in the honours of the assault. The count was with
difficulty brought off with a whole skin and put to bed. Yet despite
these disgraceful pranks there is no doubt that a better and braver
officer than he was hardly to be found even among the ten noble Nassaus
who at that moment were fighting for the cause of Dutch
liberty--fortunately with more sobriety than he at all times displayed.
On the following day, Prince Maurice, making a reconnoissance of the
works with his usual calmness, yet with the habitual contempt of personal
danger which made so singular a contrast with the cautious and
painstaking characteristics of his strategy, very narrowly escaped death.
A shot from the fort struck so hard upon the buckler under cover of which
he was taking his observations as to fell him to the ground. Sir Francis
Vere, who was with the prince under the same buckler, likewise measured
his length in the trench, but both escaped serious injury.

Pauli, one of the States commissioners present in the camp, wrote to
Barneveld that it was to be hoped that the accident might prove a warning
to his Excellency. He had repeatedly remonstrated with him, he said,
against his reckless exposure of himself to unnecessary danger, but he
was so energetic and so full of courage that it was impossible to
restrain him from being everywhere every day.

Three days later, the letter Y did its work. At ten o'clock 15 July, of
the night of the 15th July, Prince Maurice ordered the mines to be
sprung, when the north ravelin was blown into the air, and some forty of
the garrison with it. Two of them came flying into the besiegers' camp,
and, strange to say, one was alive and sound. The catastrophe finished
the sixty-five days' siege, the breach was no longer defensible, the
obstinacy of the burghers was exhausted, and capitulation followed. In
truth, there had been a subterranean intrigue going on for many weeks,
which was almost as effective as the mine. A certain Jan to Boer had been
going back and forth between camp and city, under various pretexts and
safe-conducts, and it had at last appeared that the Jesuits and the five
hundred of Verdugo's veterans were all that prevented Groningen from
returning to the Union. There had been severe fighting within the city
itself, for the Jesuits had procured the transfer of the veterans from
the faubourg to the town itself, and the result of all these operations,
political, military, and jesuitical, was that on 22nd