In the town Sir Francis Vere commanded. Few shapes are more familiar to
the student of those times than this veteran campaigner, the offshoot of
a time-honoured race. A man of handsome, weather-beaten, battle-bronzed
visage, with massive forehead, broad intelligent eyes, a high straight
nose, close-clipped hair, and a great brown beard like a spade; captious,
irascible, but most resolute, he seemed, in his gold inlaid Milan corslet
and ruff of point-lace, the very image of a partizan chieftain; one of
the noblest relics of a race of fighters slowly passing off the world's
stage.

An efficient colonel, he was not a general to be relied upon in great
affairs either in council or the field. He hated the Nassaus, and the
Nassaus certainly did not admire him, while his inordinate self-esteem,
both personal and national, and his want of true sympathy for the cause
in which, he fought, were the frequent source of trouble and danger to
the republic.

Of the seven or eight thousand soldiers in the town when the siege began,
at least two thousand were English. The queen, too intelligent, despite
her shrewishness to the Staten; not to be faithful to the cause in which
her own interests were quite as much involved as theirs, had promised
Envoy Caron that although she was obliged to maintain twenty thousand men
in Ireland to keep down the rebels, directly leagued as they were with
Spain and the archdukes, the republic might depend upon five thousand
soldiers from England. Detachment after detachment, the soldiers came as
fast as the London prisons could be swept and the queen's press-gang
perform its office. It may be imagined that the native land of those
warriors was not inconsiderably benefited by the grant to the republic
of the right to make and pay for these levies. But they had all red
uniforms, and were as fit as other men to dig trenches, to defend them;