The butchers were indeed furious.  Twelve thousand oxen grazed annually upon the pastures which were about to be submerged, and it was represented as unreasonable that all this good flesh and blood should be sacrificed.  At a meeting of the magistrates on the following day, sixteen butchers, delegates from their guild, made their appearance, hoarse with indignation.  They represented the vast damage which would be inflicted upon the estates of many private individuals by the proposed inundation, by this sudden conversion of teeming meadows, fertile farms, thriving homesteads, prolific orchards, into sandy desolation.  Above all they depicted, in glowing colours and with natural pathos, the vast destruction of beef which was imminent, and they urged—­with some show of reason—­that if Parma were really about to reduce Antwerp by famine, his scheme certainly would not be obstructed by the premature annihilation of these wholesome supplies.

That the Scheldt could be, closed in any manner was, however, they said, a preposterous conception.  That it could be bridged was the dream of a lunatic.  Even if it were possible to construct a bridge, and probable that the Zeelanders and Antwerpers would look on with folded arms while the work proceeded, the fabric, when completed, would be at the mercy of the ice-floods of the winter and the enormous power of the ocean-tides.  The Prince of Orange himself, on a former occasion, when Antwerp was Spanish, had attempted to close the river with rafts, sunken piles, and other obstructions, but the whole had been swept away, like a dam of bulrushes, by the first descent of the ice-blocks of winter.  It was witless to believe that Parma contemplated any such measure, and utterly monstrous to believe in its success.

Thus far the butchers.  Soon afterwards came sixteen colonels of militia, as representatives of their branch of the multiform government.  These personages, attended by many officers of inferior degree, sustained the position of the butchers with many voluble and vehement arguments.  Not the least convincing of their conclusions was the assurance that it would be idle for the authorities to attempt the destruction of the dyke, seeing that the municipal soldiery itself would prevent the measure by main force, at all hazards, and without regard to their own or others’ lives.

The violence of this opposition, and the fear of a serious internecine conflict at so critical a juncture, proved fatal to the project.  Much precious time was lost, and when at last the inhabitants of the city awoke from their delusion, it was to find that repentance, as usual, had come many hours too late.

For Parma had been acting while his antagonists had been wrangling.  He was hampered in his means, but he was assisted by what now seems the incredible supineness of the Netherlanders.  Even Sainte Aldegonde did not believe in the possibility of erecting the bridge; not a man in Antwerp seemed to believe it.  “The preparations,” said one who lived in the city, “went on before our very noses, and every one was ridiculing the Spanish commander’s folly.”