Nothing could induce the stadholder, who held an observing position at Wesel, with his back against the precious watery quadrilateral, to risk the defence of those most vital lines of the Yssel and the Waal.  While attempting to save Rheinberg, he felt it possible that he might lose Nymegen, or even Utrecht.  The swift but wily Genoese was not to be trifled with or lost sight of an instant.  The road to Holland might still be opened, and the destiny of the republic might hang on the consequences of a single false move.  That destiny, under God, was in his hands alone, and no chance of winning laurels, even from his greatest rival’s head, could induce him to shrink from the path of duty, however obscure it might seem.  There were a few brilliant assaults and sorties, as in all sieges, the French volunteers especially distinguishing themselves; but the place fell at the end of forty days.  The garrison marched out with the honours of war.  In the modern practice, armies were rarely captured in strongholds, nor were the defenders, together with the population, butchered.

The loss, after a six weeks’ siege, of Rheinberg, which six years before, with far inferior fortifications, had held out a much longer time against the States, was felt as a bitter disappointment throughout the republic.  Frederic Henry, on leaving the place, made a feeble and unsuccessful demonstration against Yenlo, by which the general dissatisfaction was not diminished.  Soon afterwards, the war became more languid than ever.  News arrived of a great crisis on the Genoa exchange.  A multitude of merchants, involved in pecuniary transactions with Spinola, fell with one tremendous crash.  The funds of the Catholic commander-in-chief were already exhausted, his acceptances could no longer be negotiated.

His credit was becoming almost as bad as the king’s own.  The inevitable consequence of the want of cash and credit followed.  Mutiny, for the first time in Spinola’s administration, raised its head once more, and stalked about defiant.  Six hundred veterans marched to Breda, and offered their services to Justinus of Nassau.  The proposal was accepted.  Other bands, established their quarters in different places, chose their Elettos and lesser officers, and enacted the scenes which have been so often depicted in these pages.  The splendid army of Spinola melted like April snow.  By the last week of October there hardly seemed a Catholic army in the field.  The commander-in-chief had scattered such companies as could still be relied upon in the villages of the friendly arch-episcopate of Cologne, and had obtained, not by murders and blackmail—­ according to the recent practice of the Admiral of Arragon, at whose grim name the whole country-side still shuddered—­but from the friendship of the leading inhabitants and by honest loans, a sufficient sum to put bread into the mouths of the troops still remaining faithful to him.