Maurice broke up his camp soon after the departure of his antagonist, and paused for a few days at Arnheim to give honourable burial to his cousin Philip and Count Solms.  Meantime Sir Francis Vere was detached, with three regiments, which were to winter in Overyssel, towards Weerd castle, situate at a league’s distance from Ysselsburg, and defended by a garrison of twenty-six men under Captain Pruys.  That doughty commandant, on being summoned to surrender, obstinately refused.  Vere, according to Maurice’s orders, then opened with his artillery against the place, which soon capitulated in great panic and confusion.  The captain demanded the honours of war.  Vere told him in reply that the honours of war were halters for the garrison who had dared to defend such a hovel against artillery.  The twenty-six were accordingly ordered to draw black and white straws.  This was done, and the twelve drawing white straws were immediately hanged; the thirteenth receiving his life on consenting to act as executioner for his comrades.  The commandant was despatched first of all.  The rope broke, but the English soldiers held him under the water of the ditch until he was drowned.  The castle was then thoroughly sacked, the women being sent unharmed to Ysselsburg.

Maurice then shipped the remainder of his troops along the Rhine and Waal to their winter quarters and returned to the Hague.  It was the feeblest year’s work yet done by the stadholder.

Meantime his great ally, the Huguenot-Catholic Prince of Bearne, was making a dashing, and, on the whole, successful campaign in the heart of his own kingdom.  The constable of Castile, Don Ferdinando de Velasco, one of Spain’s richest grandees and poorest generals, had been sent with an army of ten thousand men to take the field in Burgundy against the man with whom the great Farnese had been measuring swords so lately, and with not unmingled success, in Picardy.  Biron, with a sudden sweep, took possession of Aussone, Autun, and Beaune, but on one adventurous day found himself so deeply engaged with a superior force of the enemy in the neighbourhood of Fontaine Francaise, or St. Seine, where France’s great river takes its rise, as to be nearly cut off and captured.  But Henry himself was already in the field, and by one of those mad, reckless impulses which made him so adorable as a soldier and yet so profoundly censurable as a commander-in-chief, he flung himself, like a young lieutenant, with a mere handful of cavalry, into the midst of the fight, and at the imminent peril of his own life succeeded in rescuing the marshal and getting off again unscathed.  On other occasions Henry said he had fought for victory, but on that for dear life; and, even as in the famous and foolish skirmish at Aumale three years before, it was absence of enterprise or lack of cordiality on the part of his antagonists, that alone prevented a captive king from being exhibited as a trophy of triumph for the expiring League.