trade, and a warm partisan of Orange, plucked a pistol from beneath his robe, and shot the commandant through the head.  The others, taking advantage of the sudden panic, overcame all the resistance offered by the feeble garrison, and made themselves masters of the place.  In the course of the next day they introduced into the castle four or five and twenty men, with which force they diligently set themselves to fortify the place, and secure themselves in its possession.  A larger reinforcement which they had reckoned upon, was detained by the floods and frosts, which, for the moment, had made the roads and fivers alike impracticable.

Don Roderigo de Toledo, governor of Bois le Duc, immediately despatched a certain Captain Perea, at the head of two hundred soldiers, who were joined on the way by a miscellaneous force of volunteers, to recover the fortress as soon as possible.  The castle, bathed on its outward walls by the Waal and Meuse, and having two redoubts, defended by a double interior foss, would have been difficult to take by assaults had the number of the besieged been at all adequate to its defence.  As matters stood, however, the Spaniards, by battering a breach in the wall with their cannon on the first day, and then escalading the inner works with remarkable gallantry upon the second, found themselves masters of the place within eight and forty hours of their first appearance before its gates.  Most of the defenders were either slain or captured alive.  De Ruyter alone had betaken himself to an inner hall of the castle, where he stood at bay upon the threshold.  Many Spaniards, one after another, as they attempted to kill or to secure him, fell before his sword, which he wielded with the strength of a giant.  At last, overpowered by numbers, and weakened by the loss of blood, he retreated slowly into the hall, followed by many of his antagonists.  Here, by an unexpected movement, he applied a match to a train of powder, which he had previously laid along the floor of the apartment.  The explosion was instantaneous.  The tower, where the contest was taking place, sprang into the air, and De Ruyter with his enemies shared a common doom.  A part of the mangled remains of this heroic but ferocious patriot were afterwards dug from the ruins of the tower, and with impotent malice nailed upon the gallows at Bois le Duc.  Of his surviving companions, some were beheaded, some were broken on the wheel, some were hung and quartered—­all were executed.

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MOTLEY’S HISTORY OF THE NETHERLANDS, PG EDITION, VOLUME 18.