sacked, the women being sent unharmed to Ysselsburg.

Maurice then shipped the remainder of his troops along the Rhine and Waal
to their winter quarters and returned to the Hague. It was the feeblest
year's work yet done by the stadholder.

Meantime his great ally, the Huguenot-Catholic Prince of Bearne, was
making a dashing, and, on the whole, successful campaign in the heart of
his own kingdom. The constable of Castile, Don Ferdinando de Velasco,
one of Spain's richest grandees and poorest generals, had been sent with
an army of ten thousand men to take the field in Burgundy against the man
with whom the great Farnese had been measuring swords so lately, and with
not unmingled success, in Picardy. Biron, with a sudden sweep, took
possession of Aussone, Autun, and Beaune, but on one adventurous day
found himself so deeply engaged with a superior force of the enemy in the
neighbourhood of Fontaine Francaise, or St. Seine, where France's great
river takes its rise, as to be nearly cut off and captured. But Henry
himself was already in the field, and by one of those mad, reckless
impulses which made him so adorable as a soldier and yet so profoundly
censurable as a commander-in-chief, he flung himself, like a young
lieutenant, with a mere handful of cavalry, into the midst of the fight,
and at the imminent peril of his own life succeeded in rescuing the
marshal and getting off again unscathed. On other occasions Henry said
he had fought for victory, but on that for dear life; and, even as in the
famous and foolish skirmish at Aumale three years before, it was absence
of enterprise or lack of cordiality on the part of his antagonists, that
alone prevented a captive king from being exhibited as a trophy of
triumph for the expiring League.

But the constable of Castile was not born to cheer the heart of his