The stadtholderess now applied her whole efforts to destroy the union among the patriot lords.  She, in the meantime, ordered levies of troops to the amount of some thousands, the command of which was given to the nobles on whose attachment she could reckon.  The most vigorous measures were adopted.  Noircarmes, governor of Hainault, appeared before Valenciennes, which, being in the power of the Calvinists, had assumed a most determined attitude of resistance.  He vainly summoned the place to submission, and to admit a royalist garrison; and on receiving an obstinate refusal, he commenced the siege in form.  An undisciplined rabble of between three thousand and four thousand Gueux, under the direction of John de Soreas, gathered together in the neighborhood of Lille and Tournay, with a show of attacking these places.  But the governor of the former town dispersed one party of them; and Noircarmes surprised and almost destroyed the main body—­their leader falling in the action.  These were the first encounters of the civil war, which raged without cessation for upward of forty years in these devoted countries, and which is universally allowed to be the most remarkable that ever desolated any isolated portion of Europe.  The space which we have already given to the causes which produced this memorable revolution, now actually commenced, will not allow us to do more than rapidly sketch the fierce events that succeeded each other with frightful rapidity.

While Valenciennes prepared for a vigorous resistance, a general synod of the Protestants was held at Antwerp, and De Brederode undertook an attempt to see the stadtholderess, and lay before her the complaints of this body; but she refused to admit him into the capital.  He then addressed to her a remonstrance in writing, in which he reproached her with her violation of the treaties; on the faith of which the confederates had dispersed, and the majority of the Protestants laid down their arms.  He implored her to revoke the new proclamations, by which she prohibited them from the free exercise of their religion; and, above all things, he insisted on the abandonment of the siege of Valenciennes, and the disbanding of the new levies.  The stadtholderess’s reply was one of haughty reproach and defiance.  The gauntlet was now thrown down; no possible hope of reconciliation remained; and the whole country flew to arms.  A sudden attempt on the part of the royalists, under Count Meghem, against Bois-le-duc, was repulsed by eight hundred men, commanded by an officer named Bomberg, in the immediate service of De Brederode, who had fortified himself in his garrison town of Vienen.