Return of Prince Maurice to the siege of Steenwyck--Capitulation of
the besieged--Effects of the introduction of mining operations--
Maurice besieges Coeworden--Verdugo attempts to relieve the city,
but fails--The city capitulates, and Prince Maurice retreats into
winter quarters.
While Farnese had thus been strengthening the bulwarks of Philip's
universal monarchy in that portion of his proposed French dominions which
looked towards England, there had been opportunity for Prince Maurice to
make an assault upon the Frisian defences of this vast realm. It was
difficult to make half Europe into one great Spanish fortification,
guarding its every bastion and every point of the curtain, without far
more extensive armaments than the "Great King," as the Leaguers proposed
that Philip should entitle himself, had ever had at his disposal. It
might be a colossal scheme to stretch the rod of empire over so large a
portion of the earth, but the dwarfish attempts to carry the design into
execution hardly reveal the hand of genius. It is astonishing to
contemplate the meagre numbers and the slender funds with which this
world-empire was to be asserted and maintained. The armies arrayed at any
important point hardly exceeded a modern division or two; while the
resources furnished for a year would hardly pay in later days for a few
weeks' campaign.
When Alexander, the first commander of his time, moved out of Flanders
into France with less than twenty thousand men, he left most vital
portions of his master's hereditary dominions so utterly unprotected that
it was possible to attack them with a handful of troops. The young
disciple of Simon Stevinus now resumed that practical demonstration of
his principles which had been in the previous year so well begun.
On the 28th May, 1592, Maurice, taking the field with six thousand foot
and two thousand horse, came once more before Steenwyck. It will be
remembered that he had been obliged to relinquish the siege of this place
in order to confront the Duke of Parma in July, 1591, at Nymegen.
The city--very important from its position, being the key to the province
of Drenthe as well as one of the safeguards of Friesland--had been
besieged in vain by Count Renneberg after his treasonable surrender of
Groningen, of which he was governor, to the Spaniards, but had been
subsequently surprised by Tassis. Since that time it had held for the
king. Its fortifications were strong, and of the best description known
at that day. Its regular garrison was sixteen companies of foot and some
cavalry under Antoine de Quocqueville, military governor. Besides these
troops were twelve hundred Walloon infantry, commanded by Lewis, youngest
Count van den Berg, a brave lad of eighteen years, with whom were the
lord of Waterdyck and other Netherland nobles.
To the military student the siege may possess importance as marking a
transitional epoch in the history of the beleaguering science. To the
general reader, as in most of the exploits of the young Poliorcetes, its
details have but slender interest. Perhaps it was here that the spade
first vindicated its dignity, and entitled itself to be classed as a
military weapon of value along with pike and arquebus. It was here that
the soldiers of Maurice, burrowing in the ground at ten stuyvers a day,
were jeered at by the enemy from the battlements as boors and ditchers,
who had forfeited their right to be considered soldiers--but jeered at
for the last time.
From 30th May to 9th June the prince was occupied in throwing up
earthworks on the low grounds in order to bring his guns into position.
On the 13th June he began to batter with forty-five pieces, but effected
little more than to demolish some of the breast-works. He threw hot shot
into the town very diligently, too, but did small damage. The cannonading
went on for nearly a week, but the practice was so very
indifferent--notwithstanding the protection of the blessed Barbara and
the tuition of the busmasters--that the besieged began to amuse
themselves with these empty and monotonous salvos of the honourable
Artillery Guild. When all this blazing and thundering had led to no
better result than to convert a hundred thousand good Flemish florins
into noise and smoke, the thrifty Netherlanders on both sides of the
walls began to disparage the young general's reputation. After all, they
said, the Spaniards were right when they called artillery mere
'espanta-vellacos' or scare-cowards. This burrowing and bellowing must at
last give place to the old-fashioned push of pike, and then it would be
seen who the soldiers were. Observations like these were freely made
under a flag of truce; for on the 19th June--notwithstanding their
contempt for the 'espanta-vellacos'--the besieged had sent out a
deputation to treat for an honourable surrender. Maurice entertained the
negotiators hospitably in his own tent, but the terms suggested to him
were inadmissible. Nothing came of the conference therefore but mutual
criticisms, friendly enough, although sufficiently caustic.
Maurice now ceased cannonading, and burrowed again for ten days without
interruption. Four mines, leading to different points of the defences,
were patiently constructed, and two large chambers at the terminations,
neatly finished off and filled respectively with five thousand and
twenty-five hundred pounds of powder, were at last established under two
of the principal bastions.
During all this digging there had been a couple of sorties in which the
besieged had inflicted great damage on their enemy, and got back into the
town with a few prisoners, having lost but six of their own men. Sir
Francis Vere had been severely wounded in the leg, so that he was obliged
to keep his bed during the rest of the siege. Verdugo, too, had made a
feeble attempt to reinforce the place with three hundred men, sixty or
seventy of whom had entered, while the rest had been killed or captured.
On such a small scale was Philip's world-empire contended for by his
stadholder in Friesland; yet it was certainly not the fault of the stout
old Portuguese. Verdugo would rather have sent thirty thousand men to
save the front door of his great province than three hundred. But every
available man--and few enough of them they were--had been sent out of the
Netherlands, to defend the world-empire in its outposts of Normandy and
Brittany.
This was Philip the Prudent's system for conquering the world, and men
looked upon him as the consummation of kingcraft.
On the 3rd July Maurice ordered his whole force to be in readiness for
the assault. The mines were then sprung.
The bastion of the east gate was blown to ruins. The mine under the
Gast-Huys bulwark, burst outwardly, and buried alive many Hollanders
standing ready for the assault. At this untoward accident Maurice
hesitated to give the signal for storming the breach, but the panic
within the town was so evident that Lewis William lost no time in seizing
the overthrown eastern bulwark, from the ruins of which he looked over
the whole city. The other broken bastion was likewise easily mastered,
and the besieged, seeing the storm about to burst upon them with
irresistible fury, sent a trumpet. Meantime Maurice, inspecting the
effects of the explosion and preparing for the assault, had been shot
through the left cheek. The wound was not dangerous, and the prince
extracted the bullet with his own hand, but the change of half an inch
would have made it fatal. He was not incapacitated--after his wound had
been dressed, amidst the remonstrances of his friends for his
temerity-from listening to the propositions of the city. They were
refused, for the prince was sure of having his town on his own terms.
Next day he permitted the garrison to depart; the officers and soldiers
promising not to serve the King of Spain on the Netherland side of the
Rhine for six months. They were to take their baggage, but to leave arms,
flags, munitions, and provisions. Both Maurice and Lewis William were for
insisting on sterner conditions, but the States' deputies and members of
the council who were present, as usual, in camp urged the building of the
golden bridge. After all, a fortified city, the second in importance
after Groningen of all those regions, was the real prize contended for.
The garrison was meagre and much reduced during the siege. The
fortifications, of masonry and earthwork combined, were nearly as strong
as ever. Saint Barbara had done them but little damage, but the town
itself was in a sorry plight. Churches and houses were nearly all shot to
pieces, and the inhabitants had long been dwelling in the cellars. Two
hundred of the garrison remained, severely wounded, in the town; three
hundred and fifty had been killed, among others the young cousin of the
Nassaus, Count Lewis van den Berg. The remainder of the royalists marched
out, and were treated with courtesy by Maurice, who gave them an escort,
permitting the soldiers to retain their side-arms, and furnishing horses
to the governor.
In the besieging army five or six hundred had been killed and many
wounded, but not in numbers bearing the same proportion to the slain as
in modern battles.
The siege had lasted forty-four days. When it was over, and men came out
from the town to examine at leisure the prince's camp and his field of
operations, they were astounded at the amount of labor performed in so
short a time. The oldest campaigners confessed that they never before had
understood what a siege really was, and they began to conceive a higher
respect for the art of the engineer than they had ever done before. "Even
those who were wont to rail at science and labour," said one who was
present in the camp of Maurice, "declared that the siege would have been
a far more arduous undertaking had it not been for those two engineers,
Joost Matthes of Alost, and Jacob Kemp of Gorcum. It is high time to take
from soldiers the false notion that it is shameful to work with the
spade; an error which was long prevalent among the Netherlanders, and
still prevails among the French, to the great detriment of the king's
affairs, as may be seen in his sieges."
Certainly the result of Henry's recent campaign before Rouen had proved
sufficiently how much better it would have been for him had there been
some Dutch Joosts and Jacobs with their picks and shovels in his army at
that critical period. They might perhaps have baffled Parma as they had
done Verdugo.
Without letting the grass grow under his feet, Maurice now led his army
from Steenwyck to Zwol and arrived on the 26th July before Coeworden.
This place, very strong by art and still stronger by-nature, was the
other key to all north Netherland--Friesland, Groningen, and Drenthe.
Should it fall into the hands of the republic it would be impossible for
the Spaniards to retain much longer the rich and important capital of all
that country, the city of Groningen. Coeworden lay between two vast
morasses, one of which--the Bourtange swamp--extended some thirty miles
to the bay of the Dollart; while the other spread nearly as far in a
westerly direction to the Zuyder Zee. Thus these two great marshes were a
frame--an almost impassable barrier--by which the northern third of the
whole territory of the republic was encircled and defended. Throughout
this great morass there was not a hand-breadth of solid ground--not a
resting-place for a human foot, save the road which led through
Coeworden. This passage lay upon a natural deposit of hard, dry sand,
interposed as if by a caprice of nature between the two swamps; and was
about half a mile in width.
The town itself was well fortified, and Verdugo had been recently
strengthening the position with additional earthworks. A thousand
veterans formed the garrison under command of another Van den Berg, the
Count Frederic. It was the fate of these sister's-children of the great
founder of the republic to serve the cause of foreign despotism with
remarkable tenacity against their own countrymen, and against their
nearest blood relations. On many conspicuous occasions they were almost
as useful to Spain and the Inquisition as the son and nearly all the
other kinsmen of William the Silent had rendered themselves to the cause
of Holland and of freedom.
Having thoroughly entrenched his camp before Coeworden and begun the
regular approaches, Maurice left his cousin Lewis William to superintend
the siege operations for the moment, and advanced towards Ootmarsum, a
frontier town which might give him trouble if in the hands of a relieving
force. The place fell at once, with the loss of but one life to the
States army, but that a very valuable one; General de Famars, one of the
original signers of the famous Compromise; and a most distinguished
soldier of the republic, having been killed before the gates.
On the 31st July, Maurice returned to his entrenchments. The enemy
professed unbounded confidence; Van den Berg not doubting that he should
be relieved by Verdugo, and Verdugo being sure that Van den Berg would
need no relief. The Portuguese veteran indeed was inclined to wonder at
Maurice's presumption in attacking so impregnable a fortress. "If
Coeworden does not hold," said he, "there is no place in the world that
can hold."
Count Peter Ernest, was still acting as governor-general for Alexander
Farnese, on returning from his second French campaign, had again betaken
himself, shattered and melancholy, to the waters of Spa, leaving the
responsibility for Netherland affairs upon the German octogenarian. To
him; and to the nonagenarian Mondragon at Antwerp, the veteran Verdugo
now called loudly for aides against the youthful pedant, whom all men had
been laughing at a twelvemonth or so before. The Macedonian phalanx,
Simon Stevinus and delving Dutch boors--unworthy of the name of
soldiers--seemed to be steadily digging the ground from under Philip's
feet in his hereditary domains.
What would become of the world-empire, where was the great king--not of
Spain alone, nor of France alone--but the great monarch of all
Christendom, to plant his throne securely, if his Frisian strongholds,
his most important northern outposts, were to fall before an almost
beardless youth at the head of a handful of republican militia?
Verdugo did his best, but the best was little. The Spanish and Italian
legions had been sent out of the Netherlands into France. Many had died
there, many were in hospital after their return, nearly all the rest were
mutinous for want of pay.
On the 16th August, Maurice formally summoned Coeworden to surrender.
After the trumpeter had blown thrice; Count Van den Berg, forbidding all
others, came alone upon the walls and demanded his message. "To claim
this city in the name of Prince Maurice of Nassau and of the
States-General," was the reply.
"Tell him first to beat down my walls as flat as the ditch," said Van den
Berg, "and then to bring five or six storms. Six months after that I will
think whether I will send a trumpet."
The prince proceeded steadily with his approaches, but he was infinitely
chagrined by the departure out of his camp of Sir Francis Vere with his
English contingent of three regiments, whom Queen Elizabeth had
peremptorily ordered to the relief of King Henry in Brittany.
Nothing amazes the modern mind so much as the exquisite paucity of forces
and of funds by which the world-empire was fought for and resisted in
France, Holland, Spain, and England. The scenes of war were rapidly
shifted--almost like the slides of a magic-lantern--from one country to
another; the same conspicuous personages, almost the same individual
armies, perpetually re-appearing in different places, as if a wild
phantasmagoria were capriciously repeating itself to bewilder the
imagination. Essex, and Vere, and Roger Williams, and Black Norris-Van
der Does, and Admiral Nassau, the Meetkerks and Count Philip-Farnese and
Mansfeld, George Basti, Arenberg, Berlaymont, La None and Teligny, Aquila
and Coloma--were seen alternately fighting, retreating, triumphant,
beleaguering, campaigning all along the great territory which extends
from the Bay of Biscay to the crags of Brittany, and across the narrow
seas to the bogs of Ireland, and thence through the plains of Picardy and
Flanders to the swamps of Groningen and the frontiers of the Rhine.
This was the arena in which the great struggle was ever going on, but the
champions were so few in number that their individual shapes become
familiar to us like the figures of an oft-repeated pageant. And now the
withdrawal of certain companies of infantry and squadrons of cavalry from
the Spanish armies into France, had left obedient Netherland too weak to
resist rebellious Netherland, while, on the other hand, the withdrawal of
some twenty or thirty companies of English auxiliaries--most
hard-fighting veterans it is true, but very few in number--was likely to
imperil the enterprise of Maurice in Friesland.
The removal of these companies from the Low Countries to strengthen the
Bearnese in the north of France, formed the subject of much bitter
diplomatic conference between the States and England; the order having
been communicated by the great queen herself in many a vehement epistle
and caustic speech, enforced by big, manly oaths.
Verdugo, although confident in the strength of the place, had represented
to Parma and to Mansfeld the immense importance of relieving Coeworden.
The city, he said, was more valuable than all the towns taken the year
before. All Friesland hung upon it, and it would be impossible to save
Groningen should Coeworden fall.
Meantime Count Philip Nassau arrived from the campaign in France with his
three regiments which he threw into garrison, and thus set free an equal
number of fresh troops, which were forthwith sent to the camp of Maurice.
The prince at the same time was made aware that Verdugo was about to
receive important succour, and he was advised by the deputies of the
States-General present at his headquarters to send out his German Reiters
to intercept them. Maurice refused. Should his cavalry be defeated, he
said, his whole army would be endangered. He determined to await within
his fortified camp the attack of the relieving force.
During the whole month of August he proceeded steadily with his sapping
and mining. By the middle of the month his lines had come through the
ditch, which he drained of water into the counterscarp. By the beginning
of September he had got beneath the principal fort, which, in the course
of three or four days, he expected to blow into the air. The rainy
weather had impeded his operations and the march of the relieving army.
Nevertheless that army was at last approaching. The regiments of
Mondragon, Charles Mansfeld, Gonzaga, Berlaymont, and Arenberg had been
despatched to reinforce Verdugo. On the 23rd August, having crossed the
Rhine at Rheinberg, they reached Olfen in the country of Benthem, ten
miles from Coeworden. Here they threw up rockets and made other signals
that relief was approaching the town. On the 3rd of September Verdugo,
with the whole force at his disposal, amounting to four thousand foot and
eighteen hundred horse, was at the village of Emblichen, within a league
of the besieged city. That night a peasant was captured with letters from
Verdugo to the Governor of Coeworden, giving information that he intended
to make an assault on the besiegers on the night of 6th-7th September.
Thus forewarned, Maurice took the best precautions and calmly within his
entrenchments awaited the onslaught. Punctual to his appointment, Verdugo
with his whole force, yelling "Victoria! Victoria!" made a shirt-attack,
or camiciata--the men wearing their shirts outside their armour to
distinguish each other in the darkness--upon that portion of the camp
which was under command of Hohenlo. They were met with determination and
repulsed, after fighting all night, with a loss of three hundred killed
and a proportionate number of wounded. The Netherlanders had but three
killed and six wounded. Among the latter, however, was Lewis William, who
received a musket-ball in the belly, but remained on the ground until the
enemy had retreated. It was then discovered that his wound was not
mortal--the intestines not having been injured--and he was soon about his
work again. Prince Maurice, too, as usual, incurred the remonstrances of
the deputies and others for the reckless manner in which he exposed
himself wherever the fire was hottest He resolutely refused, however, to
permit his cavalry to follow the retreating enemy. His object was
Coeworden--a prize more important than a new victory over the already
defeated Spaniards would prove--and this object he kept ever before his
eyes.
This was Verdugo's first and last attempt to relieve the city. He had
seen enough of the young prince's tactics and had no further wish to
break his teeth against those scientific entrenchments. The Spaniards at
last, whether they wore their shirts inside or outside their doublets,
could no longer handle the Dutchmen at pleasure. That people of butter,
as the iron duke of Alva was fond of calling the Netherlanders, were
grown harder with the pressure of a twenty-five years' war.
Five days after the sanguinary 'camiciata' the besieged offered to
capitulate. The trumpet at which the proud Van den Berg had hinted for
six months later arrived on the 12th September. Maurice was glad to get
his town. His "little soldiers" did not insist, as the Spaniards and
Italians were used to do in the good old days, on unlimited murder, rape,
and fire, as the natural solace and reward of their labours in the
trenches. Civilization had made some progress, at least in the
Netherlands. Maurice granted good terms, such as he had been in the habit
of conceding to all captured towns. Van den Berg was courteously received
by his cousins, as he rode forth from the place at the head of what
remained of his garrison, five hundred in number, with colours flying,
matches burning, bullet in mouth, and with all their arms and baggage
except artillery and ammunition, and the heroic little Lewis,
notwithstanding the wound in his belly, got on horseback and greeted him
with a cousinly welcome in the camp.
The city was a most important acquisition, as already sufficiently set
forth, but Queen Elizabeth, much misinformed on this occasion, was
inclined to undervalue it. She wrote accordingly to the States,
reproaching them for using all that artillery and that royal force
against a mere castle and earthheap, instead of attempting some
considerable capital, or going in force to the relief of Brittany. The
day was to come when she would acknowledge the advantage of not leaving
this earth-heap in the hands of the Spaniard. Meantime, Prince
Maurice--the season being so far advanced--gave the world no further
practical lessons in the engineering science, and sent his troops into
winter quarters.
These were the chief military phenomena in France and Flanders during
three years of the great struggle to establish Philip's universal
dominion.