power to prevent the catastrophe. The Prince was lodged in apart of the
town remote from the original scene of action, and it does not appear
that information had reached him that anything unusual was occurring,
until the affair was approaching its termination. Then there was little
for him to do. He hastened, however, to the scene, and mounting the
ramparts, persuaded the citizens to cease cannonading the discomfited
and retiring foe. He felt the full gravity of the situation, and the
necessity of diminishing the rancor of the inhabitants against their
treacherous allies, if such a result were yet possible. The burghers
had done their duty, and it certainly would have been neither in his
power nor his inclination to protect the French marauders from
expulsion and castigation.

Such was the termination of the French Fury, and it seems sufficiently
strange that it should have been so much less disastrous to Antwerp than
was the Spanish Fury of 1576, to which men could still scarcely allude
without a shudder. One would have thought the French more likely to
prove successful in their enterprise than the Spaniards in theirs. The
Spaniards were enemies against whom the city had long been on its guard.
The French were friends in whose sincerity a somewhat shaken confidence
had just been restored. When the Spanish attack was made, a large force
of defenders was drawn up in battle array behind freshly strengthened
fortifications. When the French entered at leisure through a scarcely
guarded gate, the whole population and garrison of the town were quietly
eating their dinners. The numbers of the invading forces on the two
occasions did not materially differ; but at the time of the French Fury
there was not a large force of regular troops under veteran generals to
resist the attack. Perhaps this was the main reason for the result,
which seems at first almost inexplicable. For protection against the
Spanish invasion, the burghers relied on mercenaries, some of whom proved