William of Orange was a worthy embodiment of the Christian, national resistance of the German race to a foreign tyranny.  Alva had entered the Netherlands to deal with them as with conquered provinces.  He found that the conquest was still to be made, and he left the land without having accomplished it.  Through the sea of blood, the Hollanders felt that they were passing to the promised land.  More royal soldiers fell during the seven months’ siege of Harlem than the rebels had lost in the defeat of Jemmingen, and in the famous campaign of Brabant.  At Alkmaar the rolling waves of insolent conquest were stayed, and the tide then ebbed for ever.

The accomplished soldier struggled hopelessly, with the wild and passionate hatred which his tyranny had provoked.  Neither his legions nor his consummate strategy availed him against an entirely desperate people.  As a military commander, therefore, he gained, upon the whole, no additional laurels during his long administration of the Netherlands.  Of all the other attributes to be expected in a man appointed to deal with a free country, in a state of incipient rebellion, he manifested a signal deficiency.  As a financier, he exhibited a wonderful ignorance of the first principles of political economy.  No man before, ever gravely proposed to establish confiscation as a permanent source of revenue to the state; yet the annual product from the escheated property of slaughtered heretics was regularly relied upon, during his administration, to replenish the King’s treasury, and to support the war of extermination against the King’s subjects.  Nor did statesman ever before expect a vast income from the commerce of a nation devoted to almost universal massacre.  During the daily decimation of the people’s lives, he thought a daily decimation of their industry possible.  His persecutions swept the land of those industrious classes which had made it the rich and prosperous commonwealth it had been so lately; while, at the same time, he found a “Peruvian mine,” as he pretended, in the imposition of a tenth penny upon every one of its commercial transactions.  He thought that a people, crippled as this had been by the operations of the Blood Council; could pay ten per cent., not annually but daily; not upon its income, but upon its capital; not once only, but every time the value constituting the capital changed hands.  He had boasted that he should require no funds from Spain, but that, on the contrary, he should make annual remittances to the royal treasury at home, from the proceeds of his imposts and confiscations; yet, notwithstanding these resources, and notwithstanding twenty-five millions of gold in five years, sent by Philip from Madrid, the exchequer of the provinces was barren and bankrupt when his successor arrived.  Requesens found neither a penny in the public treasury nor the means of raising one.