While these events were taking place in Brussels and Antwerp, the two armies of the states and of Don John were indolently watching each other.  The sinews of war had been cut upon both sides.  Both parties were cramped by the most abject poverty.  The troops under Bossu and Casimir, in the camp sear Mechlin, were already discontented, for want of pay.  The one hundred thousand pounds of Elizabeth had already been spent, and it was not probable that the offended Queen would soon furnish another subsidy.  The states could with difficulty extort anything like the assessed quotas from the different provinces.  The Duke of Alencon was still at Mons, from which place he had issued a violent proclamation of war against Don John—­a manifesto which had, however, not been followed up by very vigorous demonstrations.  Don John himself was in his fortified camp at Bouge, within a league of Namur, but the here was consuming with mental and with bodily fever.  He was, as it were, besieged.  He was left entirely without funds, while his royal brother obstinately refused compliance with his earnest demands to be recalled, and coldly neglected his importunities for pecuniary assistance.

Compelled to carry on a war against an armed rebellion with such gold only as could be extracted from loyal swords; stung to the heart by the suspicion of which he felt himself the object at home, and by the hatred with which he was regarded in the provinces; outraged in his inmost feelings by the murder of Escovedo; foiled, outwitted, reduced to a political nullity by the masterly tactics of the “odious heretic of heretics” to whom he had originally offered his patronage and the royal forgiveness, the high-spirited soldier was an object to excite the tenderness even of religious and political opponents.  Wearied with the turmoil of camps without battle and of cabinets without counsel, he sighed for repose, even if it could be found only in a cloister or the grave.  “I rejoice to see by your letter,” he wrote, pathetically, to John Andrew Doria, at Genoa, “that your life is flowing on with such calmness, while the world around me is so tumultuously agitated.  I consider you most fortunate that you are passing the remainder of your days for God and yourself; that you are not forced to put yourself perpetually in the scales of the world’s events, nor to venture yourself daily on its hazardous games.”  He proceeded to inform his friend of his own painful situation, surrounded by innumerable enemies, without means of holding out more than three months, and cut off from all assistance by a government which could not see that if the present chance were lost all was lost.  He declared it impossible for him to fight in the position to which he was reduced, pressed as he was within half a mile of the point which he had always considered as his last refuge.  He stated also that the French were strengthening themselves in Hainault, under Alencon, and that the King of France was in readiness to break in through Burgundy, should