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HISTORY OF THE UNITED NETHERLANDS
From the Death of William the Silent to the Twelve Year's Truce--1609
By John Lothrop Motley
MOTLEY'S HISTORY OF THE NETHERLANDS, Project Gutenberg Edition, Vol. 74
History of the United Netherlands, 1600-1602
CHAPTER XXXIX.
Effects of the Nieuport campaign--The general and the statesman--
The Roman empire and the Turk--Disgraceful proceedings of the
mutinous soldiers in Hungary--The Dunkirk pirates--Siege of Ostend
by the Archduke--Attack on Rheinberg by Prince Maurice--Siege and
capitulation of Meura--Attempt on Bois-le-Duc--Concentration of the
war at Ostend--Account of the belligerents--Details of the siege--
Feigned offer of Sir Francis Vere to capitulate--Arrival of
reinforcements from the States--Attack and overthrow of the
besiegers.
The Nieuport campaign had exhausted for the time both belligerents.
The victor had saved the republic from impending annihilation, but was
incapable of further efforts during the summer. The conquered cardinal-
archduke, remaining essentially in the same position as before, consoled
himself with the agreeable fiction that the States, notwithstanding their
triumph, had in reality suffered the most in the great battle. Meantime
both parties did their best to repair damages and to recruit their
armies.
The States--or in other words Barneveld, who was the States--had learned
a lesson. Time was to show whether it would be a profitable one, or
whether Maurice, who was the preceptor of Europe in the art of war, would
continue to be a docile pupil of the great Advocate even in military
affairs. It is probable that the alienation between the statesman and
the general, which was to widen as time advanced, may be dated from the
day of Nieuport.
Fables have even been told which indicated the popular belief in an
intensity of resentment on the part of the prince, which certainly did
not exist till long afterwards.
"Ah, scoundrel!" the stadholder was said to have exclaimed, giving the
Advocate a box on the ear as he came to wish him joy of his great
victory, "you sold us, but God prevented your making the transfer."
History would disdain even an allusion to such figments--quite as
disgraceful, certainly to Maurice as to Barneveld--did they not point the
moral and foreshadow some of the vast but distant results of events which
had already taken place, and had they not been so generally repeated that
it is a duty for the lover of truth to put his foot upon the calumny,
even at the risk for a passing moment of reviving it.
The condition of the war in Flanders had established a temporary
equilibrium among the western powers--France and England discussing,
intriguing, and combining in secret with each other, against each other,
and in spite of each other, in regard to the great conflict--while Spain
and the cardinal-archduke on the one side, and the republic on the other,
prepared themselves for another encounter in the blood-stained arena.
Meantime, on the opposite verge of what was called European civilization,
the perpetual war between the Roman Empire and the Grand Turk had for the
moment been brought into a nearly similar equation. Notwithstanding the
vast amount of gunpowder exploded during so many wearisome years, the
problem of the Crescent and the Cross was not much nearer a solution in
the East than was that of mass and conventicle in the West. War was the
normal and natural condition of mankind. This fact, at least, seemed to
have been acquired and added to the mass of human knowledge.
From the prolific womb of Germany came forth, to swell impartially the
Protestant and Catholic hosts, vast swarms of human creatures. Sold by
their masters at as high prices as could be agreed upon beforehand, and
receiving for themselves five stivers a day, irregularly paid, until the
carrion-crow rendered them the last service, they found at times more
demand for their labor in the great European market than they could fully
supply. There were not Germans enough every year for the consumption of
the Turk, and the pope, and the emperor, and the republic, and the
Catholic king, and the Christian king, with both ends of Europe ablaze at
once. So it happened that the Duke of Mercoeur and other heroes of the
League, having effected their reconciliation with the Bearnese, and for a
handsome price paid down on the nail having acknowledged him to be their
legitimate and Catholic sovereign, now turned their temporary attention
to the Turk. The sweepings of the League--Frenchmen, Walloons, Germans,
Italians, Spaniards--were tossed into Hungary, because for a season the
war had become languid in Flanders. And the warriors grown grey in the
religious wars of France astonished the pagans on the Danube by a variety
of crimes and cruelties such as Christians only could imagine. Thus,
while the forces of the Sultan were besieging Buda, a detachment of
these ancient Leaguers lay in Pappa, a fortified town not far from Raab,
which Archduke Maximilian had taken by storm two years before. Finding
their existence monotonous and payments unpunctual, they rose upon the
governor; Michael Maroti, and then entered into a treaty with the Turkish
commander outside the walls. Bringing all the principal citizens of the
town, their wives and children, and all their moveable property into the
market-place, they offered to sell the lot, including the governor, for a
hundred thousand rix dollars. The bargain was struck, and the Turk,
paying him all his cash on hand and giving hostages for the remainder,
carried off six hundred of the men and women, promising soon to
return and complete the transaction. Meantime the imperial general,
Schwartzenberg, came before the place, urging the mutineers with promises
of speedy payment, and with appeals to their sense of shame, to abstain
from the disgraceful work. He might as well have preached to the wild
swine swarming in the adjacent forests. Siege thereupon was laid to the
place. In a sortie the brave Schwartzenberg was killed, but Colonitz
coming up in force the mutineers were locked up in the town which they
had seized, and the Turk never came to their relief. Famine drove them
at last to choose between surrender and a desperate attempt to cut their
way out. They took the bolder course, and were all either killed or
captured. And now--the mutineers having given the Turk this lesson in
Christian honour towards captives--their comrades and the rest of the
imperial forces showed them the latest and most approved Christian method
of treating mutineers. Several hundred of the prisoners were distributed
among the different nationalities composing the army to be dealt with at
pleasure. The honest Germans were the most straightforward of all
towards their portion of the prisoners, for they shot them down at once,
without an instant's hesitation. But the Lorrainers, the remainder of
the French troops, the Walloons, and especially the Hungarians--whose
countrymen and women had been sold into captivity--all vied with each
other in the invention of cruelties at which the soul sickens, and which
the pen almost refuses to depict.
These operations and diversions had no sensible effect upon the progress
of the war, which crept on with the same monotonous and sluggish cruelty
as ever; but the incidents narrated paint the course of civilization more
vividly than the detailed accounts of siege and battle; mining and
countermining, assaults and ambuscades can do, of which the history books
are full. The leaguers of Buda and of other cities and fortresses in
Hungary went their course; and it was destined to remain for a still
longer season doubtful whether Cross or Crescent should ultimately wave
over the whole territory of Eastern Europe, and whether the vigorous
Moslem, believing in himself, his mission, his discipline, and his
resources, should ultimately absorb what was left of the ancient Roman
Empire.
Meantime, such of the Walloons, Lorrainers, Germans, and Frenchmen as had
grown wearied of the fighting on the Danube and the Theiss--might have
recourse for variety to the perpetual carnage on the Meuse, the Rhine,
and the Scheld. If there was not bloodshed enough for all, it was surely
not the fault of Mahomet, nor Clement, nor Philip.
During the remainder of the year not much was done in of the stadholder
or the cardinal, but there was immense damage done to the Dutch shipping
by the famous privateersman, Van der Waecken, with his squadron of twelve
or fourteen armed cruisers. In vain had the States exerted themselves to
destroy the robbers cave, Dunkirk. Shiploads of granite had been brought
from Norway, and stone fleets had been sunk in the channel, but the
insatiable quicksands had swallowed them as fast as they could be
deposited, the tide rolled as freely as before, and the bold pirates
sailed forth as gaily as ever to prey upon the defenceless trading
vessels and herring-smacks of the States. For it was only upon non-
combatants that Admiral Van der Waecken made war, and the fishermen
especially, who mainly belonged to the Memnonite religion, with its
doctrines of non-resistance--not a very comfortable practice in that
sanguinary age--were his constant victims. And his cruelties might have
almost served as a model to the Christian warriors on the Turkish
frontier. After each vessel had been rifled of everything worth
possessing, and then scuttled, the admiral would order the crews to be,
thrown overboard at once, or, if he chanced to be in a merry mood, would
cause them to be fastened to the cabin floor, or nailed crossways on the
deck and then would sail away leaving ship and sailors to sink at
leisure. The States gave chase as well as they could to the miscreant--
a Dutchman born, and with a crew mainly composed of renegade
Netherlanders and other outcasts, preying for base lucre on their
defenceless countryman--and their cruisers were occasionally fortunate
enough to capture and bring in one of the pirate ships. In such cases,
short shrift was granted, and the buccaneers were hanged without mercy,
thirty-eight having been executed in one morning at Rotterdam. The
admiral with most of his vessels escaped, however, to the coast of Spain,
where his crews during the autumn mainly contrived to desert, and where
he himself died in the winter, whether from malady, remorse, or
disappointment at not being rewarded by a high position in the Spanish
navy.
The war was in its old age. The leaf of a new century had been turned,
and men in middle life had never known what the word Peace meant.
Perhaps they could hardly imagine such a condition. This is easily said,
but it is difficult really to picture to ourselves the moral constitution
of a race of mankind which had been born and had grown up, marrying and
giving in marriage, dying and burying their dead, and so passing on from
the cradle towards the grave, accepting the eternal clang of arms, and
the constant participation by themselves and those nearest to them in the
dangers, privations, and horrors of siege and battle-field as the
commonplaces of life. At least, those Netherlanders knew what fighting
for independence of a foreign tyrant meant. They must have hated Spain
very thoroughly, and believed in the right of man to worship God
according to the dictates of his conscience, and to govern himself upon
his own soil, however meagre, very earnestly, or they would hardly have
spent their blood and treasure, year after year; with such mercantile
regularity when it was always in their power to make peace by giving up
the object for which they had been fighting.
Yet the war, although in its old age, was not fallen into decrepitude.
The most considerable and most sanguinary pitched battle of what then
were modern times had just been fought, and the combatants were preparing
themselves for a fresh wrestle, as if the conflict had only begun. And
now--although the great leaguers of Harlem, Leyden, and Antwerp, as well
as the more recent masterpieces of Prince Maurice in Gelderland and
Friesland were still fresh in men's memory--there was to be a siege,
which for endurance, pertinacity, valour, and bloodshed on both sides,
had not yet been foreshadowed, far less equalled, upon the fatal
Netherland soil.
That place of fashionable resort, where the fine folk of Europe now
bathe, and flirt, and prattle politics or scandal so cheerfully during
the summer solstice--cool and comfortable Ostend--was throughout the
sixteenth century as obscure a fishing village as could be found in
Christendom. Nothing, had ever happened there, nobody had ever lived
there, and it was not until a much later period that the famous oyster,
now identified with its name, had been brought to its bay to be educated.
It was known for nothing except for claiming to have invented the
pickling of herrings, which was not at all the fact. Towards the latter
part of the century, however, the poor little open village had been
fortified to such purpose as to enable it to beat off the great Alexander
Farnese, when he had made an impromptu effort to seize it in the year
1583, after his successful enterprise against Dunkirk and Nieuport, and
subsequent preparation had fortunately been made against any further
attempt. For in the opening period of the new century thousands and tens
of thousands were to come to those yellow sands, not for a midsummer
holiday, but to join hands in one of the most enduring struggles that
history had yet recorded, and on which the attention of Europe was for a
long time to be steadily fixed.
Ostend--East-end--was the only possession of the republic in Flanders.
Having been at last thoroughly fortified according to the principles of
the age, it was a place whence much damage was inflicted upon the enemy,
and whence forays upon the obedient Flemings could very successfully be
conducted. Being in the hands of so enterprising a naval power, it
controlled the coast, while the cardinal-archduke on the other side
fondly hoped that its possession would give him supremacy on the sea.
The States of Flanders declared it to be a thorn in the Belgic lion's
foot, and called urgently upon their sovereign to remove the annoyance.
They offered Albert 300,000 florins a month so long as the siege should
last, besides an extraordinary sum of 300,000, of which one third was to
be paid when the place should be invested, one-third when the breach had
been made, and one-third after the town had been taken. It was obvious
that, although they thought the extraction of the thorn might prove
troublesome, the process would be accomplished within a reasonable time.
The cardinal-archduke, on his part, was as anxious as the "members" of
Flanders. Asking how long the Duke of Parma had been in taking Antwerp,
and being told "eighteen months," he replied that, if necessary, he was
willing to employ eighteen years in reducing Ostend.
The town thus about to assume so much importance in the world's eye had
about three thousand inhabitants within its lowly; thatch-roofed houses.
It fronted directly upon the seacoast and stretched backward in a
southerly direction, having the sandy downs on the right and left, and a
swampy, spongy soil on the inner verge, where it communicated with the
land. Its northern part, small and scarcely inhabited, was lashed by the
ocean, and exposed to perpetual danger from its storms and flood-tides,
but was partially protected from these encroachments by a dyke stretching
along the coast on the west. Here had hitherto been the harbour formed
by the mouth of the river Iperleda as it mingled with the sea, but this
entrance had become so choked with sand as to be almost useless at low
water. This circumstance would have rendered the labours of the archduke
comparatively easy, and much discouraged the States, had there not
fortunately been a new harbour which had formed itself on the eastern
side exactly at the period of threatened danger. The dwarf mountain
range of dunes which encircled the town on the eastern side had been
purposely levelled, lest the higher summits should offer positions of
vantage to a besieging foe. In consequence of this operation, the sea
had burst over the land and swept completely around the place, almost
converting it into an island, while at high water there opened a wide and
profound gulf which with the ebb left an excellent channel quite deep
enough for even the ships of war of those days. The next care of the
States authorities was to pierce their fortifications on this side at a
convenient point, thus creating a safe and snug haven within the walls
for the fleets of transports which were soon to arrive by open sea, laden
with soldiers and munitions.
The whole place was about half an hour's walk in circumference. It was
surrounded with a regular counterscarp, bastions, and casemates, while
the proximity of the ocean and the humid nature of the soil ensured it a
network of foss and canal on every side. On the left or western side,
where the old harbour had once been, and which was the most vulnerable by
nature, was a series of strong ravelins, the most conspicuous of which
were called the Sand Hill, the Porcupine, and Hell's Mouth. Beyond
these, towards the southwest, were some detached fortifications, resting
for support, however, upon the place itself, called the Polder, the
Square, and the South Square. On the east side, which was almost
inaccessible, as it would seem, by such siege machinery as then existed,
was a work called the Spanish half-moon, situate on the new harbour
called the Guele or Gullet.
Towards the west and southwest, externally, upon the territory of
Flanders--not an inch of which belonged to the republic, save the sea-
beaten corner in which nestled the little town-eighteen fortresses had
been constructed by the archduke as a protection against hostile
incursions from the place. Of these, the most considerable were
St. Albert, often mentioned during the Nieuport campaign, St. Isabella
St. Clara, and Great-Thirst.
On the 5th July, 1601, the archduke came before the town, and formally
began the siege. He established his headquarters in the fort which bore
the name of his patron saint. Frederic van den Berg meanwhile occupied
fort Breden on the eastern side, with the intention, if possible, of
getting possession of the Gullet, or at least of rendering the entrance
to that harbour impossible by means of his hostile demonstrations. Under
Van den Berg was Count Bucquoy-Longueval, a Walloon officer of much
energy and experience, now general-in-chief of artillery in the
archduke's army.
The numbers with which Albert took the field at first have not been
accurately stated, but it is probable that his object was to keep as many
as twenty thousand constantly engaged in the siege, and that in this
regard he was generally successful.
Within the town were fifty-nine companies of infantry, to which were soon
added twenty-three more under command of young Chatillon, grandson of the
great Coligny. It was "an olla podrida of nationalities," according to
the diarist of the siege--[Meteren]. English, Scotch, Dutch, Flemings,
Frenchmen, Germans, mixed in about equal proportions. Commander-in-
chief at the outset was Sir Francis Vere, who established himself by the
middle of July in the place, sent thither by order of the States-General.
It had been the desire of that assembly that the stadholder should make
another foray in Flanders for the purpose of driving off the archduke
before he should have time to complete his preliminary operations. But
for that year at least Maurice was resolved not to renounce his own
schemes in deference to those so much more ignorant than himself of the
art of war, even if Barneveld and his subordinates on their part had not
learned a requisite lesson of modesty.
So the prince, instead of risking another Nieuport campaign, took the
field with a small but well-appointed force, about ten thousand men in
all, marched to the Rhine, and early in June, laid siege to Rheinberg.
It was his purpose to leave the archduke for the time to break his teeth
against the walls of Ostend, while he would himself protect the eastern
frontier, over which came regular reinforcements and supplies for the
Catholic armies. His works were laid out with his customary precision
and neatness. But, standing as usual, like a professor at his
blackboard, demonstrating his proposition to the town, he was disturbed
in his calculations by the abstraction from his little army of two
thousand English troops ordered by the States-General to march to the
defence of Ostend. The most mathematical but most obedient of princes,
annoyed but not disconcerted, sent off the troops but continued his
demonstration.
"By this specimen," cried the French envoy, with enthusiasm, "judge of
the energy of this little commonwealth. They are besieging Berg with an
army of twelve thousand men, a place beyond the frontier, and five days'
march from the Hague. They are defending another important place,
besieged by the principal forces of the archdukes, and there is good
chance of success at both points. They are doing all this too with such
a train of equipages of artillery, of munitions, of barks, of ships of
war, that I hardly know of a monarch in the world who would not be
troubled to furnish such a force of warlike machinery."
By the middle of July he sprang a mine under the fortifications, doing
much damage and sending into the air a considerable portion of the
garrison. Two of the soldiers were blown into his own camp, and one of
them, strangely enough, was but slightly injured. Coming as he did
through the air at cannon-ball speed, he was of course able to bring the
freshest intelligence from the interior of the town.
His news as to the condition of the siege confirmed the theory of the
stadholder. He persisted in his operations for three weeks longer, and
the place was then surrendered. The same terms--moderate and honourable
were given to the garrison and the burghers as in all Maurice's
victories. Those who liked to stay were at liberty to do so, accepting
the prohibition of public worship according to the Roman ritual, but
guaranteed against inquisition into household or conscience. The
garrison went out with the honours of war, and thus the place, whose
military value caused it to change hands almost as frequently as a
counter in a game, was once more in possession of the republic. In the
course of the following week Maurice laid siege to the city of Meurs, a
little farther up the Rhine, which immediately capitulated. Thus the
keys to the debatable land of Cleves and Juliers, the scene of the
Admiral of Arragon's recent barbarities, were now held by the stadholder.
These achievements were followed by an unsuccessful attempt upon
Bois-le-Duc in the course of November. The place would have fallen
notwithstanding the slenderness of the besieging army had not a sudden
and severe frost caused the prudent prince to raise the siege. Feeling
that his cousin Frederic van den Berg, who had been despatched from
before Ostend to command the relieving force near Bois-le-Duc, might take
advantage of the prematurely frozen canals and rivers to make an
incursion into Holland, he left his city just as his works had been
sufficiently advanced to ensure possession of the prize, and hastened to
protect the heart of the republic from possible danger.
Nothing further was accomplished by Maurice that year, but meantime
something had been doing within and around Ostend.
For now the siege of Ostend became the war, and was likely to continue
to be the war for a long time to come; all other military operations
being to a certain degree suspended, as if by general consent of both
belligerants, or rendered subsidiary to the main design. So long as this
little place should be beleaguered it was the purpose of the States, and
of Maurice, acting in harmony with those authorities, to concentrate
their resources so as to strengthen the grip with which the only scrap of
Flanders was held by the republic,
And as time wore on, the supposed necessities of the wealthy province,
which, in political importance, made up a full half of the archduke's
dominions, together with self-esteem and an exaggerated idea of military
honour, made that prelate more and more determined to effect his purpose.
So upon those barren sands was opened a great academy in which the
science and the art of war were to be taught by the most skilful
practitioners to all Europe; for no general, corporal, artillerist,
barber-surgeon, or engineer, would be deemed to know his trade if he had
not fought at Ostend; and thither resorted month after month warriors of
every rank, from men of royal or of noblest blood to adventurers of
lowlier degree, whose only fortune was buckled at their sides. From
every land, of every religion, of every race, they poured into the town
or into the besiegers' trenches. Habsburg and Holstein; Northumberland,
Vere, and Westmoreland; Fairfax and Stuart; Bourbon, Chatillon, and
Lorraine; Bentivoglio, Farnese, Spinola, Grimaldi, Arragon, Toledo,
Avila, Berlaymont, Bucquoy, Nassau, Orange, Solms--such were the historic
names of a few only of the pupils or professors in that sanguinary high
school, mingled with the plainer but well known patronymics of the Baxes,
Meetkerkes, Van Loons, Marquettes, Van der Meers, and Barendrechts, whose
bearers were fighting, as they long had fought, for all that men most
dearly prize on earth, and not to win honour or to take doctors' degrees
in blood. Papist, Calvinist, Lutheran, Turk, Jew and Moor, European,
Asiatic, African, all came to dance in that long carnival of death; and
every incident, every detail throughout the weary siege could if
necessary be reproduced; for so profound and general was the attention
excited throughout Christendom by these extensive operations, and so new
and astonishing were many of the inventions and machines employed--most
of them now as familiar as gunpowder or as antiquated as a catapult--that
contemporaries have been most bountiful in their records for the benefit
of posterity, feeling sure of a gratitude which perhaps has not been
rendered to their shades.
Especially the indefatigable Philip Fleming-auditor and secretary of
Ostend before and during the siege, bravest, most conscientious, and most
ingenious of clerks--has chronicled faithfully in his diary almost every
cannon-shot that was fired, house that was set on fire, officer that was
killed, and has pourtrayed each new machine that was invented or imagined
by native or foreign genius. For the adepts or, pretenders who swarmed
to town or camp from every corner of the earth, bringing in their hands
or brains to be disposed of by either belligerents infallible recipes for
terminating the siege at a single blow, if only their theories could be
understood and their pockets be filled, were as prolific and as sanguine
as in every age. But it would be as wearisome, and in regard to the
history of human culture as superfluous, to dilate upon the technics of
Targone and Giustianini, and the other engineers, Italian and Flemish,
who amazed mankind at this period by their successes, still more by their
failures, or to describe every assault, sortie, and repulse, every
excavation, explosion, and cannonade, as to disinter the details of the
siege of Nineveh or of Troy. But there is one kind of enginry which
never loses its value or its interest, and which remains the same in
every age--the machinery by which stout hearts act directly upon willing
hands--and vast were the results now depending on its employment around
Ostend.
On the outside and at a distance the war was superintended of course by
the stadholder and commander-in-chief, while his cousin William Lewis,
certainly inferior to no living man in the science of war, and whose
studies in military literature, both ancient and modern, during the brief
intervals of his active campaigning, were probably more profound than
those of any contemporary, was always alert and anxious to assist with
his counsels or to mount and ride to the fray.
In the town Sir Francis Vere commanded. Few shapes are more familiar to
the student of those times than this veteran campaigner, the offshoot of
a time-honoured race. A man of handsome, weather-beaten, battle-bronzed
visage, with massive forehead, broad intelligent eyes, a high straight
nose, close-clipped hair, and a great brown beard like a spade; captious,
irascible, but most resolute, he seemed, in his gold inlaid Milan corslet
and ruff of point-lace, the very image of a partizan chieftain; one of
the noblest relics of a race of fighters slowly passing off the world's
stage.
An efficient colonel, he was not a general to be relied upon in great
affairs either in council or the field. He hated the Nassaus, and the
Nassaus certainly did not admire him, while his inordinate self-esteem,
both personal and national, and his want of true sympathy for the cause
in which, he fought, were the frequent source of trouble and danger to
the republic.
Of the seven or eight thousand soldiers in the town when the siege began,
at least two thousand were English. The queen, too intelligent, despite
her shrewishness to the Staten; not to be faithful to the cause in which
her own interests were quite as much involved as theirs, had promised
Envoy Caron that although she was obliged to maintain twenty thousand men
in Ireland to keep down the rebels, directly leagued as they were with
Spain and the archdukes, the republic might depend upon five thousand
soldiers from England. Detachment after detachment, the soldiers came as
fast as the London prisons could be swept and the queen's press-gang
perform its office. It may be imagined that the native land of those
warriors was not inconsiderably benefited by the grant to the republic
of the right to make and pay for these levies. But they had all red
uniforms, and were as fit as other men to dig trenches, to defend them;
and to fill them afterwards, and none could fight more manfully or
plunder friend and foe with greater cheerfulness of impartiality than did
those islanders.
The problem which the archduke had set himself to solve was not an easy
one. He was to reduce a town, which he could invest and had already
succeeded very thoroughly in investing on the land aide, but which was
open to the whole world by sea; while the besieged on their part could
not only rely upon their own Government and people, who were more at home
on the ocean than was any nation in the world, but upon their alliance
with England, a State hardly inferior in maritime resources to the
republic itself.
On the western side, which was the weakest, his progress was from the
beginning the more encouraging, and his batteries were soon able to make
some impression upon the outer works, and even to do considerable damage
to the interior of the town. In the course of a few months he had fifty
siege-guns in position, and had constructed a practicable road all around
the place, connecting his own fortifications on the west and south with
those of Bucquoy on the east.
Albert's leading thought however was to cut off the supplies. The freaks
of nature, as already observed, combined with his own exertions, had
effectually disposed of the western harbour as a means of ingress. The
tide ebbed and flowed through the narrow channel, but it was clogged with
sand and nearly, dry at low water. Moreover, by an invention then
considered very remarkable, a foundation was laid for the besiegers'
forts and batteries by sinking large and deep baskets of wicker-work,
twenty feet in length, and filled with bricks and sand, within this
abandoned harbour. These clumsy machines were called sausages,21 and
were the delight of the camp and of all Europe. The works thus
established on the dry side crept slowly on towards the walls, and some
demi-cannon were soon placed upon, them, but the besieged, not liking
these encroachments, took the resolution to cut the pea-dyke along the
coast which had originally protected the old harbour. Thus the sea, when
the tides were high and winds boisterous, was free to break in upon the
archduke's works, and would often swallow sausages, men, and cannon far
more rapidly than it was possible to place them there.
Yet still those human ants toiled on, patiently restoring what the
elements so easily destroyed; and still, despite the sea; the cannonade,
and the occasional sorties of the garrison, the danger came nearer and
nearer. Bucquoy on the other side was pursuing the same system, but his
task was immeasurably more difficult. The Gullet, or new eastern
entrance, was a whirlpool at high tide, deep, broad, and swift as a
millrace. Yet along its outer verge he too laid his sausages, protecting
his men at their work as well as he could with gabions, and essayed to
build a dyke of wicker-work upon which he might place a platform for
artillery to prevent the ingress of the republican ships.
And his soldiers were kept steadily at work, exposed all the time to the
guns of the Spanish half-moon from which the besieged never ceased to
cannonade those industrious pioneers. It was a bloody business. Night
and day the men were knee-deep in the trenches delving in mud and sand,
falling every instant into the graves which they were thus digging for
themselves, while ever and anon the sea would rise in its wrath and sweep
them with their works away. Yet the victims were soon replaced by
others, for had not the cardinal-archduke sworn to extract the thorn from
the Belgic lion's paw even if he should be eighteen years about it, and
would military honour permit him to break his vow? It was a piteous
sight, even for the besieged, to see human life so profusely squandered.
It is a terrible reflection, too, that those Spaniards, Walloons,
Italians, confronted death so eagerly, not from motives of honour,
religion, discipline, not inspired by any kind of faith or fanaticism,
but because the men who were employed in this horrible sausage-making and
dyke-building were promised five stivers a day instead of two.
And there was always an ample supply of volunteers for the service so
long as the five stivers were paid.
But despite all Bucquoy's exertions the east harbour remained as free as
ever. The cool, wary Dutch skippers brought in their cargoes as
regularly as if there had been no siege at all. Ostend was rapidly
acquiring greater commercial importance, and was more full of bustle and
business than had ever been dreamed of in that quiet nook since the days
of Robert the Frisian, who had built the old church of Ostend, as one of
the thirty which he erected in honour of St. Peter, five hundred years
before.
For the States did not neglect their favourite little city. Fleets of
transports arrived day after day, week after week, laden with every
necessary and even luxury for the use of the garrison. It was perhaps
the cheapest place in all the Netherlands, so great was the abundance.
Capons, bares, partridges, and butcher's meat were plentiful as
blackberries, and good French claret was but two stivers the quart.
Certainly the prospect was not promising of starving the town into a
surrender.
But besides all this digging and draining there was an almost daily
cannonade. Her Royal Highness the Infanta was perpetually in camp by the
side of her well-beloved Albert, making her appearance there in great
state, with eighteen coaches full of ladies of honour, and always
manifesting much impatience if she did not hear the guns.
She would frequently touch off a forty-pounder with her own serene
fingers in order to encourage the artillerymen, and great was the
enthusiasm which such condescension excited.
Assaults, sorties, repulses, ambuscades were also of daily occurrence,
and often with very sanguinary results; but it would be almost as idle
now to give the details of every encounter that occurred, as to describe
the besieging of a snow-fort by schoolboys.
It is impossible not to reflect that a couple of Parrots and a Monitor or
two would have terminated the siege in half an hour in favor of either
party, and levelled the town or the besiegers' works as if they had been
of pasteboard.
Bucquoy's dyke was within a thousand yards of the harbour's entrance, yet
the guns on his platform never sank a ship nor killed a man on board,
while the archduke's batteries were even nearer their mark. Yet it was
the most prodigious siege of modern days. Fifty great guns were in
position around the place, and their balls weighed from ten to forty
pounds apiece. It was generally agreed that no such artillery practice
had ever occurred before in the world.
For the first six months, and generally throughout the siege, there was
fired on an average a thousand of such shots a day. In the sieges of the
American civil war there were sometimes three thousand shots an hour, and
from guns compared to which in calibre and power those cannon and demi-
cannon were but children's toys.
Certainly the human arm was of the same length then as now, a pike-thrust
was as effective as the stab of the most improved bayonet, and when it
came, as it was always the purpose to do, to the close embrace of foemen,
the work was done as thoroughly as it could be in this second half of the
nineteenth century.
Nevertheless it is impossible not to hope that such progress in science
must at last render long wars impossible. The Dutch war of independence
had already lasted nearly forty years. Had the civil war in America upon
the territory of half a continent been waged with the Ostend machinery it
might have lasted two centuries. Something then may have been gained for
humanity by giving war such preter-human attributes as to make its
demands of gold and blood too exhaustive to become chronic.
Yet the loss of human life during that summer and winter was sufficiently
wholesale as compared with the meagre results. Blood flowed in torrents,
for no man could be more free of his soldiers' lives than was the
cardinal-archduke, hurling them as he did on the enemy's works before the
pretence of a practical breach had been effected, and before a reasonable
chance existed of purchasing an advantage at such a price. Five hundred
were killed outright in half-an-hour's assault on an impregnable position
one autumn evening, and lay piled in heaps beneath the Sand Hill fort-
many youthful gallants from Spain and Italy among them, noble volunteers
recognised by their perfumed gloves and golden chains, and whose pockets
were worth rifling. The Dutch surgeons, too, sallied forth in strength
after such an encounter, and brought in great bags filled with human fat
esteemed the sovereignst remedy in the world for wounds and disease.
Leaders were killed on both sides. Catrici, chief of the Italian
artillery, and Braccamonte, commander of a famous Sicilian legion, with
many less-known captains, lost their lives before the town. The noble
young Chatillon, grandson of Coligny, who had distinguished himself at
Nieuport, fell in the Porcupine fort, his head carried off by a cannon-
ball, which destroyed another officer at his side, and just grazed the
ear of the distinguished Colonel Uchtenbroek. Sir Francis Vere, too, was
wounded in the head by a fragment of iron, and was obliged to leave the
town for six weeks till his wound should heal.
The unfortunate inhabitants--men, women, and children--were of course
exposed to perpetual danger, and very many were killed. Their houses
were often burned to the ground, in which cases the English auxiliaries
were indefatigable, not in rendering assistance, but in taking possession
of such household goods as the flames had spared. Nor did they always
wait for such opportunities, but were apt, at the death of an eminent
burgher, to constitute themselves at once universal legatees. Thus,
while honest Bartholomew Tysen, a worthy citizen grocer, was standing
one autumn morning at his own door, a stray cannon-ball took off his
head, and scarcely had he been put in a coffin before his house was
sacked from garret to cellar and all the costly spices, drugs, and other
valuable merchandize of his warehouse--the chief magazine in the town--
together with all his household furniture, appropriated by those London
warriors. Bartholomew's friends and relatives appealed to Sir Francis
Vere for justice, but were calmly informed by that general that Ostend
was like a stranded ship, on its beamends on a beach, and that it was
impossible not to consider it at the mercy of the wreckers. So with this
highly figurative view of the situation from the lips of the governor of
the place and the commander-in-chief of the English as well as the Dutch
garrison, they were fain to go home and bury their dead, finding when
they returned that another cannonball had carried away poor Bartholomew's
coffin-lid. Thus was never non-combatant and grocer, alive or dead, more
out of suits with fortune than this citizen of Ostend; and such were the
laws of war, as understood by one of the most eminent of English
practitioners in the beginning of the seventeenth century. It is true,
however, that Vere subsequently hanged a soldier for stealing fifty
pounds of powder and another for uttering counterfeit money, but
robberies upon the citizens were unavenged.
Nor did the deaths by shot or sword-stroke make up the chief sum of
mortality. As usual the murrain-like pestilence which swept off its
daily victims both within an without the town, was more effective than
any direct agency of man. By the month of December the number of the
garrison had been reduced to less than three thousand, while it is
probable that the archduke had not eight thousand effective men left in
his whole army.
It was a black and desolate scene. The wild waves of the German ocean,
lashed by the wintry gales, would often sweep over the painfully
constructed works of besieger and besieged and destroy in an hour the
labour of many weeks. The Porcupine's small but vitally-important
ravelin lying out in the counterscarp between the old town and the new,
guarding the sluices by which the water for the town moats and canals was
controlled, and preventing the pioneers of the enemy from undermining the
western wall--was so damaged by the sea as to be growing almost
untenable. Indefatigably had the besieged attempted with wicker-work and
timber and palisades to strengthen this precious little fort, but they
had found, even as Bucquoy and the archduke on their part had learned,
that the North Sea in winter was not to be dammed by bulrushes.
Moreover, in a bold and successful assault the besiegers had succeeded
in setting fire to the inflammable materials heaped about the ravelin to
such effect that the fire burned for days, notwithstanding the flooding
of the works at each high tide. The men, working day and night,
scorching in the flames, yet freezing kneedeep in the icy slush of the
trenches and perpetually under fire of the hostile batteries, became
daily more and more exhausted, notwithstanding their determination to
hold the place. Christmas drew nigh, and a most gloomy, festival it was
like to be, for it seemed as if the beleaguered garrison had been
forgotten by the States. Weeks had passed away without a single company
being sent to repair the hideous gaps made daily in the ranks of those
defenders of a forlorn hope. It was no longer possible to hold the
external works; the Square, the Polder, and the other forts on the
southwest which Vere had constructed with so much care and where he had
thus far kept his headquarters. On Sunday morning,--23rd December, he
reluctantly gave orders that they should be abandoned on the following
day and the whole garrison concentrated within the town.
The clouds were gathering darkly over the head of the gallant Vere; for
no sooner had he arrived at this determination than he learned from a
deserter that the archduke had fixed upon that very Sunday evening for
a general assault upon the place. It was hopeless for the garrison to
attempt to hold these outer forts, for they required a far larger number
of soldiers than could be spared from the attenuated little army. Yet
with those forts in the hands of the enemy there would be nothing left
but to make the best and speediest terms that might be obtained. The
situation was desperate. Sir Francis called his principal officers
together, announced his resolve not to submit to the humiliation of a
surrender after all their efforts, if there was a possibility of escape
from their dilemma, reminded them that reinforcements might be expected
to arrive at any moment, and that with even a few hundred additional
soldiers the outer works might still be manned and the city saved.
The officers English, Dutch, and French, listened respectfully to his
remarks, but, without any suggestions on their own part, called on him
as their Alexander to untie the Gordian knot. Alexander solved it, not
with the sword, but with a trick which he hoped might prove sharper than
a sword. He announced his intention of proposing at once to treat, and
to protract the negotiations as long as possible, until the wished-for
sails should be discerned in the offing, when he would at once break
faith with them, resume hostilities, and so make fools of the besiegers.
This was a device worthy of a modern Alexander whose surname was Farnese.
Even in that loose age such cynical trifling with the sacredness of
trumpets of truce and offers of capitulation were deemed far from
creditable among soldiers and statesmen, yet the council of war highly
applauded the scheme, and importuned the general to carry it at once into
effect.
When it came, however, to selecting the hostages necessary for the
proposed negotiations, they became less ardent and were all disposed to
recede. At last, after much discussion, the matter was settled, and
before nightfall a drummer was set upon the external parapet of the
Porcupine, who forthwith began to beat vigorously for a parley. The
rattle was a welcome sound in the ears of the weary besiegers, just drawn
up in column for a desperate assault, and the tidings were at once
communicated to the archduke in Fort St. Albert. The prince manifested
at first some unwillingness to forego the glory of the attack, from
which he confidently expected a crowning victory, but yielding to the
representations of his chief generals that it was better to have his town
without further bloodshed, he consented to treat. Hostages were
expeditiously appointed on both sides, and Captains Ogle and Fairfax were
sent that same evening to the headquarters of the besieging army. It was
at once agreed as a preliminary that the empty outer works of the place
should remain unmolested. The English officers were received with much
courtesy. The archduke lifted his hat as they were presented, asked them
of what nation they were, and then inquired whether they were authorized
to agree upon terms of capitulation. They answered in the negative;
adding, that the whole business would be in the hands of commissioners to
be immediately sent by his Highness, as it was supposed, into the town.
Albert then expressed the hope that there was no fraudulent intention
in the proposition just made to negotiate. The officers professed
themselves entirely ignorant of any contemplated deception; although
Captain Ogle had been one of the council, had heard every syllable of
Vere's stratagem, and had heartily approved of the whole plot. The
Englishmen were then committed to the care of a Spanish nobleman of the
duke's staff, and were treated with perfect politeness and hospitality.