If there had ever been a time when every nerve in Protestant Christendom
should be strained to weld all those provinces together into one great
commonwealth, as a bulwark for European liberty, rather than to allow
them to be broken into stepping-stones, over which absolutism could
stride across France and Holland into England, that moment had arrived.
Every sacrifice should have been cheerfully made by all Netherlanders,
the uttermost possible subsidies and auxiliaries should have been
furnished by all the friends of civil and religious liberty in every land
to save Flanders and Brabant from their impending fate.

No man felt more keenly the importance of the business in which he was
engaged than Parma. He knew his work exactly, and he meant to execute it
thoroughly. Antwerp was the hinge on which the fate of the whole
country, perhaps of all Christendom, was to turn. "If we get Antwerp,"
said the Spanish soldiers--so frequently that the expression passed into
a proverb--"you shall all go to mass with us; if you save Antwerp, we
will all go to conventicle with you."

Alexander rose with the difficulty and responsibility of his situation.
His vivid, almost poetic intellect formed its schemes with perfect
distinctness. Every episode in his great and, as he himself termed it,
his "heroic enterprise," was traced out beforehand with the tranquil
vision of creative genius; and he was prepared to convert his conceptions
into reality, with the aid of an iron nature that never knew fatigue or
fear.

But the obstacles were many. Alexander's master sat in his cabinet with
his head full of Mucio, Don Antonio, and Queen Elizabeth; while Alexander
himself was left neglected, almost forgotten. His army was shrinking to
a nullity. The demands upon him were enormous, his finances delusive,