No language can exaggerate the consequences of this wretched treason.  Unfortunately, too; the abject condition to which the English troops had been reduced by the niggardliness of their sovereign was an additional cause of danger.  Leicester was gone, and since her favourite was no longer in the Netherlands, the Queen seemed to forget that there was a single Englishman upon that fatal soil.  In five months not one penny had been sent to her troops.  While the Earl had been there one hundred and forty thousand pounds had been sent in seven or eight months.  After his departure not five thousand pounds were sent in one half year.

The English soldiers, who had fought so well in every Flemish battle-field of freedom, had become—­such as were left of them—­mere famishing half naked vagabonds and marauders.  Brave soldiers had been changed by their sovereign into brigands, and now the universal odium which suddenly attached itself to the English name converted them into outcasts.  Forlorn and crippled creatures swarmed about the Provinces, but were forbidden to come through the towns, and so wandered about, robbing hen-roosts and pillaging the peasantry.  Many deserted to the enemy.  Many begged their way to England, and even to the very gates of the palace, and exhibited their wounds and their misery before the eyes of that good Queen Bess who claimed to be the mother of her subjects,—­and begged for bread in vain.

The English cavalry, dwindled now to a body of five hundred, starving and mutinous, made a foray into Holland, rather as highwaymen than soldiers.  Count Maurice commanded their instant departure, and Hohenlo swore that if the order were not instantly obeyed, he would put himself at the head of his troops and cut every man of them to pieces.  A most painful and humiliating condition for brave men who had been fighting the battles of their Queen and of the republic, to behold themselves—­through the parsimony of the one and the infuriated sentiment of the other—­compelled to starve, to rob, or to be massacred by those whom they had left their homes to defend.

At last, honest Wilkes, ever watchful of his duty, succeeded in borrowing eight hundred pounds sterling for two months, by “pawning his own carcase” as he expressed himself.  This gave the troopers about thirty shillings a man, with which relief they became, for a time, contented and well disposed.

Is this picture exaggerated?  Is it drawn by pencils hostile to the English nation or the English Queen?  It is her own generals and confidential counsellors who have told a story in all its painful details, which has hardly found a place in other chronicles.  The parsimony of the great Queen must ever remain a blemish on her character, and it was never more painfully exhibited than towards her brave soldiers in Flanders in the year 1587.  Thomas Wilkes, a man of truth, and a man of accounts, had informed Elizabeth that the expenses of one year’s war,