The loss, after a six weeks’ siege, of Rheinberg, which six years before, with far inferior fortifications, had held out a much longer time against the States, was felt as a bitter disappointment throughout the republic.  Frederic Henry, on leaving the place, made a feeble and unsuccessful demonstration against Yenlo, by which the general dissatisfaction was not diminished.  Soon afterwards, the war became more languid than ever.  News arrived of a great crisis on the Genoa exchange.  A multitude of merchants, involved in pecuniary transactions with Spinola, fell with one tremendous crash.  The funds of the Catholic commander-in-chief were already exhausted, his acceptances could no longer be negotiated.

His credit was becoming almost as bad as the king’s own.  The inevitable consequence of the want of cash and credit followed.  Mutiny, for the first time in Spinola’s administration, raised its head once more, and stalked about defiant.  Six hundred veterans marched to Breda, and offered their services to Justinus of Nassau.  The proposal was accepted.  Other bands, established their quarters in different places, chose their Elettos and lesser officers, and enacted the scenes which have been so often depicted in these pages.  The splendid army of Spinola melted like April snow.  By the last week of October there hardly seemed a Catholic army in the field.  The commander-in-chief had scattered such companies as could still be relied upon in the villages of the friendly arch-episcopate of Cologne, and had obtained, not by murders and blackmail—­according to the recent practice of the Admiral of Arragon, at whose grim name the whole country-side still shuddered—­but from the friendship of the leading inhabitants and by honest loans, a sufficient sum to put bread into the mouths of the troops still remaining faithful to him.

The opportunity had at last arrived for the stadholder to strike a blow before the season closed.  Bankruptcy and mutiny had reduced his enemy to impotence in the very season of his greatest probable success.  On the 24th October Maurice came before Lochem, which he recaptured in five days.  Next in the order of Spinola’s victories was Groll, which the stadholder at once besieged.  He had almost fifteen thousand infantry and three thousand horse.  A career of brief triumph before winter should close in upon those damping fields, seemed now assured.  But the rain, which during nearly the whole campaign had been his potent ally, had of late been playing him false.  The swollen Yssel, during a brief period of dry weather, had sunk so low in certain shallows as not to be navigable for his transports, and after his trains of artillery and munitions had been dragged wearily overland as far as Groll, the deluge had returned in such force, that physical necessity as well as considerations of humanity compelled him to defer his entrenching operations until the weather should moderate.  As there seemed no further danger to