These appeals had, however, but little effect.  Of three hundred thousand crowns, promised on behalf of leading nobles and merchants of the Netherlands by Marcus Perez, but ten or twelve thousand came to hand.  The appeals to the gentlemen who had signed the Compromise, and to many others who had, in times past, been favorable to the liberal party were powerless.  A poor Anabaptist preacher collected a small sum from a refugee congregation on the outskirts of Holland, and brought it, at the peril of his life, into the Prince’s camp.  It came from people, he said, whose will was better than the gift.  They never wished to be repaid, he said, except by kindness, when the cause of reform should be triumphant in the Netherlands.  The Prince signed a receipt for the money, expressing himself touched by this sympathy from these poor outcasts.  In the course of time, other contributions from similar sources, principally collected by dissenting preachers, starving and persecuted church communities, were received.  The poverty-stricken exiles contributed far more, in proportion, for the establishment of civil and religious liberty, than the wealthy merchants or the haughty nobles.

Late in September, the Prince mustered his army in the province of Treves, near the monastery of Romersdorf.  His force amounted to nearly thirty thousand men, of whom nine thousand were cavalry.  Lumey, Count de la Marek, now joined him at the head of a picked band of troopers; a bold, ferocious partisan, descended from the celebrated Wild Boar of Ardennes.  Like Civilis, the ancient Batavian hero, he had sworn to leave hair and beard unshorn till the liberation of the country was achieved, or at least till the death of Egmont, whose blood relation he was, had been avenged.  It is probable that the fierce conduct of this chieftain, and particularly the cruelties exercised upon monks and papists by his troops, dishonored the cause more than their valor could advance it.  But in those stormy times such rude but incisive instruments were scarcely to be neglected, and the name of Lumey was to be forever associated with important triumphs of the liberal cause.

It was fated, however, that but few laurels should be won by the patriots in this campaign.  The Prince crossed the Rhine at Saint Feit, a village belonging to himself.  He descended along the banks as far as the neighbourhood of Cologne.  Then, after hovering in apparent uncertainty about the territories of Juliers and Limburg, he suddenly, on a bright moonlight night, crossed the Meuse with his whole army, in the neighbourhood of Stochem.  The operation was brilliantly effected.  A compact body of cavalry, according to the plan which had been more than once adopted by Julius Caesar, was placed in the midst of the current, under which shelter the whole army successfully forded the river.  The Meuse was more shallow than usual, but the water was as high as the soldiers’ necks.  This feat