A large collection of ecclesiastical plate, jewellery, money, and other
valuables, which had been sent to the city for safe keeping from the
churches and convents of the provinces, was seized, and thus, with little
bloodshed and no violence; was the important city secured for the
insurgents. Three days afterwards, two thousand infantry, chiefly
French, arrived in the place. In the early part of the following month
Louis was still further strengthened by the arrival of thirteen hundred
foot and twelve hundred horsemen, under command of Count Montgomery, the
celebrated officer, whose spear at the tournament had proved fatal to
Henry the Second. Thus the Duke of Alva suddenly found himself exposed
to a tempest of revolution. One thunderbolt after another seemed
descending around him in breathless succession. Brill and Flushing had
been already lost; Middelburg was so closely invested that its fall
seemed imminent, and with it would go the whole island of Walcheren, the
key to all the Netherlands. In one morning he had heard of the revolt of
Enkbuizen and of the whole Waterland; two hours later came the news of
the Valenciennes rebellion, and next day the astonishing capture of Mons.
One disaster followed hard upon another. He could have sworn that the
detested Louis of Nassau, who had dealt this last and most fatal stroke,
was at that moment in Paris, safely watched by government emissaries; and
now he had, as it were, suddenly started out of the earth, to deprive him
of this important city, and to lay bare the whole frontier to the
treacherous attacks of faithless France. He refused to believe the
intelligence when it was first announced to him, and swore that he had
certain information that Count Louis had been seen playing in the tennis-
court at Paris, within so short a period as to make his presence in
Hainault at that moment impossible. Forced, at last, to admit the truth
of the disastrous news, he dashed his hat upon the ground in a fury,
uttering imprecations upon the Queen Dowager of France, to whose
perfidious intrigues he ascribed the success of the enterprise, and