Nevertheless, the rebels had achieved a considerable success; and now or never the telling blow, long meditated, was to be struck.

There lived in Antwerp a subtle Mantuan, Gianibelli by name, who had married and been long settled in the city.  He had made himself busy with various schemes for victualling the place.  He had especially urged upon the authorities, at an early period of the siege, the propriety of making large purchases of corn and storing it in magazines at a time when famine-price had by no means been reached.  But the leading men had then their heads full of a great ship, or floating castle, which they were building, and which they had pompously named the ‘War’s End,’ ’Fin de la Guerre.’  We shall hear something of this phenomenon at a later period.  Meanwhile, Gianibelli, who knew something of shipbuilding, as he did of most other useful matters, ridiculed the design, which was likely to cost, in itself before completion, as much money as would keep the city in bread for a third of a year.

Gianibelli was no patriot.  He was purely a man of science and of great acquirements, who was looked upon by the ignorant populace alternately as a dreamer and a wizard.  He was as indifferent to the cause of freedom as of despotism, but he had a great love for chemistry.  He was also a profound mechanician, second to no man of his age in theoretic and practical engineering.

He had gone from Italy to Spain that he might offer his services to Philip, and give him the benefit of many original and ingenious inventions.  Forced to dance attendance, day after day, among sneering courtiers and insolent placemen, and to submit to the criticism of practical sages and philosophers of routine, while, he was constantly denied an opportunity of explaining his projects, the quick-tempered Italian had gone away at last, indignant.  He had then vowed revenge upon the dulness by which his genius had been slighted, and had sworn that the next time the Spaniards heard the name of the man whom they had dared to deride, they should hear it with tears.

He now laid before the senate of Antwerp a plan for some vessels likely to prove more effective than the gigantic ‘War’s End,’ which he had prophesied would prove a failure.  With these he pledged himself to destroy the bridge.  He demanded three ships which he had selected from the city fleet; the ‘Orange,’ the ‘Post,’ and the ‘Golden Lion,’ measuring, respectively, one hundred and fifty, three hundred and fifty, and five hundred tons.  Besides these, he wished sixty flat-bottomed scows, which he proposed to send down the river, partially submerged, disposed in the shape of a half moon, with innumerable anchors and grapnel’s thrusting themselves out of the water at every point.  This machine was intended to operate against the raft.

Ignorance and incredulity did their work, as usual, and Gianbelli’s request was refused.  As a quarter-measure, nevertheless, he was allowed to take two smaller vessels of seventy and eighty tons.  The Italian was disgusted with parsimony upon so momentous an occasion, but he at the same time determined, even with these slender materials, to give an exhibition of his power.