Accordingly, Champagny was rewarded for his exertions by being released from prison and receiving the appointment of governor of the city:  and, after a very brief interval, about one-half of the population, the most enterprising of its merchants and manufacturers, the most industrious of its artizans, emigrated to Holland and Zeeland.  The noble city of Ghent—­then as large as Paris, thoroughly surrounded with moats, and fortified with bulwarks, ravelins, and counterscarps, constructed of earth, during the previous two years, at great expense, and provided with bread and meat, powder and shot, enough to last a year—­was ignominiously surrendered.  The population, already a very reduced and slender one for the great extent of the place and its former importance, had been estimated at 70,000.  The number of houses was 35,000, so that as the inhabitants were soon farther reduced to one-half, there remained but one individual to each house.  On the other hand, the twenty-five monasteries and convents in the town were repeopled—­with how much advantage as a set-off to the thousands of spinners and weavers who had wandered away, and who in the flourishing days of Ghent had sent gangs of workmen through the streets “whose tramp was like that of an army”—­may be sufficiently estimated by the result.

The fall of Brussels was deferred till March, and that of Mechlin (19th July, 1585) and of Antwerp (19th August, 1585), till Midsummer of the following year; but, the surrender of Ghent (10th March 1585) foreshadowed the fate of Flanders and Brabant.  Ostend and Sluys, however, were still in the hands of the patriots, and with them the control of the whole Flemish coast.  The command of the sea was destined to remain for centuries with the new republic.

The Prince of Parma, thus encouraged by the great success of his intrigues, was determined to achieve still greater triumphs with his arms, and steadily proceeded with his large design of closing the Scheldt—­and bringing about the fall of Antwerp.  The details of that siege-one of the most brilliant military operations of the age and one of the most memorable in its results—­will be given, as a connected whole, in a subsequent series of chapters.  For the present, it will be better for the reader who wishes a clear view of European politics at this epoch, and of the position of the Netherlands, to give his attention to the web of diplomatic negotiation and court-intrigue which had been slowly spreading over the leading states of Christendom, and in which the fate of the world was involved.  If diplomatic adroitness consists mainly in the power to deceive, never were more adroit diplomatists than those of the sixteenth century.  It would, however, be absurd to deny them a various range of abilities; and the history of no other age can show more subtle, comprehensive, indefatigable—­but, it must also be added, often unscrupulous—­intellects engaged in the great game of politics in which the highest interests of millions were the stakes, than were those of several leading minds in England, France, Germany, and Spain.  With such statesmen the burgher-diplomatists of the new-born commonwealth had to measure themselves; and the result was to show whether or not they could hold their own in the cabinet as on the field,