in those regions, one whom the commonwealth had watched over from his
cradle.

For in Groningen there was still a considerable party in favour of the
Union, although the treason of Renneberg had hitherto prevented both city
and province from incorporating themselves in the body politic of the
United Netherlands. Within the precincts were five hundred of Verdugo's
veterans under George Lanckema, stationed at a faubourg called
Schuytendiess. In the city there was, properly speaking, no garrison,
for the citizens in the last few years had come to value themselves on
their fidelity to church and king, and to take a sorry pride in being
false to all that was noble in their past. Their ancestors had wrested
privilege after privilege at the sword's point from the mailed hands of
dukes and emperors, until they were almost a self-governing republic;
their courts of justice recognizing no appeal to higher powers, even
under the despotic sway of Charles V. And now, under the reign of his
son, and in the feebler days of that reign, the capital of the free
Frisians--the men whom their ancient pagan statutes had once declared to
be "free so long as the wind blew out of the clouds"--relied upon the
trained bands of her burghers enured to arms and well-provided with all.
munitions of war to protect her, not against foreign tyranny nor domestic
sedition, but against liberty and against law.

For the representative of the most ancient of the princely houses of
Europe, a youth whose ancestors had been emperors when the forefathers of
Philip, long-descended as he was, were but country squires, was now
knocking at their gates. Not as a conqueror and a despot, but as the
elected first magistrate and commander-in-chief of the freest
commonwealth in the world, Maurice of Nassau, at the head of fifteen
thousand Netherlanders, countrymen of their own, now summoned the