The next day, notwithstanding the urgent entreaties of his friends, who were anxious lest his life should be endangered by breathing, in his scarcely convalescent state; the air of the city where so many thousands had been dying of the pestilence, the Prince repaired to Leyden.  He, at least, had never doubted his own or his country’s fortitude.  They could, therefore, most sincerely congratulate each other, now that the victory had been achieved.  “If we are doomed to perish,” he had said a little before the commencement of the siege, “in the name of God, be it so!  At any rate, we shall have the honor to have done what no nation ever, did before us, that of having defended and maintained ourselves, unaided, in so small a country, against the tremendous efforts of such powerful enemies.  So long as the poor inhabitants here, though deserted by all the world, hold firm, it will still cost the Spaniards the half of Spain, in money and in men, before they can make an end of us.”

The termination of the terrible siege of Leyden was a convincing proof to the Spaniards that they had not yet made an end of the Hollanders.  It furnished, also, a sufficient presumption that until they had made an end of them, even unto the last Hollander, there would never be an end of the struggle in which they were engaged.  It was a slender consolation to the Governor-General, that his troops had been vanquished, not by the enemy, but by the ocean.  An enemy whom the ocean obeyed with such docility might well be deemed invincible by man.  In the head-quarters of Valdez, at Leyderdorp, many plans of Leyden and the neighbourhood were found lying in confusion about the room.  Upon the table was a hurried farewell of that General to the scenes of his, discomfiture, written in a Latin worthy of Juan Vargas:  “Vale civitas, valete castelli parvi, qui relicti estis propter aquam et non per vim inimicorum!” In his precipitate retreat before the advancing rebels, the Commander had but just found time for this elegant effusion, and, for his parting instructions to Colonel Borgia that the fortress of Lammen was to be forthwith abandoned.  These having been reduced to writing, Valdez had fled so speedily as to give rise to much censure and more scandal.  He was even accused of having been bribed by the Hollanders to desert his post, a tale which many repeated, and a few believed.  On the 4th of October, the day following that on which the relief of the city was effected, the wind shifted to the north-east, and again blew a tempest.  It was as if the waters, having now done their work, had been rolled back to the ocean by an Omnipotent hand, for in the course of a few days, the land was bare again, and the work of reconstructing the dykes commenced.

After a brief interval of repose, Leyden had regained its former position.  The Prince, with advice of the estates, had granted the city, as a reward for its sufferings, a ten days’ annual fair, without tolls or taxes, and as a further manifestation of the gratitude entertained by the people of Holland and Zealand for the heroism of the citizens, it was resolved that an academy or university should be forthwith established within their walls.  The University of Leyden, afterwards so illustrious, was thus founded in the very darkest period of the country’s struggle.