Prince Maurice soon put into motion, to oppose this army of brigands, his small disposable force of about seven thousand men.  With these, however, and a succession of masterly manoeuvres, he contrived to preserve the republic from invasion, and to paralyze and almost destroy an army three times superior in numbers to his own.  The horrors committed by the Spaniards, in the midst of peace, and without the slightest provocation, could not fail to excite the utmost indignation in a nation so fond of liberty and so proud as Germany.  The duchy of Cleves felt particularly aggrieved; and Sybilla, the sister of the duke, a real heroine in a glorious cause, so worked on the excited passions of the people by her eloquence and her tears that she persuaded all the orders of the state to unite against the odious enemy.  Some troops were suddenly raised; and a league was formed between several princes of the empire to revenge the common cause.  The count de la Lippe was chosen general of their united forces; and the choice could not have fallen on one more certainly incapable or more probably treacherous.

The German army, with their usual want of activity, did not open the campaign till the month of June.  It consisted of fourteen thousand men; and never was an army so badly conducted.  Without money, artillery, provisions, or discipline, it was at any moment ready to break up and abandon its incompetent general; and on the very first encounter with the enemy, and after a loss of a couple of hundred men, it became self-disbanded; and, flying in every direction, not a single man could be rallied to clear away this disgrace.

The states-general, cruelly disappointed at this result of measures from which they had looked for so important a diversion in their favor, now resolved on a vigorous exertion of their own energies, and determined to undertake a naval expedition of a magnitude greater than any they had hitherto attempted.  The force of public opinion was at this period more powerful than it had ever yet been in the United Provinces; for a great number of the inhabitants, who, during the life of Philip II., conscientiously believed that they could not lawfully abjure the authority once recognized and sworn to, became now liberated from those respectable, although absurd, scruples; and the death of one unfeeling despot gave thousands of new citizens to the state.

A fleet of seventy-three vessels, carrying eight thousand men, was soon equipped, under the order of Admiral Vander Goes; and, after a series of attempts on the coasts of Spain, Portugal, Africa, and the Canary Isles, this expedition, from which the most splendid results were expected, was shattered, dispersed, and reduced to nothing by a succession of unheard-of mishaps.