The cavalry, amounting to about twelve hundred; was under the command of the natural son of the Duke, Don Ferdinando de Toledo, Prior of the Knights of St. John.  Chiapin Vitelli, Marquis of Cetona, who had served the King in many a campaign, was appointed Marechal de camp, and Gabriel Cerbelloni was placed in command of the artillery.  On the way the Duke received, as a present from the Duke of Savoy, the services of the distinguished engineer, Pacheco, or Paciotti, whose name was to be associated with the most celebrated citadel of the Netherlands; and whose dreadful fate was to be contemporaneous with the earliest successes of the liberal party.

With an army thus perfect, on a small scale, in all its departments, and furnished, in addition, with a force of two thousand prostitutes, as regularly enrolled, disciplined, and distributed as the cavalry or the artillery, the Duke embarked upon his momentous enterprise, on the 10th of May, at Carthagena.  Thirty-seven galleys, under command of Prince Andrea Doria, brought the principal part of the force to Genoa, the Duke being delayed a few days at Nice by an attack of fever.  On the 2d of June, the army was mustered at Alexandria de Palla, and ordered to rendezvous again at San Ambrosio at the foot of the Alps.  It was then directed to make its way over Mount Cenis and through Savoy; Burgundy, and Lorraine, by a regularly arranged triple movement.  The second division was each night to encamp on the spot which had been occupied upon the previous night by the vanguard, and the rear was to place itself on the following night in the camp of the corps de bataille.  Thus coiling itself along almost in a single line by slow and serpentine windings, with a deliberate, deadly, venomous purpose, this army, which was to be the instrument of Philip’s long deferred vengeance, stole through narrow mountain pass and tangled forest.  So close and intricate were many of the defiles through which the journey led them that, had one tithe of the treason which they came to punish, ever existed, save in the diseased imagination of their monarch, not one man would have been left to tell the tale.  Egmont, had he really been the traitor and the conspirator he was assumed to be, might have easily organized the means of cutting off the troops before they could have effected their entrance into the country which they had doomed to destruction.  His military experience, his qualifications for a daring stroke, his great popularity, and the intense hatred entertained for Alva, would have furnished him with a sufficient machinery for the purpose.