crowns a day. And here they remained, living exceedingly at their ease
and enjoying a life of leisure for eighteen months, and until long after
the death of the archduke, for it was not until the administration of
Cardinal Albert that the funds, amounting to three hundred and sixty
thousand crowns, could be collected.

These were the chief military exploits of the podagric Perseus in behalf
of the Flemish Andromeda.

A very daring adventure was however proposed to the archduke. Philip
calmly suggested that an expedition should be rapidly fitted out in
Dunkirk, which should cross the channel, ascend the Thames as far as
Rochester, and burn the English fleet. "I am informed by persons well
acquainted with the English coast," said the king, "that it would be an
easy matter for a few quick-sailing vessels to accomplish this. Two or
three thousand soldiers might be landed at Rochester who might burn or
sink all the unarmed vessels they could find there, and the expedition
could return and sail off again before the people of the country could
collect in sufficient numbers to do them any damage." The archduke was
instructed to consult with Fuentes and Ybarra as to whether this little
matter, thus parenthetically indicated, could be accomplished without too
much risk and trouble.

Certainly it would seem as if the king believed in the audacity,
virility, velocity, alacrity, and the rest of the twenty-eight virtues
of his governor-general, even more seriously than did John Baptist
Houwaerts. The unfortunate archduke would have needed to be, in all
earnestness, a mythological demigod to do the work required of him. With
the best part of his army formally maintained by him in recognised
mutiny, with the great cities of the Netherlands yielding themselves to