First Salute by Barbara W. Tuchman Read Free Book Online Page A

Blood, which in the course of its operations held 12,000 trials, convicted 9,000 offenders and executed or banished more than 1,000. Nobles who were leaders in the revolt were beheaded, eighteen in one day in the market square of Brussels. Estates were confiscated, scores fled the country and everywhere rose the dread of the Inquisition, as distinct from secular persecution, being established in the Netherlands. To make sure that he made everyone of all classes an insurgent, Alva imposed a tax of a tenth on the sale of every article and a hundredth part of every income. The hated “Tenth Penny” did more to spur the revolt than all the atrocities.
    The ruler, Philip II—that “odious personage,” as Motley, classic historian of the revolt, cannot refrain in his Protestant Victorian rectitude from calling him—was himself too narrow and rigid to recognize as rebellion the trouble he was stirring up for himself; Philip could think only in terms of being ordained by God to root out Protestantism, and he rejected any consideration that might suggest an obstacle in the way of this task. A small thrill of triumph inspirited the Dutch at the first success of the revolt when, in 1572, a piratical force of the Sea Beggars captured the fortified port of Den Briel, at the mouth of the Meuse, where it controlled the entry to navigation of the river.
    Extreme Calvinist partisans, arising from the early persecution ofProtestants, and forming wild and fėrocious bands of expert seamen, the Sea Beggars served the revolt by harassing Spanish shipping, while their activities added to the internal feuds of regions and factions.
    The inveterate separatism and mutual jealousies of the cities and provinces of the Low Countries, in which each feared the advantages and influence that might be gained by its neighbor, could have permanently frustrated any united resistance to Spain if the struggle had not found a dynamic leader in William of Orange. By perseverance in what seemed a hopeless struggle, by remaining unshaken under every adversity or disappointment, by overriding the incessant contention of the provinces, by maintaining the single aim of union, by organizing his compatriots with political sagacity, William, though sometimes shifting ground and not always straightforward in his maneuvers, and mainly by strength of character, came to focus and personify the revolt. If it had carried a banner, it would have borne his words “It is not necessary to hope in order to persevere.”
    In 1574, the year after Den Briel, the heroic defense of Leyden against a Spanish siege rallied every city and citizen around the standard of revolt. Surrounded by lakes and laced by streams and canals of the lower Rhine, Leyden was a beautiful and prosperous cloth-manufacturing city on the rich soil of the Rhine delta called the Garden of Holland.
    The weapon against Leyden was starvation. Alva had gone, but his successor tightened the siege until not a stray chicken nor a leaf of lettuce could get in. For seven months the enfeebled inhabitants subsisted on boiled leaves and roots and dried fish skins and on chaff from old threshings of wheat. When an occasional dog was slaughtered to feed the watch, the carcass might be torn apart in bleeding pieces and devoured raw. Disease stalked as always in the footsteps of famine, adding to the sick and wounded. In their extremity the inhabitants faced annihilation or surrender.
    It was then they turned water, their old antagonist, into their weapon and ally. William of Orange proposed opening the dikes of the Meuse and Yssel and the rivers crossing the area between them and Leyden to flush out the besiegers and lay a shallow lake that would allow flat-bottomed scows and barges to sail over the land with provisions for the beleaguered city. Because of the potential damage of a flood to crops, the consent of landholders and farmers had to be gained. Messengers were sent on the dangerous mission through the lines to reach