and cruelty. William tried in vain to restrain excesses which brought
him little profit and no small discredit. It was to no purpose that he
associated the lord of Lumbres in the chief command with Dolhain. Their
subordinates, William de Blois, lord of Treslong, and William de la
Marck, lord of Lumey, were bold, unscrupulous adventurers who found it
to their interest to allow their unruly crews to burn and pillage, as
they lusted, not only their enemies' ships in the open sea, but churches
and monasteries along the coast and up the estuaries that they infested.
The difficulty was to find harbours in which they could take refuge and
dispose of their booty. For some time they were permitted to use the
English ports freely, and the Huguenot stronghold at La Rochelle was
also open to them as a market. Queen Elizabeth, as was her wont, had no
scruple in conniving at acts of piracy to the injury of the Spaniard;
but at last, at the beginning of 1572, in consequence of strong
representations from Madrid, she judged it politic to issue an order
forbidding the Sea-Beggars to enter any English harbours. The pirates,
thus deprived of the shelter which had made their depredations possible,
would have been speedily in very bad case, but for an unexpected and
surprising stroke of good fortune. It chanced that a large number of
vessels under Lumbres and Treslong were driven by stress of weather into
the estuary of the Maas; and finding that the Spanish garrison of Brill
had left the town upon a punitive expedition, the rovers landed and
effected an entry by burning one of the gates. The place was seized and
pillaged, and the marauders were on the point of returning with their
spoil to their ships, when at the suggestion of Treslong it was
determined to place a garrison in the town and hold it as a harbour of
refuge in the name of the Prince of Orange, as Stadholder of Holland. On
April 1, 1572, the prince's flag was hoisted over Brill, and the
foundation stone was laid of the future Dutch republic.