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.

So there soon came forth and was published to the world, in the name of the Eletto and council of Hoogstraaten, a formal answer to the ban.

“If scolding and cursing be payment,” said the magistrates of the mutiny, “then we might give a receipt in full for our wages.  The ban is sufficient in this respect; but as these curses give no food for our bellies nor clothes for our backs, not preventing us, therefore, who have been fighting so long for the honour and welfare of the archdukes from starving with cold and hunger, we think a reply necessary in order to make manifest how much reason these archdukes have for thundering forth all this choler and fury, by which women and children may be frightened, but at which no soldier will feel alarm.

“When it is stated,” continued the mutineers, “that we have deserted our banners just as an attempt was making by the archduke to relieve Grave, we can only reply that the assertion proves how impossible it is to practise arithmetic with disturbed brains.  Passion is a bad schoolmistress for the memory, but, as good friends, we will recal to the recollection of your Highness that it was not your Highness, but the Admiral of Arragon, that commanded the relieving force before that city.