By midsummer, at least three thousand five hundred veterans, including a thousand of excellent cavalry, the very best soldiers in the service, had seized the city of Hoogstraaten.  Here they established themselves securely, and strengthened the fortifications; levying contributions in corn, cattle, and every other necessary, besides wine, beer, and pocket-money, from the whole country round with exemplary regularity.  As usual, disorder assumed the forms of absolute order.  Anarchy became the best organized of governments; and it would have been difficult to find in the world—­outside the Dutch commonwealth—­a single community where justice appeared to be so promptly administered as in this temporary republic, founded upon rebellion and theft.

For; although a brotherhood of thieves, it rigorously punished such of its citizens as robbed for their own, not for the public good.  The immense booty swept daily from the granges, castles; and villages of Flanders was divided with the simplicity of early Christians, while the success and steadiness of the operations paralyzed their sovereign, and was of considerable advantage to the States.

Albert endeavoured in vain to negotiate with the rebels.  Nuncius Frangipani went to them in person, but was received with calm derision.  Pious exhortations might turn the keys of Paradise, but gold alone, he was informed, would unlock the gates of Hoogstraaten.  In an evil hour the cardinal-archduke was tempted to try the effect of sacerdotal thunder.  The ex-archbishop of Toledo could not doubt that the terrors of the Church would make those brown veterans tremble who could confront so tranquilly the spring-tides of the North Sea, and the batteries of Vere and Nassau.  So he launched a manifesto, as highly spiced as a pamphlet of Marnig, and as severe as a sentence of Torquemada.  Entirely against the advice of the States-General of the obedient provinces, he denounced the mutineers as outlaws and accursed.  He called on persons of every degree to kill any of them in any way, at any time, or in any place, promising that the slayer of a private soldier should receive a reward of “ten crowns for each head” brought in, while for a subaltern officer’s head one hundred crowns were offered; for that of a superior officer two hundred, and for that of the Eletto or chief magistrate, five hundred crowns.  Should the slayer be himself a member of the mutiny, his crime of rebellion was to be forgiven, and the price of murder duly paid.  All judges, magistrates, and provost-marshals were ordered to make inventories of the goods, moveable and immoveable, of the mutineers, and of the clothing and other articles belonging to their wives and children, all which property was to be brought in and deposited in the hands of the proper functionaries of the archduke’s camp, in order that it might be duly incorporated into the domains of his Highness.

The mutineers were not frightened.  The ban was an anachronism.  If those Spaniards and Italians had learned nothing by their much campaigning in the land of Calvinism, they had at least unlearned their faith in bell, book, and candle.  It happened, too, that among their numbers were to be found pamphleteers as ready and as unscrupulous as the scribes of the archduke.