History of the United Netherlands, 1604-05 | Page 8

march towards Spinola to offer him battle, was
unable for some days to move. Meantime a council, summoned by
Marquette, of all the officers, decided that Ostend must be abandoned
now that Ostend had ceased to exist.
On the 20th September the Accord was signed with Spinola. The
garrison were to march out with their arms. They were to carry off four
cannon but no powder. All clerical persons were to leave the place,
with their goods and chattels. All prisoners taken on both sides during
the siege were to be released. Burghers, sutlers, and others, to go
whither they would, undisturbed. And thus the archdukes, after three
years and seventy-seven days of siege, obtained their prize. Three
thousand men, in good health, marched out of little Troy with the
honours of war. The officers were entertained by Spinola and his
comrades at a magnificent banquet, in recognition of the unexampled
heroism with which the town had been defended. Subsequently the
whole force marched to the headquarters of the States' army in and
about Sluys. They were received by Prince Maurice, who stood
bareheaded and surrounded by his most distinguished officers; to greet
them and to shake them warmly by the hand. Surely no defeated
garrison ever deserved more respect from friend or foe.
The Archduke Albert and the Infants Isabella entered the place in
triumph, if triumph it could be called. It would be difficult to imagine a
more desolate scene. The artillery of the first years of the seventeenth
century was not the terrible enginry of destruction that it has become in
the last third of the nineteenth, but a cannonade, continued so steadily

and so long, had done its work. There were no churches, no houses, no
redoubts, no bastions, no walls, nothing but a vague and confused mass
of ruin. Spinola conducted his imperial guests along the edge of extinct
volcanoes, amid upturned cemeteries, through quagmires which once
were moats, over huge mounds of sand, and vast shapeless masses of
bricks and masonry, which had been forts. He endeavoured to point out
places where mines had been exploded, where ravelins had been
stormed, where the assailants had been successful, and where they had
been bloodily repulsed. But it was all loathsome, hideous rubbish.
There were no human habitations, no hovels, no casemates. The
inhabitants had burrowed at last in the earth, like the dumb creatures of
the swamps and forests. In every direction the dykes had burst, and the
sullen wash of the liberated waves, bearing hither and thither the
floating wreck of fascines and machinery, of planks and building
materials, sounded far and wide over what should have been dry land.
The great ship channel, with the unconquered Half-moon upon one side
and the incomplete batteries and platforms of Bucquoy on the other,
still defiantly opened its passage to the sea, and the retiring fleets of the
garrison were white in the offing. All around was the grey expanse of
stormy ocean, without a cape or a headland to break its monotony, as
the surges rolled mournfully in upon a desolation more dreary than
their own. The atmosphere was mirky and surcharged with rain, for the
wild equinoctial storm which had held Maurice spell-bound had been
raging over land and sea for many days. At every step the unburied
skulls of brave soldiers who had died in the cause of freedom grinned
their welcome to the conquerors. Isabella wept at the sight. She had
cause to weep. Upon that miserable sandbank more than a hundred
thousand men had laid down their lives by her decree, in order that she
and her husband might at last take possession of a most barren prize.
This insignificant fragment of a sovereignty which her wicked old
father had presented to her on his deathbed--a sovereignty which he had
no more moral right or actual power to confer than if it had been in the
planet Saturn--had at last been appropriated at the cost of all this misery.
It was of no great value, although its acquisition had caused the
expenditure of at least eight millions of florins, divided in nearly equal
proportions between the two belligerents. It was in vain that great
immunities were offered to those who would remain, or who would

consent to settle in the foul Golgotha. The original population left the
place in mass. No human creatures were left save the wife of a
freebooter and her paramour, a journeyman blacksmith. This unsavoury
couple, to whom entrance into the purer atmosphere of Zeeland was
denied, thenceforth shared with the carrion crows the amenities of
Ostend.

CHAPTER XLIV
.
Equation between the contending powers--Treaty of peace between
King James and the archdukes and the King of Spain--Position of the
Provinces--States envoy in England to be styled ambassador--Protest