there, and of the twenty-five directors of the local chamber, eighteen were chosen by the burgomasters of the city. Fortunately, the charter secured to the other chambers a stated proportion of patronage and trade.

Such was the constitution of the Company which set itself the task of destroying the Portuguese power in the East and securing for itself the lucrative spice trade. It had no difficulty in obtaining as many men as were needed, for the German states—not then as now united in one great empire—formed an almost inexhaustible reservoir to draw soldiers from, and the Dutch seaports, together with Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, furnished an adequate supply of excellent seamen. It sent out strong and well-armed fleets, capable of meeting any force the enemy had to oppose them, and of driving him from the open seas.

The first of these fleets was sent out in two divisions, one of three large ships, under Sebald de Weert, which sailed on the 31st of March 1602, and the other of eleven large ships and a yacht, under Wybrand van Waerwyk, which followed on the 17th of June. Sebald de Weert directed his course to the island of Ceylon, and cast anchor in the harbour of Batticaloa on the eastern shore. The maharaja of Kandy was then the most powerful ruler in the island, and was at war with the Portuguese. Spilbergen had been to visit him, and now De Weert followed, he and his attendants riding inland on elephants. He was received with great state by the maharaja and the people. An agreement was made of close friendship and commercial intercourse, and a plan of operations against the Portuguese was arranged. De Weert returned to Batticaloa, and proceeded to Atchin for assistance, from which place he came back with seven ships.

But now a great blunder was made. No meat was to be purchased, and as some cows were seen a party of men went ashore and shot them, in absolute ignorance of the Buddhist belief in the transmigration of souls and the commandment not to take life.[35] Full payment was offered, but was indignantly refused, and a complete revulsion of feeling towards the Dutch took place. De Weert could not imagine the cause of this, but prepared to give the maharaja, who was on his way to the coast, a splendid reception on board his ship. Meantime four Portuguese vessels were captured, and their crews were released and sent away. One of the maharaja’s sons was a prisoner in the hands of the Portuguese, and he thought to obtain his liberty in exchange for the Portuguese officers. When the captives were released without an exchange having been effected the prince’s rage knew no bounds. On the 1st of June 1603 De Weert and forty-six others went ashore unsuspicious of danger, when they were suddenly attacked by the maharaja’s order, and all were put to death. This ended commercial intercourse for a time, but in 1610 another treaty of friendship was entered into with the ruler of Kandy.

Wybrand van Waerwyk with the principal division of the fleet cast anchor before Bantam in the island of Java, and in August 1603 concluded an arrangement with the sultan for the establishment of a permanent factory or trading station in that town. A strong stone building was procured for the purpose, goods were landed and stored, and an officer named FranÇois Wittert was placed in charge with a staff of assistants. This factory at Bantam was for several years thereafter regarded as the principal establishment of the Dutch in India. Another, but much smaller one, was soon afterwards formed at GrÉsik in the same island.

Though the Dutch were soon in almost undisputed possession of the valuable Spice islands, they were never able to eject the Portuguese from the comparatively worthless coast of South-Eastern Africa. That coast would only have been an encumbrance to them, if they had secured it, for its commerce was never worth much more than the cost of its maintenance until the highlands of the interior were occupied by Europeans, and the terrible mortality caused by its malaria would have been a serious misfortune to them. It was out of their ocean highway too, for they steered across south of Madagascar, instead of keeping along the African shore. But they were drawn on by rumours of the gold which was to be had, and so they resolved to make themselves masters of Mozambique, and with that island of all the Portuguese possessions subordinate to it. In Lisbon their intentions were suspected, and in January 1601 the king issued instructions that Dom Alvaro d’Abranches, Nuno da Cunha’s successor as captain of Mozambique, was on no account to absent himself from the island, as it might at any time be attacked by either the Turks or the Dutch.

On the 18th of December 1603 Steven van der Hagen left Holland for India with a strong armed fleet, consisting of the Vereenigde Provincien, Amsterdam, Dordrecht, Hoorn, and West Friesland, each of three hundred and fifty tons burden, the Gelderland and Zeelandia, each of two hundred and fifty tons, the Hof van Holland, of one hundred and eighty tons, the Delft and Enkhuizen, each of one hundred and fifty tons, the Medenblik, of one hundred and twenty-five tons, and a despatch boat named the Duifken, of thirty tons burden. In those days such a fleet was regarded as, and actually was, a very formidable force, for though there were no ships in it of the size of the great galleons of Spain and Portugal, each one was much less unwieldy, and had its artillery better placed. There were twelve hundred men on board, and the equipment cost no less than £184,947 6s. 8d.

Van der Hagen arrived before Mozambique on the 17th of June 1604. Fort SÃo SebastiÃo had not at the time its ordinary garrison of one hundred soldiers, owing to a disaster that had recently occurred. A great horde of barbarians, called the Cabires by the Portuguese, had entered the territory of the monomotapa, and were laying it waste, so the captain LourenÇo de Brito went to the assistance of the Kalanga chief, but was defeated and lost ten or twelve Portuguese and part of his stores. SebastiÃo de Macedo was then in command at Mozambique. He sent a vessel with fifty soldiers to De Brito’s assistance, but on the passage she was lost with all on board. None had yet arrived to replace them, but the resident inhabitants of the island had retired to the fort with everything of value that they could remove, so Van der Hagen considered it too strong to be attacked and therefore proceeded to blockade it. There was a carrack at anchor, waiting for some others from Lisbon to sail in company to Goa. The boats of the Dutch fleet cut her out, in spite of the heavy fire of the fort upon them. She had on board a quantity of ivory collected at Sofala and other places on the East African coast, but nothing else of much value.

On the 30th of June a small vessel from one of the factories, laden with rice and ivory, came running up to the island, and was too near to escape when she discovered her danger. She was turned into a tender, and named the Mozambique. Then, for five weeks, the blockade continued, without any noteworthy incident. On the 5th of August five pangayos arrived, laden with rice and millet, and were of course seized. Three days later Van der Hagen landed on the island with one hundred and fifty men, but found no sign of hunger, and saw that the prospect of the surrender of the fort was remote. He did no other damage than setting fire to a single house, and as night drew on he returned on board.

He was now anxious to proceed to India, so on the 12th of August he set fire to the captured carrack, and sailed, leaving the Delft, Enkhuizen, and Duifken, to wait for the ships expected from Lisbon. These vessels rejoined him, but without having made any prizes, soon after his arrival at Amboina, which was assigned as the place of meeting. He then attacked the Portuguese fort on that island, which was surrendered to him on the 23rd of February 1605. Having placed a Dutch garrison in the fort, and thus secured possession of this valuable island, he sailed to Tidor, where the Portuguese had a fortress. This stronghold he gained in May 1605, but in March 1606 it was recovered by the Portuguese, who at the same time overran a great part of the island of Ternate, where Van der Hagen had obtained trading privileges. In 1605 a factory was also established by the Dutch on the island of Banda.

On the 12th of May 1605 Cornelis Matelief sailed with eleven ships for India. One of the most important strongholds of the Portuguese in the East was Malacca, as it commanded the navigation of the strait of the same name. Matelief entered into a treaty with the sultan of Johor at the southern extremity of the Malay peninsula, and with his assistance endeavoured to obtain possession of the stronghold, which was bravely defended by AndrÉ Furtado de MendoÇa. The first blockade of Malacca lasted four months, and ended by Matelief’s being obliged to retire from a very superior naval force sent from Goa. The second blockade was shorter, but though seven Portuguese ships were taken and five hundred Portuguese soldiers were killed, it was unsuccessful. At Amboina, Matelief strengthened the garrison of the Dutch fort, and gave the soldiers and sailors there permission to marry native women. He did not get possession of the Portuguese castle on Ternate, but he built Fort Orange on another part of the island, and left an effective garrison in it.

On the 28th of January 1608 Matelief sailed from Bantam in the Oranje to return home. On the 12th of April he put into Table Bay, as he was badly in want of meat, and hoped to obtain as much as he needed here. In this he succeeded, for he bartered thirty-four oxen, five calves, and a hundred and seventy-three sheep from the Hottentots for pieces of old iron hoop and rings, valued at less than a halfpenny for each animal. His description of the Hottentots is one of the best of that time, and is accurate in all its details. The greatest plague in Table Valley he found to be the flies, which from this and other accounts appear to have been even more troublesome then than they are to-day. On Robben Island he killed about a hundred seals for the sake of their skins, and as he had more sheep than he needed, he left twenty there to breed. He remained in Table Bay longer than two months, and with a crew thoroughly refreshed he set sail for Holland on the 22nd of June.

Another attempt to get possession of Mozambique was made in 1607. On the 29th of March of that year a Dutch fleet of eight large ships—the Banda, Bantam, Ceylon, Walcheren, Ter Veere, Zierikzee, China, and Patane,—carrying one thousand and sixty men, commanded by Paulus van Caerden, appeared before the island. The Portuguese historian of this event represents that the fortress was at the time badly in want of repair, that it was insufficiently provided with cannon, and that there were no artillerymen nor indeed regular soldiers of any branch of the service in it, its defence being undertaken by seventy male inhabitants of the town, who were the only persons on the island capable of bearing arms. But this statement does not agree either with the Dutch narrative or with the account given by Dos Santos, from which it appears that there were between soldiers and residents of the island one hundred and forty-five men in the fortress. It was commanded by an officer—Dom EstevÃo d’Ataide by name—who deserves a place among the bravest of his countrymen. He divided his force into four companies, to each of which he gave a bastion in charge. To one, under Martim Gomes de Carvalho, was committed the defence of the bastion SÃo JoÃo, another, under Antonio Monteiro Corte Real, had a similar charge in the bastion Santo Antonio, the bastion Nossa Senhora was confided to the care of AndrÉ de Alpoim de Brito, while the bastion SÃo Gabriel, which was the one most exposed to assault on the land side and where the stoutest resistance would have to be made, was entrusted to the company under Diogo de Carvalho. The people of the town abandoned their houses and hastily took shelter within the fortress, carrying their most valuable effects with them. Van Caerden, in the Banda, led the way right under the guns of SÃo SebastiÃo to the anchorage, where the Sofala packet and two carracks were lying. A heavy fire was opened on both sides, but, though the ships were slightly damaged, as the ramparts were of great height and the Portuguese guns could not be depressed to command the Dutch position thoroughly, no one except the master of the Ceylon was wounded. Two of the vessels at anchor were partly burned, but all were made prizes after their crews had escaped to the shore.

On the 1st of April Van Caerden landed with seven hundred men and seven heavy guns, several of them twenty-eight-pounders, in order to lay siege to Fort SÃo SebastiÃo. The Portuguese set fire to the town, in order to prevent their enemy from getting possession of spoil, though in this object they were unsuccessful, as a heavy fall of rain extinguished the flames before much damage was done. The Dutch commander took possession of the abandoned buildings without opposition, and made the Dominican convent his headquarters, lodging his people in the best houses. He commenced at once making trenches in which the fortress could be approached by men under shelter from its fire, and on the 6th his first battery was completed. The blacks, excepting the able-bodied, being considered an encumbrance by both combatants, D’Ataide expelled those who were in the fort, and Van Caerden caused all who were within his reach to be transported to the mainland.

From the batteries, which were mere earthen mounds with level surfaces, protected on the exposed sides with boxes, casks, and bags filled with soil, a heavy fire was opened, by which the parapet of the bastion Santo Antonio was broken down, but it was repaired at night by the defenders, the women and others incapable of bearing arms giving assistance in this labour. The musketeers on the walls, in return, caused some loss to their opponents by shooting any who exposed themselves. The Portuguese historian makes special mention of one Dutch officer in a suit of white armour, who went about recklessly in full view, encouraging his men, and apparently regardless of danger, until he was killed by a musket ball.

The trenches were at length within thirty paces of the bastion SÃo Gabriel, and a battery was constructed there, which could not be injured by the cannon on the fortress owing to their great elevation, while from it the walls could be battered with twenty-eight pound shot as long as the artillerymen took care not to show themselves to the musketeers on the ramparts. The Dutch commander then proposed a parley and D’Ataide having consented, he demanded the surrender of the fortress. He stated that the Portuguese could expect no assistance from either Europe or India, as the mother country was exhausted and the viceroy Dom Martim Affonso de Castro had been defeated in a naval engagement, besides which nearly all the strongholds of the East were lost to them. It would therefore be better to capitulate while it could be done in safety than to expose the lives of the garrison to the fury of men who would carry the place by storm. Further, even if the walls proved too massive for cannon, hunger must soon reduce the fortress, as there could not be more than three months’ provisions in it. The Portuguese replied with taunts and bravado, and defied the besiegers to do their worst. They would have no other intercourse with rebels, they said, than that of arms.

During the night of the 17th some of the garrison made a sortie for the purpose of destroying a drawbridge, which they effected, and then retired, after having killed two men according to their own account, though only having wounded one according to the Dutch statement. A trench was now made close up to the wall of the bastion SÃo Gabriel, and was covered with movable shields of timber of such thickness that they could not be destroyed by anything thrown upon them from the ramparts. During the night of the 29th, however, the garrison made a second sortie, in which they killed five Hollanders and wounded many more, and on the following day they succeeded in destroying the wooden shields by fire.

In the meantime fever and dysentery had attacked Van Caerden’s people, and the prospect was becoming gloomy in the extreme. The fire from the batteries and ships had not damaged the walls of the fortress below the parapet, and sickness was increasing so fast that the Dutch commander could not wait for famine to give him the prize. He therefore resolved to raise the siege, and on the 6th of May he removed his cannon.

War between nations of different creeds in those days was carried on in a merciless manner. On the 7th of May Van Caerden wrote to Captain d’Ataide that he intended to burn and destroy all the churches, convents, houses, and palm groves on the island and the buildings and plantations on the mainland, unless they were ransomed; but offered to make terms if messengers were sent to him with that object. A truce was entered into for the purpose of correspondence, and six Hollanders dressed in Spanish costume went with a letter to the foot of the wall, where it was fastened to a string and drawn up. D’Ataide declined the proposal, however, and replied that he had no instructions from his superiors, nor intention of his own, except to do all that was possible with his weapons. He believed that if he ransomed the town on this occasion, he would only expose it to similar treatment every time a strong Dutch fleet should pass that way.

Van Caerden then burned all the boats, canoes, and houses, cut down all the cocoa-nut trees, sent a party of men to the mainland, who destroyed everything of value that they could reach there, and finally, just before embarking he set fire to the Dominican convent and the church of SÃo Gabriel. What was more to be deplored, adds the Portuguese historian Barbuda, “the perfidious heretics burned with abominable fury all the images that were in the churches, after which they treated them with a thousand barbarous indignities.” The walls of the great church and of some other buildings were too massive to be destroyed by the flames, but everything that was combustible was utterly ruined.

On the morning of the 16th of May, before daylight, the Dutch fleet set sail. As the ships were passing Fort SÃo SebastiÃo every gun that could be got to bear was brought into use on both sides, when the Zierikzee had her tiller shot away, and ran aground. Her crew and the most valuable effects on board were rescued, however, by the boats of the rest of the fleet, though many men were wounded by the fire from the fort. The wreck was given to the flames.

In the second attempt to get possession of Mozambique the Dutch lost forty men, either killed by the enemy or carried off by fever, and they took many sick and wounded away. The Portuguese asserted that they had only thirteen men killed during the siege, and they magnified their slain opponents to over three hundred.

After his arrival in India Van Caerden obtained possession of a couple of Portuguese forts of small importance, but on the 17th of September 1608 he was taken prisoner in a naval battle, and was long detained in captivity.

As soon as their opponents were out of sight of Mozambique the Portuguese set about repairing the damage that had been done. In this they were assisted by the crews of three ships, under command of Dom Jeronymo Coutinho, that called on their way from Lisbon to Goa. The batteries were removed, the trenches were levelled, the walls of the ruined Dominican convent were broken down, and the fortress was repaired and provided with a good supply of food and munitions of war. Its garrison also was strengthened with one hundred soldiers landed from the ships. The inhabitants of the town returned to the ruins of their former habitations, and endeavoured to make new homes for themselves. These efforts to retrieve their disasters had hardly been made when the island was attacked by another and more formidable fleet.

It consisted of the ships Geunieerde Provintien, Hollandia, Amsterdam, Roode Leeuw met Pylen, Middelburg, Zeelandia, Delft, Rotterdam, Hoorn, Arend, Paauw, Valk, and Griffioen, carrying in all between eighteen and nineteen hundred men, and was under the command of Pieter Willemszoon Verhoeff, an officer who had greatly distinguished himself after Admiral Heemskerk’s death in the famous battle in Gibraltar Bay. Verhoeff left the Netherlands on the 22nd of December 1607, and after a long stay at the island of St. Helena where he waited for the westerly winds to take him past the Cape of Good Hope, on the 28th of July 1608 arrived at Mozambique. He was under the impression that Van Caerden had certainly obtained possession of the fortress, and his object was to lie in wait for Portuguese ships in the Channel; but he was undeceived when his signals were answered with cannon balls and a flag of defiance was hoisted over the ramparts.

In the port were lying four coasting vessels and a carrack with a valuable cargo on board, ready to sail for Goa. In endeavouring to escape, the carrack ran aground under the guns of the fort, where the Dutch got possession of her, and made thirty-four of the crew prisoners. These were removed, but before much of the cargo could be got out the Portuguese from the fortress made a gallant dash, retook the carrack, and burned her to the water’s edge. Two of the coasters were made prizes, the other two were in a position where they could not be attacked.

Within a few hours of his arrival Verhoeff landed a strong force, and formed a camp on the site of the destroyed Dominican convent. Next morning he commenced making trenches towards the fortress, by digging ditches and filling bags with earth, of which banks were then made. The Portuguese of the town had retired within the fortress in such haste that they were unable to remove any of their effects, and the blacks, as during the preceding siege, were now sent over to the mainland to be out of the way. Some of the ships were directed to cruise off the port, the others were anchored out of cannon range. A regular siege of the fortress was commenced.

In the mode of attack this siege differed little from that by Van Caerden, as trenches and batteries were made in the same manner and almost in the same places. But there were some incidents connected with it that deserve to be mentioned. At its commencement an accident occurred in the fortress, which nearly had disastrous consequences. A soldier, through carelessness, let a lighted fuse fall in a quantity of gunpowder, and by the explosion that resulted several men were killed and a fire was kindled which for a short time threatened the destruction of the storehouses, but which was extinguished before much harm was done.

On the second day after the batteries were in full working order the wall of the fortress between the bastions Santo Antonio and SÃo Gabriel was partly broken down, and, according to the Portuguese account, a breach was opened through which a storming party might have entered. “If,” says the historian Barbuda, “they had been Portuguese, no doubt they would have stormed; but as the Dutch are nothing more than good artillerymen, and beyond this are of no account except to be burned as desperate heretics, they had not courage to rush through the ruin of the wall.” That this was said of men who had fought under Heemskerk leads one to suspect that probably the breach was not of great size, and the more so as the garrison was able to repair it during the following night. It is not mentioned in the Dutch account, in which the bravery of their opponents is fully recognised.

On the 4th of August Verhoeff sent a trumpeter with a letter demanding the surrender of the fortress. D’Ataide would not even write a reply. He said that as he had compelled Van Caerden to abandon the siege he hoped to be able to do the same with his present opponent. The captain of the bastion SÃo Gabriel, however, wrote that the castle had been confided by the king to the commandant, who was not the kind of cat to be taken without gloves. Verhoeff believed that the garrison was ill supplied with food, so his trumpeter was well entertained, and on several occasions goats and pigs were driven out of the gateway in a spirit of bravado.

Sorties were frequently made by the besieged, who had the advantage of being able to observe from the ramparts the movements of the Dutch. In one of these a soldier named Moraria distinguished himself by attacking singly with his lance three pikemen in armour at a distance from their batteries, killing two of them and wounding the other.

D’Ataide was made acquainted with his enemy’s plans by a French deserter, who claimed his protection on the ground of being of the same religion. Four others subsequently deserted from the Dutch camp, and were received in the fortress on the same plea. Verhoeff demanded that they should be surrendered to him, and threatened that if they were not given up he would put to death the thirty-four prisoners he had taken in the carrack. D’Ataide replied that if the prisoners were thirty-four thousand he would not betray men who were catholics and who had claimed his protection, but if the Portuguese captives were murdered their blood would certainly be avenged. Verhoeff relates in his journal that the whole of the prisoners were then brought out in sight of the garrison and shot, regarding the act in the spirit of the time as rather creditable than otherwise; but the version of the Portuguese historian may be correct, in which it is stated that six men with their hands bound were shot in sight of their countrymen, and that the others, though threatened, were spared. Until the 18th of August the siege was continued. Twelve hundred and fifty cannon balls had been fired against the fortress, without effect as far as its reduction was concerned. Thirty of Verhoeff’s men had been killed and eighty were wounded. He therefore abandoned the effort, and embarked his force, after destroying what remained of the town.

On the 21st a great galleon approached the island so close that the ships in the harbour could be counted from her deck, but put about the moment the Dutch flag was distinguished. Verhoeff sent the ships Arend, Griffioen, and Valk in pursuit, and she was soon overtaken. According to the Dutch account she made hardly any resistance, but in a letter to the king from her captain, Francisco de Sodre Pereira, which is still preserved, he claims to have made a gallant stand for the honour of his flag. The galleon was poorly armed, but he says that he fought till his ammunition was all expended, and even then would not consent to surrender, though the ship was so riddled with cannon balls that she was in danger of going down. He preferred, he said to those around him, to sink with his colours flying. The purser, however, lowered the ensign without orders, and a moment afterwards the Dutch, who had closed in, took possession. The prize proved to be the Bom Jesus, from Lisbon, which had got separated from a fleet on the way to Goa, under command of the newly appointed viceroy, the count De Feira. She had a crew of one hundred and eighty men. The officers were detained as prisoners, the others were put ashore on the island Saint George with provisions sufficient to last them two days.

On the 23rd of August the fleet sailed from Mozambique for India. There can be little question that this defeat of the Dutch was more advantageous to them than victory would have been, for if their design had succeeded a very heavy tax upon their resources and their energy would have been entailed thereafter. After this siege Fort SÃo SebastiÃo was provided with a garrison of one hundred and fifty men, and some small armed vessels were kept on the coast to endeavour to prevent the Dutch from communicating with the inhabitants or obtaining provisions and water, but their ships kept the Portuguese stations in constant alarm.

On his arrival in India Verhoeff entered into a treaty of alliance with the ruler of Calicut against the Portuguese, in which he secured commercial privileges. In May 1609 he and twenty-nine of his principal officers, when holding a conference with some Bandanese, were murdered on the island of Neira, and all the Dutch at Lonthor shared the same fate. This led immediately to the conquest of Neira, and the erection of the strong fort Nassau in a commanding position on the island. On the 10th of August 1609 a treaty of peace was concluded with the Bandanese government, in which the sovereignty of Neira was ceded to the Dutch, and a monopoly of the spice trade in all the islands dependent on Banda was secured. In June 1609 a treaty was concluded with the ruler of Ternate, by which that island and all its dependencies came under the protection of the Dutch, and a monopoly of the spice trade was secured. In September 1609 a factory was established at Firato in Japan, where the Dutch obtained from the emperor liberty to trade. On the 25th of November 1609 the Portuguese fort on Batjan, one of the Molucca islands, was taken, and became thereafter Fort Barneveld.

V.
The Truce with Spain and English Rivalry.

By this time the Dutch had factories or trading stations at Masulipatam, Pulikat, and two smaller places on the eastern coast of Hindostan, they had liberty to trade at Calicut, they had entered into a new treaty with the maharaja of Kandy in Ceylon, they had factories at Bantam and GrÉsik in Java, and in November 1610 they entered into a treaty with the ruler of Jakatra in the same island, in which they secured the site of the future city of Batavia, they held the protectorate of Ternate, although the Portuguese still had a fort there, Neira was theirs with a monopoly of the spice trade of all the Banda islands, Batjan was theirs also, as was Amboina, they had factories at Patani on the eastern coast of the Malay peninsula, established in 1604, and at Johor at its southern extremity, also at Achin in Sumatra, at Landok in Borneo, on the island of Celebes, and in the empire of Japan. The foundation of the vast realm which they subsequently acquired in the eastern seas was thus established on the ruins of the gigantic dominions of Portugal, though much fighting was still to be done before it should be fully built up.

A great defect appeared to be the want of some local authority to control the conquests and supervise the trade. To meet this want the assembly of seventeen resolved to establish a strong government in the East, though the seat of authority was not fixed upon. On the 21st of November 1609 Pieter Both was appointed first governor-general of Netherlands India, and councillors, consisting of the principal officials, were named to assist him. He left Texel on the 30th of January 1610 with a fleet of eight ships. In a great storm off the Cape his ship got separated from the others, so he put into Table Bay to repair some damages to the mainmast and to refresh his men. In July 1610 Captain Nicholas Downton called at the same port in an English vessel, and found Governor-General Both’s ship lying at anchor and also two homeward bound Dutch ships taking in train oil that had been collected at Robben Island. The governor-general arrived at Bantam on the 19th of December 1610, and in the factory at that place, in a town belonging to an independent though friendly sovereign, an authority, soon to eclipse that of any Indian prince, was first established.

The great successes of the Dutch in the eastern seas caused the Spaniards to desire peace, and they were prepared to acknowledge the independence of the United Provinces if two conditions only could be obtained: the right of Roman Catholics to worship in public and the prohibition of the Indian trade. The archduke Albert made the first advance by sending two secret agents to the Hague at the close of 1606. The Dutch people were divided in opinion: one party, under the leadership of the prominent statesman Johan van Olden-Barneveld, favoured peace on reasonable terms, the other, under Maurits of Nassau, desired to continue the war until Spain should be thoroughly humiliated. The peace party was in the majority, and as the other European governments were urgent that hostilities should be brought to an end, in April 1607 an armistice was agreed to for eight months from the 4th of May, in order that negotiations might be entered into.

Just at this time an event occurred which greatly promoted the desire of the Spaniards for peace. A fleet of twenty-six small ships of war and four tenders, under Admiral Jacob van Heemskerk, had recently been sent by the states-general to cruise in the Atlantic. Heemskerk came to learn that a Spanish war fleet of ten great galleons and eleven smaller vessels, under command of Don Juan Alvarez d’Avila, was lying at anchor in Gibraltar Bay under the guns of the fortress. Notwithstanding the tremendous disparity of force, he determined to attack the enemy, and on the 25th of April 1607 he stood into the bay and boldly grappled with the monster galleons. It was like a fight between giants and pygmies, but so daring were the Dutch sailors that every galleon was destroyed. Before nightfall nothing of the Spanish fleet but burning fragments could be seen floating in the bay or stranded on the shore. It was one of the most brilliant naval victories ever recorded, and it was won against such odds that it seemed to be due to God alone. Heemskerk fell in the battle, killed by a cannon ball, leaving a deathless name of glory behind him. The Spanish admiral also was killed in the engagement. Unfortunately the victory was tarnished by a ferocious massacre of all the Spaniards that could be laid hold of, for which barbarous act Pieter Willemszoon Verhoeff, captain of the admiral’s ship, was chiefly responsible.

The Dutch now rejected the two Spanish conditions with disdain, and had it not been for the intervention of the agents of other governments, the negotiations would have been broken off. As it was, they were continued, but such difficulties were experienced in coming to terms that it was necessary to prolong the armistice from time to time, and it was not until the 9th of April 1609 that matters were finally arranged and a treaty was signed at Antwerp. Even then it was not a final peace that was concluded, but only a truce for twelve years, during which time each party was to retain whatever territory it possessed on that day, and could carry on commerce freely with the other.

The republic of the United Netherlands thereafter consisted of the provinces of Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht, Friesland, Groningen, Overyssel with Drenthe except the town of Oldenzaal, which was held by the archduke, and about three quarters of ancient Gelderland, which retained that name. In this, however, the town of Groenlo or Grol was held by the archduke. South of the Schelde the republic was in possession of Sluis and Axel, with the forts along the river in Flanders, which with Flushing gave it control of the navigation of the stream and enabled it to stifle Antwerp. South of the Maas it possessed in Brabant all the territory belonging to the marquisate of Bergen op Zoom, the barony of Breda, and the land of Grave with Kuik. This territory in Flanders and Brabant was governed directly by the states-general, being of course detached from the provinces to which it properly belonged. The seven provinces were in one sense seven sovereign states, as they voted separately in the states-general, and no one of them was bound by any act to which it did not individually consent. It was the weakest form of a federal government, being rather a loose alliance than a firm union. That was its great defect, which, however, was not remedied until nearly two centuries more had passed away.

The provinces that remained under the government of Albert and Isabella covered much more ground than the present kingdom of Belgium.[36] France always coveted them, and never lost an opportunity to gnaw portions of them away. By the treaty of the Pyrenees on the 7th of November 1659 Louis XIV obtained a strip of territory containing Thionville, Montmedi, Damvilliers, Ivoix, and Marville. By the treaty of Aix la Chapelle on the 2nd of May 1668 he obtained Lille, Douai, Courtrai, and Charleroi. On the 17th of March 1677 Valenciennes was taken by the French, and on the 5th of April 1677 Cambrai fell into their hands. By the treaty of Nymegen on the 17th of September 1678 France was recognised as the owner of a slice of Belgian territory containing these cities, and by the treaty of Ratisbon on the 15th of August 1684 she acquired part of Luxemburg.

Thus before the close of the seventeenth century Belgium had lost to France two entire provinces—Artois and Lille with Douai and Orchies—and part of Flanders containing Dunkirk, Gravelines, and Menior, part of Hainaut, containing Valenciennes, Bavay, Maubeuge, Conde, Marienbourg, and Philippeville, part of Namur containing Charlemont, part of Luxemburg containing Thionville and Montmedi, and the city and bishopric of Cambrai, which then ranked as a duchy. The present boundary between France and Belgium was not fixed until 1814.

By the treaty of Utrecht the portion of Gelderland that remained subject to Albert and Isabella in 1609, excepting the town of Venlo, which passed to the republic, and the town and district of Roermonde, which went to Austria, was ceded to Prussia and became the circle of DÜsseldorf. Roermonde was added to the kingdom of the Netherlands in 1831. Luxemburg was divided into two portions by the treaty of London in 1839, one of which is now part of the German empire, and the other remains a province of Belgium. By the same treaty Limburg was divided into two sections, one of which remained to Belgium, the other became part of the kingdom of the Netherlands.

By the treaty of Munster on the 30th of January 1648, in which the king of Spain recognised the independence of the United Netherlands, the present province of North Brabant went to the republic,[37] as did also the city and jurisdiction of Maastricht and a small portion of Flanders. A map of Belgium as it is to-day is thus very different from one in 1610, but it contains the province of Liege, which did not then belong to it.

The trade of the Dutch with India now increased rapidly, but South Africa was hardly affected by it, except through the visits of passing ships and occasionally the residence of parties of Europeans for a short time on its shores.

In May 1611 the Dutch skipper Isaac le Maire, after whom the straits of Le Maire are named, called at Table Bay. When he sailed, he left behind his son Jacob and a party of seamen, who resided in Table Valley for several months. Their object was to kill seals on Robben Island, and to harpoon whales, which were then very abundant in South African waters in the winter season. They also tried to open up a trade for skins of animals with the Hottentots in the neighbourhood, but in this met with no success, as those barbarians needed all the peltry they could obtain for their own use.

In 1616 the assembly of seventeen resolved that its outward bound fleets should always put into Table Bay to refresh the crews, and from that time onward Dutch ships touched there almost every season. A kind of post office was established by marking the dates of arrivals and departures on stones, and burying letters in places indicated. But no attempt was made to explore the country, and no port south of the Zambesi except Table Bay was frequented by Netherlanders, so that down to the middle of the century nothing more concerning it was known than the Portuguese had placed on record.

The Dutch had now to fear the competition of the English in the East much more than that of the Portuguese. Our countrymen were equally enterprising and courageous, and however friendly the two nations might be in Europe, in distant lands they were animated by a spirit of rivalry which on some occasions went so far as to cause them to act unscrupulously towards each other. It will not be necessary to relate here the proceedings of the English in the eastern seas, but some references to their visits to Table Bay in those early times must be made.

They too had established an East India Company, whose first fleet, consisting of the Dragon, of six hundred tons, the Hector, of three hundred tons, the Ascension, of two hundred and sixty tons, and the Susan, of two hundred and forty tons burden, sailed from Torbay on the 22nd of April 1601. The admiral was James Lancaster, the same who had commanded the Edward Bonaventure ten years earlier. The chief pilot was John Davis, who had only returned from the Indies nine months before. On the 9th of September the fleet came to anchor in Table Bay, by which time the crews of all except the admiral’s ship were so terribly afflicted with scurvy that they were unable to drop their anchors. The admiral had kept his men in a tolerable state of health by supplying them with a small quantity of limejuice daily. After his ship was anchored he was obliged to get out his boats and go to the assistance of the others. Sails were then taken on shore to serve as tents, and the sick were landed as soon as possible. Trade was commenced with the Hottentots and in the course of a few days forty-two oxen and a thousand sheep were obtained for pieces of iron hoop. The fleet remained in Table Bay nearly seven weeks, during which time most of the sick men recovered.

On the 5th of December 1604 the Tiger—a ship of two hundred and forty tons—and a pinnace called the Tiger’s Whelp set sail from Cowes for the Indies. The expedition was under command of Sir Edward Michelburne, and next to him in rank was Captain John Davis. It was the last voyage that this famous seaman was destined to make, for he was killed in an encounter with Japanese pirates on the 27th of December 1605. The journal of the voyage contains the following paragraph:—

“The 3rd of April 1605 we sailed by a little island which Captain John Davis took to be one that stands some five or six leagues from Saldanha. Whereupon our general, Sir Edward Michelburne, desirous to see the island, took his skiff, accompanied by no more than the master’s mate, the purser, myself, and four men that did row the boat, and so putting off from the ship we came on land. While we were on shore they in the ship had a storm, which drove them out of sight of the island; and we were two days and two nights before we could recover our ship. Upon the said island is abundance of great conies and seals, whereupon we called it Cony Island.”

On the 9th of April they anchored in Table Bay, where they remained until the 3rd of the following month refreshing themselves.

On the 14th of March 1608 the East India Company’s ships Ascension and Union sailed from England, and on the 14th of July put into Table Bay to obtain refreshments and to build a small vessel for which they had brought out the materials ready prepared. The crews constructed a fort to protect themselves, by raising an earthen wall in the form of a square and mounting a cannon on each angle. They found a few Hottentots on the shore, to whom they made known by signs their want of oxen and sheep, which three days afterwards were brought for barter in such numbers that they procured as much meat as they needed. They gave a yard (91·4 centimetres) of iron hoop for an ox, and half that length for a sheep. After bartering them, the Hottentots whistled some away and then brought them for sale again, which was not resented, as the English officers were desirous of remaining on friendly terms with the rude people. For the same reason no notice was taken of the theft of various articles of trifling value.

Boats were sent to Robben Island to capture seals, as oil was needed, and many of these animals were killed and brought to the fort. After cutting off the oily parts the carcases were carried to a distance as useless, but for fifteen days the Hottentots feasted upon the flesh, which they merely heated on embers, though before the expiration of that time it had become so putrid and the odour so offensive that the Europeans were obliged to keep at a great distance from it.

Great quantities of steenbras were obtained with a seine at the mouth of Salt River, and three thousand five hundred mullets were caught and taken on board for consumption after leaving. The object of refreshing was thus fully carried out, as was also that of putting together the little vessel, which was even made larger than the original design, and which when launched was named the Good Hope.

Mr. John Jourdain, an official of the East India Company, who was a passenger in the Ascension, and from whose journal this account is taken, with some others ascended Table Mountain. From its summit they saw the same sheet of water on the flats which Antonio de Saldanha a hundred and five years before had mistaken for the mouth of a great river, and which Mr. Jourdain now mistook for an inland harbour with an opening to the sea by which ships might enter it. He, however, unlike his Portuguese predecessor, had an opportunity afterwards of visiting the big pond and ascertaining that his conjecture was incorrect.

Mr. Jourdain was of opinion that a settlement of great utility might be formed in Table Valley. In words almost identical with those of Jansen and Proot forty years later he spoke of its capabilities for producing grain and fruit, of the hides, sealskins, and oil that could be obtained to reduce the expense, of the possibility of opening up a trade in ivory, as he had seen many footprints of elephants, and of bringing the Hottentots first to “civility,” and then to a knowledge of God.

After a stay of little more than two months, on the 19th of September the Ascension and Union sailed again, with the Good Hope in their company.

From this date onward the fleets of the English East India Company made Table Bay a port of call and refreshment, and usually procured in barter from the Hottentots as many cattle as they needed. In 1614 the board of directors sent a ship with as many spare men as she could carry, a quantity of provisions, and some naval stores to Table Bay to wait for the homeward bound fleet, and, while delayed, to carry on a whale and seal fishery as a means of partly meeting the expense. The plan was found to answer fairly well, and it was continued for several years. The relieving vessels left England between October and February, in order to be at the Cape in May, when the homeward bound fleets usually arrived from India. If men were much needed, the victualler—which was commonly an old vessel—was then abandoned, otherwise an ordinary crew was left in her to capture whales, or she proceeded to some port in the East, according to circumstances.

The advantage of a place of refreshment in South Africa was obvious, and as early as 1613 enterprising individuals in the service of the East India Company drew the attention of the directors to the advisability of forming a settlement in Table Valley. Still earlier it was rumoured that the king of Spain and Portugal had such a design in contemplation, with the object of cutting off thereby the intercourse of all other nations with the Indian seas, so that the strategical value of the Cape was already recognised. The directors discussed the matter on several occasions, but their views in those days were very limited, and the scheme seemed too large for them to attempt alone.

In their fleets were officers of a much more enterprising spirit, as they were without responsibility in regard to the cost of any new undertaking. In 1620 some of these proclaimed King James I sovereign of the territory extending from Table Bay to the dominions of the nearest Christian prince. The records of this event are interesting, as they not only give the particulars of the proclamation and the reasons that led to it, but show that there must often have been a good deal of bustle in Table Valley in those days.

On the 24th of June 1620 four ships bound to Surat under command of Andrew Shillinge, put into Table Bay, and were joined when entering by two others bound to Bantam, under command of Humphrey Fitzherbert. The Dutch had at this time the greater part of the commerce of the East in their hands, and nine large ships under their flag were found at anchor. The English vessel Lion was also there. Commodore Fitzherbert made the acquaintance of some of the Dutch officers, and was informed by them that they had inspected the country around, as their Company intended to form a settlement in Table Valley the following year. Thereupon he consulted with Commodore Shillinge, who agreed with him that it was advisable to try to frustrate the project of the Hollanders. On the 25th the Dutch fleet sailed for Bantam, and the Lion left at the same time, but the Schiedam, from Delft, arrived and cast anchor.

On the 1st of July the principal English officers, twenty-one in number,—among them the Arctic navigator William Baffin,—met in council, and resolved to proclaim the sovereignty of King James I over the whole country. They placed on record their reasons for this decision, which were, that they were of opinion a few men only would be needed to keep possession of Table Valley, that a plantation would be of great service for the refreshment of the fleets, that the soil was fruitful and the climate pleasant, that the Hottentots would become willing subjects in time and they hoped would also become servants of God, that the whale fishery would be a source of profit, but, above all, that they regarded it as more fitting for the Dutch when ashore there to be subjects of the king of England than for Englishmen to be subject to them or anyone else. “Rule Britannia” was a very strong sentiment, evidently, with that party of adventurous seamen.

On the 3rd of July a proclamation of sovereignty was read in presence of as many men of the six ships as could go ashore for the purpose of taking part in the ceremony. Skipper Jan Cornelis Kunst, of the Schiedam, and some of his officers were also present, and raised no objection. On the Lion’s rump, or King James’s mount as Fitzherbert and Shillinge named it, the flag of St. George was hoisted, and was saluted, the spot being afterwards marked by a mound of stones. A small flag was then given to the Hottentots to preserve and exhibit to visitors, which it was believed they would do most carefully.

After going through this ceremony with the object of frustrating the designs of the Dutch, the English officers buried a packet of despatches beside a stone slab in the valley, on which were engraved the letters V O C, they being in perfect ignorance of the fact that those symbols denoted prior possession taken for the Dutch East India Company. On the 25th of July the Surat fleet sailed, and on the next day Fitzherbert’s two ships followed, leaving at anchor in the bay only the English ship Bear, which had arrived on the 10th.

The proceeding of Fitzherbert and Shillinge, which was entirely unauthorised, was not confirmed by the directors of the East India Company or by the government of England, and nothing whatever came of it. At that time the ocean commerce of England was small, and as she had just entered upon the work of colonising North America, she was not prepared to attempt to form a settlement in South Africa also. Her king and the directors of her India Company had no higher ambition than to enter into a close alliance with the Dutch Company, and to secure by this means a stated proportion of the trade of the East. In the Netherlands also a large and influential party was in favour of either forming a federated company, or of a binding union of some kind, so as to put it out of the power of the Spaniards and Portuguese to harm them. From 1613 onward this matter was frequently discussed on both sides of the Channel, and delegates went backward and forward, but it was almost impossible to arrange terms.

The Dutch had many fortresses which they had either built or taken from the Portuguese in Java and the Spice islands, and the English had none, so that the conditions of the two parties were unequal. In 1617, however, the king of France sent ships to the eastern seas, and in the following year the king of Denmark embarked in the same enterprise, when a possibility arose that one or other of them might unite with Holland or England. Accordingly each party was more willing than before to make concessions, and on the 2nd of June 1619 a treaty of close alliance was entered into at London between the two Companies, which was ratified by their respective governments.[38]

It provided that all past differences should be forgotten, and all persons, ships, and goods detained by either side be immediately released. That the servants of each Company should act in the most friendly manner towards those of the other, and give them assistance when needed. That commerce in all parts of India should be free to both. That joint efforts should be made to reduce the price of products in India to a fixed and reasonable rate, and that a selling price in Europe should be agreed upon from time to time, below which it should not be lawful for either party to dispose of them. That pepper should only be purchased in Java by a commission representing both parties, and be equally divided afterwards between the two Companies. That the Dutch Company should have two-thirds of the trade at the Moluccas, Banda, and Amboina, and the English one-third. That twenty ships of war from six to eight hundred tons burden, armed with thirty heavy cannon, and carrying one hundred and fifty men each, should be maintained in the eastern seas for the protection of commerce, half by each Company. And that a council of defence should be established, consisting of four of the principal officers on each side, to appoint stations for the ships and to engage and pay land forces.

There were thirty-one articles in all, of which the above were the principal, the others referring to matters of less importance, but dealing with them in the same spirit. The treaty was intended to bring the two East India Companies into as close a union as that existing between the different provinces of the Netherlands republic.

The rivalry, however,—bordering closely on animosity—between the servants of the two companies in distant lands prevented any agreement of this nature made in Europe being carried out, and though in 1623 another treaty of alliance was entered into, in the following year it was dissolved. Thereafter the great success of the Dutch in the East placed them beyond the desire of partnership with competitors.

While these negotiations were in progress, a proposal was made from Holland that a refreshment station should be established in South Africa for the joint use of the fleets of the two nations, and the English directors received it favourably. They undertook to cause a search for a proper place to be made by the next ship sent to the Cape with relief for the returning fleet, and left the Dutch at liberty to make a similar search in any convenient way. Accordingly on the 30th of November 1619 the assembly of seventeen issued instructions to the commander of the fleet then about to sail to examine the coast carefully from Saldanha Bay to a hundred or a hundred and fifty nautical miles east of the Cape of Good Hope, in order that the best harbour for the purpose might be selected. This was done, and an opinion was pronounced in favour of Table Bay. In 1622 a portion of the coast was inspected for the same purpose by Captain Johnson, in the English ship Rose, but his opinion of Table Bay and the other places which he visited was such that he would not recommend any of them. The tenor of his report mattered little, however, for with the failure of the close alliance between the two companies, the design of establishing a refreshment station in South Africa was abandoned by both.

Perhaps the ill opinion of Table Bay formed by Captain Johnson may have arisen from an occurrence that took place on its shore during the previous voyage of the Rose. That ship arrived in the bay on the 28th of January 1620, and on the following day eight of her crew went ashore with a seine to catch fish near the mouth of Salt River. They never returned, but the bodies of four were afterwards found and buried, and it was believed that the Hottentots had either carried the other four away as prisoners or had murdered them and concealed their corpses.

This was not the only occurrence of the kind, for in March 1632 twenty-three men belonging to a Dutch ship that put into Table Bay lost their lives in conflict with the inhabitants. The cause of these quarrels is not known with certainty, but at the time it was believed they were brought on by the Europeans attempting to rob the Hottentots of cattle.

An experiment was once made with a view of trying to secure a firm friend among the Hottentots, and impressing those people with respect for the wonders of civilisation. In 1613 two Hottentots were taken from Table Valley on board a ship returning from India, one of whom died of grief soon after leaving his home.[39] The other, who was named Cory, reached England, where he resided six months and learned to understand and speak a little English. He was made a great deal of, and received many rich and valuable presents from benevolent people. Sir Thomas Smythe, the governor of the East India Company, was particularly kind to him, and gave him among other things a complete suit of brass armour. He returned to South Africa with Captain Nicholas Downton in the ship New Year’s Gift, and in June 1614 landed in Table Valley with all his treasures. But Captain Downton, who thought that he was overflowing with gratitude, saw him no more. Cory returned to his former habits of living, and instead of acting as was anticipated, taught his countrymen to despise bits of copper in exchange for their cattle, so that for a long time afterwards it was impossible for ships that called to obtain a supply of fresh meat.

Mr. John Jourdain, when returning from India to England, put into Table Bay on the 25th of February 1617. A few lean calves were obtained on the day the ships anchored, but nothing whatever afterwards, though at one time about ten thousand head of cattle were in sight. Mr. Jourdain and a party of sixty armed men went a short distance into the country, and he was of opinion that through the roguery of “that dogge Cory” they would have been drawn into a conflict with some five thousand Hottentots if they had not prudently retired. Thereafter he believed no cattle would be obtained except at dear rates, for the Hottentots no longer esteemed iron hoops, copper, or even shining brass. A fort, he considered, would be the only means of bringing them to “civility.” On this occasion Mr. Jourdain remained in Table Bay eighteen days, of which only four were calm and fine.

According to a statement made by a Welshman who was in Table Bay in August 1627, and who kept a journal, part of which has been preserved,[40] Cory came to an evil end. The entry reads: “They” (the Hottentots) “hate the duchmen since they hanged one of the blackes called Cary who was in England & upon refusall of fresh victuals they put him to death.”

It has been seen what use the Portuguese made of convicts when they were exploring unknown countries, or when there were duties of a particularly hazardous or unpleasant nature to be performed. The English employed criminals in the same manner. In January 1615 the governor of the East India Company obtained permission from the king to transport some men under sentence of death to countries occupied by savages, where, it was supposed, they would be the means of procuring provisions, making discoveries, and creating trade. The records in existence—unless there are documents in some unknown place—furnish too scanty material for a complete account of the manner in which this design was carried out. Only the following can be ascertained with certainty. A few days after the consent of the king was given, the sheriffs of London sent seventeen men from Newgate on board ships bound to the Indies, and these were voluntarily accompanied by three others, who appear to have been convicted criminals, but not under sentence of death. The proceeding was regarded as “a very charitable deed and a means to bring them to God by giving them time for repentance, to crave pardon for their sins, and reconcile themselves unto His favour.” On the 5th of June, after a passage from the Thames of one hundred and thirty-two days, the four ships comprising the fleet arrived in Table Bay, and on the 16th nine of the condemned men were set ashore with their own free will. A boat was left for their use, and to each a gun with some ammunition and a quantity of provisions was given.

Of some of these convicts the afterlife is known. Two were taken on to India by Sir Thomas Roe, one of whom, Duffield by name, returned with him to England, where he requited the kindness shown to him by stealing some plate and running away. Of those set ashore in Table Valley, one, named Cross, committed some offence against the Hottentots shortly after the ships sailed, and was killed by them. The other seven[41] escaped to Robben Island, where their boat was wrecked. They lived five or six months on the island, when an English ship put into the bay, and four of them made a raft and tried to get to her, but were drowned on the way. The next day the ship sent a boat to the island, and took off the other three. They behaved badly on board, commenced to steal again as soon as they reached England, and were apprehended and executed in accordance with their old sentences.

In one of the ships that brought these convicts in 1615 Sir Thomas Roe, English envoy to the great Mogul, was a passenger. A pillar bearing an inscription of his embassy was set up in Table Valley, and fifteen or twenty kilogrammes weight of stone which he believed to contain quicksilver and vermilion was taken away to be assayed in England, but of particulars that would be much more interesting now no information whatever is to be had from the records of his journey.

Again, in June 1616, three condemned men were set ashore in Table Valley from a fleet under Commodore Joseph on its way to the East. A letter signed by them is extant, in which they acknowledge the clemency of King James in granting them their forfeited lives, and promise to do his Majesty good and acceptable service. Terry, who was an eye witness, says that before they were set ashore they begged the commodore rather to hang them than to abandon them, but he left them behind. The Swan, one of the vessels of the fleet, however, was detained in Table Bay a day or two longer than her consorts, and she took them on to Bantam in Java.

There may have been other instances of the kind, of which no record is in existence now, but this seems unlikely. It is certain that no information upon the country, its inhabitants, or its resources was ever obtained from criminals set ashore here.

No further effort was made by the English at this time to form a connection with the inhabitants of South Africa, though their ships continued to call at Table Bay for the purpose of taking in water and getting such other refreshment as was obtainable. They did not attempt to explore the country or to correct the charts of its coasts, nor did they frequent any of its ports except Table Bay, and very rarely Mossel Bay, until a much later date. A few remarks in ships’ journals, and a few pages of observations and opinions in a book of travels such as that of Sir Thomas Herbert, from none of which can any reliable information be obtained that is not also to be drawn from earlier Portuguese writers, are all the contributions to a knowledge of South Africa made by Englishmen during the early years of the seventeenth century. Though our countrymen were behind no others in energy and daring, as Drake, Raleigh, Gilbert, Davis, Hawkins, and a host of others had proved so well, not forgetting either the memorable story of the Revenge, which Jan Huyghen van Linschoten handed down for a modern historian to write in more thrilling words, England had not yet entered fully upon her destined career either of discovery or of commerce, the time when “the ocean wave should be her home” was still in the days to come.

The Danes were the next to make their appearance in the Indian seas. Their first fleet, fitted out by King Christian IV, consisted of six ships, under Ove Giedde as admiral. On the 8th of July 1619 this fleet put into Table Bay, where eight English ships were found at anchor, whose officers treated the Danes with hospitality. Admiral Giedde remained here until the 5th of August, when his people were sufficiently refreshed to proceed on their voyage. On the 30th of August 1621 he reached Table Bay again in the ship Elephant on his return passage from Ceylon and India, and remained until the 12th of September. Before leaving he had an inscription cut on a stone, in which the dates of both his visits were recorded.