he made overtures to Parma.  Alexander was glad to enlist so bold a soldier on his side, and assisted Schenk in his besieged stronghold.  For years afterwards, his services under the King’s banner were most brilliant, and he rose to the highest military command, while his coffers, meantime, were rapidly filling with the results of his robberies and ‘brandschatzungs.’ “’Tis a most courageous fellow,” said Parma, “but rather a desperate highwayman than a valiant soldier.”  Martin’s couple of lances had expanded into a corps of free companions, the most truculent, the most obedient, the most rapacious in Christendom.  Never were freebooters more formidable to the world at large, or more docile to their chief, than were the followers of General Schenk.  Never was a more finished captain of highwaymen.  He was a man who was never sober, yet who never smiled.  His habitual intoxication seemed only to increase both his audacity and his taciturnity, without disturbing his reason.  He was incapable of fear, of fatigue, of remorse.  He could remain for days and nights without dismounting-eating, drinking, and sleeping in the saddle; so that to this terrible centaur his horse seemed actually a part of himself.  His soldiers followed him about like hounds, and were treated by him like hounds.  He habitually scourged them, often took with his own hand the lives of such as displeased him, and had been known to cause individuals of them to jump from the top of church steeples at his command; yet the pack were ever stanch to his orders, for they knew that he always led them where the game was plenty.  While serving under Parma he had twice most brilliantly defeated Hohenlo.  At the battle of Hardenberg Heath he had completely outgeneralled that distinguished chieftain, slaying fifteen hundred of his soldiers at the expense of only fifty or sixty of his own.  By this triumph he had preserved the important city of Groningen for Philip, during an additional quarter of a century, and had been received in that city with rapture.  Several startling years of victory and rapine he had thus run through as a royalist partisan.  He became the terror and the scourge of his native Gelderland, and he was covered with wounds received in the King’s service.  He had been twice captured and held for ransom.  Twice he had effected his escape.  He had recently gained the city of Nymegen.  He was the most formidable, the most unscrupulous, the most audacious Netherlander that wore Philip’s colours; but he had received small public reward for his services, and the wealth which he earned on the high-road did not suffice for his ambition.  He had been deeply disgusted, when, at the death of Count Renneberg, Verdugo, a former stable-boy of Mansfeld, a Spaniard who had risen from the humblest rank to be a colonel and general, had been made governor of Friesland.  He had smothered his resentment for a time however, but had sworn within himself to desert at the most favourable opportunity.  At last, after he had brilliantly saved the city of Breda from falling into the hands of the patriots, he was more enraged than he had ever been before, when Haultepenne, of the house of Berlapmont, was made governor of that place in his stead.