The Life and Death of John of Barneveld, Advocate of Holland, 1609-14 | Page 2

make up the opulent duchy, seemed virtually converted into a
province of the detested heretical republic. The German gate of the
Spanish Netherlands was literally in the hands of its most formidable
foe.
The Spaniards about the court of the Archduke did not dissemble their
rage. The seizure of Julich was a stain upon his reputation, they cried.
Was it not enough, they asked, for the United Provinces to have made a
truce to the manifest detriment and discredit of Spain, and to have
treated her during all the negotiation with such insolence? Were they
now to be permitted to invade neutral territory, to violate public faith,
to act under no responsibility save to their own will? What was left for
them to do except to set up a tribunal in Holland for giving laws to the
whole of Northern Europe? Arrogating to themselves absolute power
over the controverted states of Cleve, Julich, and the dependencies,
they now pretended to dispose of them at their pleasure in order at the
end insolently to take possession of them for themselves.
These were the egregious fruits of the truce, they said tauntingly to the
discomfited Archduke. It had caused a loss of reputation, the very soul
of empires, to the crown of Spain. And now, to conclude her abasement,
the troops in Flanders had been shaven down with such parsimony as to
make the monarch seem a shopkeeper, not a king. One would suppose
the obedient Netherlands to be in the heart of Spain rather than outlying
provinces surrounded by their deadliest enemies. The heretics had
gained possession of the government at Aix-la-Chapelle; they had
converted the insignificant town of Mulheim into a thriving and
fortified town in defiance of Cologne and to its manifest detriment, and
in various other ways they had insulted the Catholics throughout those
regions. And who could wonder at such insolence, seeing that the army
in Flanders, formerly the terror of heretics, had become since the truce
so weak as to be the laughing-stock of the United Provinces? If it was
expensive to maintain these armies in the obedient Netherlands, let
there be economy elsewhere, they urged.
From India came gold and jewels. From other kingdoms came
ostentation and a long series of vain titles for the crown of Spain.

Flanders was its place of arms, its nursery of soldiers, its bulwark in
Europe, and so it should be preserved.
There was ground for these complaints. The army at the disposition of
the Archduke had been reduced to 8000 infantry and a handful of
cavalry. The peace establishment of the Republic amounted to 20,000
foot, 3000 horse, besides the French and English regiments.
So soon as the news of the occupation of Julich was officially
communicated to the Spanish cabinet, a subsidy of 400,000 crowns was
at once despatched to Brussels. Levies of Walloons and Germans were
made without delay by order of Archduke Albert and under guidance of
Spinola, so that by midsummer the army was swollen to 18,000 foot
and 3000 horse. With these the great Genoese captain took the field in
the middle of August. On the 22nd of that month the army was
encamped on some plains mid-way between Maestricht and Aachen.
There was profound mystery both at Brussels and at the Hague as to the
objective point of these military movements. Anticipating an attack
upon Julich, the States had meantime strengthened the garrison of that
important place with 3000 infantry and a regiment of horse. It seemed
scarcely probable therefore that Spinola would venture a foolhardy
blow at a citadel so well fortified and defended. Moreover, there was
not only no declaration of war, but strict orders had been given by each
of the apparent belligerents to their military commanders to abstain
from all offensive movements against the adversary. And now began
one of the strangest series of warlike evolution's that were ever
recorded. Maurice at the head of an army of 14,000 foot and 3000 horse
manoeuvred in the neighbourhood of his great antagonist and
professional rival without exchanging a blow. It was a phantom
campaign, the prophetic rehearsal of dreadful marches and tragic
histories yet to be, and which were to be enacted on that very stage and
on still wider ones during a whole generation of mankind. That cynical
commerce in human lives which was to become one of the chief
branches of human industry in the century had already begun.
Spinola, after hovering for a few days in the neighbourhood, descended
upon the Imperial city of Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle). This had been one
of the earliest towns in Germany to embrace the Reformed religion, and
up to the close of the sixteenth century the control of the magistracy
had been in the hands of the votaries of that creed. Subsequently