After the army which the Prince had so unsuccessfully led to the relief of Mons had been disbanded, he had himself repaired to Holland.  He had come to Kampen shortly before its defection from his cause.  Thence he had been escorted across the Zuyder Zee to Eukhuyzen.  He came to that province, the only one which through good and ill report remained entirely faithful to him, not as a conqueror but as an unsuccessful, proscribed man.  But there were warm hearts beating within those cold lagunes, and no conqueror returning from a brilliant series of victories could have been received with more affectionate respect than William in that darkest hour of the country’s history.  He had but seventy horsemen at his back, all which remained of the twenty thousand troops which he had a second time levied in Germany, and he felt that it would be at that period hopeless for him to attempt the formation of a third army.  He had now come thither to share the fate of Holland, at least, if he could not accomplish her liberation.  He went from city to city, advising with the magistracies and with the inhabitants, and arranging many matters pertaining both to peace and war.  At Harlem the States of the Provinces, according to his request, had been assembled.  The assembly begged him to lay before them, if it were possible, any schemes and means which he might have devised for further resistance to the Duke of Alva.  Thus solicited, the Prince, in a very secret session, unfolded his plans, and satisfied them as to the future prospects of the cause.  His speech has nowhere been preserved.  His strict injunctions as to secrecy, doubtless, prevented or effaced any record of the session.  It is probable, however, that he entered more fully into the state of his negotiations with England, and into the possibility of a resumption by Count Louis of his private intercourse with the French court, than it was safe, publicly, to divulge.

While the Prince had been thus occupied in preparing the stout-hearted province for the last death-struggle with its foe, that mortal combat was already fast approaching; for the aspect of the contest in the Netherlands was not that of ordinary warfare.  It was an encounter between two principles, in their nature so hostile to each other that the absolute destruction of one was the only, possible issue.  As the fight went on, each individual combatant seemed inspired by direct personal malignity, and men found a pleasure in deeds of cruelty, from which generations not educated to slaughter recoil with horror.  To murder defenceless prisoners; to drink, not metaphorically but literally, the heart’s blood of an enemy; to exercise a devilish ingenuity in inventions of mutual torture, became not only a duty but a rapture.  The Liberty of the Netherlands had now been hunted to its lair.  It had taken its last refuge among the sands and thickets where its savage infancy had been nurtured, and had now prepared itself to crush its tormentor in a last embrace, or to die in the struggle.