Dire was the anger not unjustly excited in Spain when the news of this violation of neutrality reached that government.  Julich, placed midway between Liege and Cologne, and commanding those fertile plains which make up the opulent duchy, seemed virtually converted into a province of the detested heretical republic.  The German gate of the Spanish Netherlands was literally in the hands of its most formidable foe.

The Spaniards about the court of the Archduke did not dissemble their rage.  The seizure of Julich was a stain upon his reputation, they cried.  Was it not enough, they asked, for the United Provinces to have made a truce to the manifest detriment and discredit of Spain, and to have treated her during all the negotiation with such insolence?  Were they now to be permitted to invade neutral territory, to violate public faith, to act under no responsibility save to their own will?  What was left for them to do except to set up a tribunal in Holland for giving laws to the whole of Northern Europe?  Arrogating to themselves absolute power over the controverted states of Cleve, Julich, and the dependencies, they now pretended to dispose of them at their pleasure in order at the end insolently to take possession of them for themselves.

These were the egregious fruits of the truce, they said tauntingly to the discomfited Archduke.  It had caused a loss of reputation, the very soul of empires, to the crown of Spain.  And now, to conclude her abasement, the troops in Flanders had been shaven down with such parsimony as to make the monarch seem a shopkeeper, not a king.  One would suppose the obedient Netherlands to be in the heart of Spain rather than outlying provinces surrounded by their deadliest enemies.  The heretics had gained possession of the government at Aix-la-Chapelle; they had converted the insignificant town of Mulheim into a thriving and fortified town in defiance of Cologne and to its manifest detriment, and in various other ways they had insulted the Catholics throughout those regions.  And who could wonder at such insolence, seeing that the army in Flanders, formerly the terror of heretics, had become since the truce so weak as to be the laughing-stock of the United Provinces?  If it was expensive to maintain these armies in the obedient Netherlands, let there be economy elsewhere, they urged.

From India came gold and jewels.  From other kingdoms came ostentation and a long series of vain titles for the crown of Spain.  Flanders was its place of arms, its nursery of soldiers, its bulwark in Europe, and so it should be preserved.

There was ground for these complaints.  The army at the disposition of the Archduke had been reduced to 8000 infantry and a handful of cavalry.  The peace establishment of the Republic amounted to 20,000 foot, 3000 horse, besides the French and English regiments.