Alva turned first toward the recovery of this important place, and gave the command of the siege to his son Frederic of Toledo, who was assisted by the counsels of Noircarmes and Vitelli; but Louis of Nassau held out for upward of three months, and only surrendered on an honorable capitulation in the month of September; his French allies having been first entirely defeated, and their brave leader De Genlis taken prisoner.  The Prince of Orange had in the meantime secured possession of Louvain, Ruremonde, Mechlin, and other towns, carried Termonde and Oudenarde by assault, and made demonstrations which seemed to court Alva once more to try the fortune of the campaign in a pitched battle.  But such were not William’s real intentions, nor did the cautious tactics of his able opponent allow him to provoke such a risk.  He, however, ordered his son Frederic to march with all his force into Holland, and he soon undertook the siege of Haerlem.  By the time that Mons fell again into the power of the Spaniards, sixty-five towns and their territories, chiefly in the northern provinces, had thrown off the yoke.  The single port of Flessingue contained one hundred and fifty patriot vessels, well armed and equipped; and from that epoch may be dated the rapid growth of the first naval power in Europe, with the single exception of Great Britain.

It is here worthy of remark, that all the horrors of which the people of Flanders were the victims, and in their full proportion, had not the effect of exciting them to revolt; but they rose up with fury against the payment of the new taxes.  They sacrificed everything sooner than pay these unjust exactions—­Omniadabant_, nedecimam_darant_.  The next important event in these wars was the siege of Haerlem, before which place the Spaniards were arrested in their progress for seven months, and which they at length succeeded in taking with a loss of ten thousand men.

The details of this memorable siege are calculated to arouse every feeling of pity for the heroic defenders, and of execration against the cruel assailants.  A widow, named Kenau Hasselaer, gained a niche in history by her remarkable valor at the head of a battalion of three hundred of her townswomen, who bore a part in all the labors and perils of the siege.  After the surrender, and in pursuance of Alva’s common system, his ferocious son caused the governor and the other chief officers to be beheaded; and upward of two thousand of the worn-out garrison and burghers were either put to the sword, or tied two and two and drowned in the lake which gives its name to the town.  Tergoes in South Beveland, Mechlin, Naerden, and other towns, were about the same period the scenes of gallant actions, and of subsequent cruelties of the most revolting nature as soon as they fell into the power of the Spaniards.  Strada, with all his bigotry to the Spanish cause, admits that these excesses were atrocious crimes rather than just punishments:  nonpoena,_sed_flagitium_.