eating up every green leaf, robbing and pillaging, where robbery and
pillage had gone so often that hardly anything was left for rapine. Thus
dealt the soldiers in the open country, while their master at Ghent was
plunging into the complicated intrigues spread over that unfortunate city
by the most mischievous demagogues that ever polluted a sacred cause.
Well had Cardinal Granvelle, his enemy, William of Hesse, his friend and
kinsman, understood the character of John Casimir. Robbery and pillage
were his achievements, to make chaos more confounded was his destiny.
Anjou--disgusted with the temporary favor accorded to a rival whom he
affected to despise--disbanded his troops in dudgeon, and prepared to
retire to France. Several thousand of these mercenaries took service
immediately with the Malcontents under Montigny, thus swelling the ranks
of the deadliest foes to that land over which Anjou had assumed the title
of protector. The states' army, meanwhile, had been rapidly dissolving.
There were hardly men enough left to make a demonstration in the field,
or properly to garrison the more important towns. The unhappy provinces,
torn by civil and religious dissensions, were overrun by hordes of unpaid
soldiers of all nations, creeds, and tongues-Spaniards, Italians,
Burgundians, Walloons, Germans, Scotch and English; some who came to
attack and others to protect, but who all achieved nothing and agreed in
nothing save to maltreat and to outrage the defenceless peasantry and
denizens of the smaller towns. The contemporary chronicles are full of
harrowing domestic tragedies, in which the actors are always the insolent
foreign soldiery and their desperate victims.

Ghent energetic, opulent, powerful, passionate, unruly Ghent--was now the
focus of discord, the centre from whence radiated not the light and
warmth of reasonable and intelligent liberty, but the bale-fires of
murderous licence and savage anarchy. The second city of the
Netherlands, one of the wealthiest and most powerful cities of