The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1582-84 | Page 7

the
principal command of the enterprise had been entrusted by Anjou,
stood directly in the path of his fugitive soldiers, not only bitterly
upbraiding them with their cowardice, but actually slaying ten or
twelve of them with his own hands, as the most effectual mode of
preventing their retreat. Hardly an hour had elapsed from the time when
the Duke of Anjou first rode out of the Kipdorp gate, before nearly the
whole of the force which he had sent to accomplish his base design was
either dead or captive. Two hundred and fifty nobles of high rank and
illustrious name were killed; recognized at once as they lay in the
streets by their magnificent costume. A larger number of the gallant
chivalry of France had been sacrificed--as Anjou confessed--in this
treacherous and most shameful enterprise, than had often fallen upon
noble and honorable fields. Nearly two thousand of the rank and file
had perished, and the rest were prisoners. It was at first asserted that
exactly fifteen hundred and eighty-three Frenchmen had fallen, but this

was only because this number happened to be the date of the year, to
which the lovers of marvellous coincidences struggled very hard to
make the returns of the dead correspond. Less than one hundred
burghers lost their lives.
Anjou, as he looked on at a distance, was bitterly reproached for his
treason by several of the high-minded gentlemen about his person, to
whom he had not dared to confide his plot. The Duke of Montpensier
protested vehemently that he washed his hands of the whole transaction,
whatever might be the issue. He was responsible for the honor of an
illustrious house, which should never be stained, he said, if he could
prevent it, with such foul deeds. The same language was held by Laval,
by Rochefoucauld, and by the Marechal de Biron, the last gentleman,
whose two sons were engaged in the vile enterprise, bitterly cursing the
Duke to his face, as he rode through the gate after revealing his secret
undertaking.
Meanwhile, Anjou, in addition to the punishment of hearing these
reproaches from men of honor, was the victim of a rapid and violent
fluctuation of feeling. Hope, fear, triumph, doubt, remorse, alternately
swayed him. As he saw the fugitives leaping from the walls, he shouted
exultingly, without accurately discerning what manner of men they
were, that the city was his, that four thousand of his brave soldiers were
there, and were hurling the burghers from the battlements. On being
made afterwards aware of his error, he was proportionably depressed;
and when it was obvious at last that the result of the enterprise was an
absolute and disgraceful failure, together with a complete exposure of
his treachery, he fairly mounted his horse, and fled conscience-stricken
from the scene.
The attack had been so unexpected, in consequence of the credence that
had been rendered by Orange and the magistracy to the solemn
protestations of the Duke, that it had been naturally out of any one's
power to prevent the catastrophe. The Prince was lodged in apart of the
town remote from the original scene of action, and it does not appear
that information had reached him that anything unusual was occurring,
until the affair was approaching its termination. Then there was little
for him to do. He hastened, however, to the scene, and mounting the
ramparts, persuaded the citizens to cease cannonading the discomfited
and retiring foe. He felt the full gravity of the situation, and the

necessity of diminishing the rancor of the inhabitants against their
treacherous allies, if such a result were yet possible. The burghers had
done their duty, and it certainly would have been neither in his power
nor his inclination to protect the French marauders from expulsion and
castigation.
Such was the termination of the French Fury, and it seems sufficiently
strange that it should have been so much less disastrous to Antwerp
than was the Spanish Fury of 1576, to which men could still scarcely
allude without a shudder. One would have thought the French more
likely to prove successful in their enterprise than the Spaniards in theirs.
The Spaniards were enemies against whom the city had long been on
its guard. The French were friends in whose sincerity a somewhat
shaken confidence had just been restored. When the Spanish attack was
made, a large force of defenders was drawn up in battle array behind
freshly strengthened fortifications. When the French entered at leisure
through a scarcely guarded gate, the whole population and garrison of
the town were quietly eating their dinners. The numbers of the invading
forces on the two occasions did not materially differ; but at the time of
the French Fury there was not a large force of regular troops under
veteran generals to resist the