Surely the Lord seemed to have delivered the enemy into his hands that morning.  Maurice was shut in between Nieuport on one side and the archduke’s army on the other, planted as it was on the only road of retreat.  Had Albert entrenched himself, Maurice must either have attacked at great disadvantage or attempted embarkation in the face of his enemy.  To stay indefinitely where he was would have proved an impossibility, and amid the confusion necessary to the shipping of his army, how could he have protected himself by six demi-cannon placed on the sea-beach?

That Maurice was able to extricate himself from the horrible dilemma in which he had been placed, through no fault of his own, and to convert imminent disaster into magnificent victory, will always redound to his reputation as a great military chief.  And this was all the fruit of the expedition, planned, as Elizabeth thought, with so much secrecy and discretion.  Three days after the battle the stadholder came again before Nieuport, only to find the garrison strengthened meantime by La Bourlotte to three thousand men.  A rainy week succeeded, and Maurice then announced to the States-General the necessity of abandoning an enterprise, a successful issue to which was in his opinion impossible.  The States-General, grown more modest in military matters, testified their willingness to be governed by his better judgment, and left Ostend for the Hague on the 18th July.  Maurice, after a little skirmishing with some of the forts around that city, in one of which the archduke’s general La Bourlotte was killed, decided to close the campaign, and he returned with his whole army on the last day of July into Holland.

The expedition was an absolute failure, but the stadholder had gained a great victory.  The effect produced at home and abroad by this triumphant measuring of the republican forces, horse, foot, and artillery, in a pitched battle and on so conspicuous an arena, with the picked veterans of Spain and Italy, was perhaps worth the cost, but no other benefit was derived from the invasion of Flanders.

The most healthy moral to be drawn from this brief but memorable campaign is that the wisest statesmen are prone to blunder in affairs of war, success in which seems to require a special education and a distinct genius.  Alternation between hope and despair, between culpable audacity and exaggerated prudence, are but too apt to mark the warlike counsels of politicians who have not been bred soldiers.  This, at least, had been eminently the case with Barneveld and his colleagues of the States-General.

ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS: 

Alas! the benighted victims of superstition hugged their chains
Culpable audacity and exaggerated prudence
The wisest statesmen are prone to blunder in affairs of war

*** End of the project gutenberg EBOOK history United Netherlands, 1600 ***