He took Burik on the 11th October, Rheinberg on the 15th of the same month, and compounded with Wesel for a hundred and twenty thousand florins.  Leaving garrisons in these and a few other captured places, he crossed the Lippe, came to Borhold, and ravaged the whole country side.  His troops being clamorous for pay were only too eager to levy black-mail on this neutral territory.  The submission of the authorities to this treatment brought upon them a reproach of violation of neutrality by the States-General; the Governments of Munster and of the duchies being informed that, if they aided and abetted the one belligerent, they must expect to be treated as enemies by the other.

The admiral took Rees on the 30th October, and Emmerich on the 2nd November—­two principal cities of Cleves.  On the 8th November he crossed into the territory of the republic and captured Deutekom, after a very short siege.  Maurice, by precaution, occupied Sevenaer in Cleves.  The prince—­whose difficult task was to follow up and observe an enemy by whom he was outnumbered nearly four to one, to harass him by skirmishes, to make forays on his communications, to seize important points before he could reach them, to impose upon him by an appearance of far greater force than the republican army could actually boast, to protect the cities of the frontier like Zutphen, Lochem, and Doesburg, and to prevent him from attempting an invasion of the United Provinces in force, by crossing any of the rivers, either in the autumn or after the winter’s ice had made them passable for the Spanish army-succeeded admirably in all his strategy.  The admiral never ventured to attack him, for fear of risking a defeat of his whole army by an antagonist whom he ought to have swallowed at a mouthful, relinquished all designs upon the republic, passed into Munster, Cleves, and Berg, and during the whole horrible winter converted those peaceful provinces into a hell.  No outrage which even a Spanish army could inflict was spared the miserable inhabitants.  Cities and villages were sacked and burned, the whole country was placed under the law of black-mail.  The places of worship, mainly Protestant, were all converted at a blow of the sword into Catholic churches.  Men were hanged, butchered, tossed in sport from the tops of steeples, burned, and buried alive.  Women of every rank were subjected by thousands to outrage too foul and too cruel for any but fiends or Spanish soldiers to imagine.

Such was the lot of thousands of innocent men and women at the hands of Philip’s soldiers in a country at peace with Philip, at the very moment when that monarch was protesting with a seraphic smile on his expiring lips that he had never in his whole life done injury to a single human being.