ver active, could effect in many years.

Nearly at the close of this year (1570) an incident occurred,
illustrating the ferocious courage so often engendered in civil contests.
On the western verge of the Isle of Bommel, stood the castle of
Lowestein. The island is not in the sea. It is the narrow but important
territory which is enclosed between the Meuse and the Waal. The castle,
placed in a slender hook, at the junction of the two rivers, commanded
the two cities of Gorcum and Dorcum, and the whole navigation of the
waters. One evening, towards the end of December, four monks, wearing the
cowls and robes of Mendicant Grey Friars, demanded hospitality at the
castle gate. They were at once ushered into the presence of the
commandant, a brother of President Tisnacq. He was standing by the fire,
conversing with his wife. The foremost monk approaching him, asked
whether the castle held for the Duke of Alva or the Prince of Orange. The
castellian replied that he recognized no prince save Philip, King of
Spain. Thereupon the monk, who was no other than Herman de Ruyter, a
drover by trade, and a warm partisan of Orange, plucked a pistol from
beneath his robe, and shot the commandant through the head. The others,
taking advantage of the sudden panic, overcame all the resistance offered
by the feeble garrison, and made themselves masters of the place. In the
course of the next day they introduced into the castle four or five and
twenty men, with which force they diligently set themselves to fortify
the place, and secure themselves in its possession. A larger
reinforcement which they had reckoned upon, was detained by the floods
and frosts, which, for the moment, had made the roads and fivers alike
impracticable.

Don Roderigo de Toledo, governor of Bois le Duc, immediately despatched a
certain Captain Perea, at the head of two hundred soldiers, who were
joined on the way by a miscellaneous force of volunteers, to recover the
fortress as soon as possible. The castle, bathed on its outward walls by
the Waal and Meuse, and having two redoubts, defended by a double
interior foss, would have been difficult to take by assaults had the
number of the besieged been at all adequate to its defence. As matters
stood, however, the Spaniards, by battering a breach in the wall with
their cannon on the first day, and then escalading the inner works with
remarkable gallantry upon the second, found themselves masters of the
place within eight