s, stood ready to send a
fleet to the Mediterranean. The offer was gratefully declined, and the
quarrel with the pope arranged, but the incident laid the foundation of a
lasting friendship between the only two important republics then
existing. The issue of the Gunpowder Plot, at the close of the preceding
year, had confirmed James in his distaste for Jesuits, and had effected
that which all the eloquence of the States-General and their ambassador
had failed to accomplish, the prohibition of Spanish enlistments in his
kingdom. Guido Fawkes had served under the archduke in Flanders.

Here then were delays additional to that caused by Spinola's illness. On
the other hand, the levies of the republic were for a season paralysed by
the altercation, soon afterwards adjusted, between Henry IV. and the Duke
of Bouillon, brother-in-law of the stadholder and of the Palatine, and by
the petty war between the Duke and Hanseatic city of Brunswick, in which
Ernest of Nassau was for a time employed.

During this period of almost suspended animation the war gave no signs of
life, except in a few spasmodic efforts on the part of the irrepressible
Du Terrail. Early in the spring, not satisfied with his double and
disastrous repulse before Bergen-op-Zoom, that partisan now determined to
surprise Sluy's. That an attack was impending became known to the
governor of that city, the experienced Colonel Van der Noot. Not
dreaming, however, that any mortal--even the most audacious of Frenchmen
and adventurers--would ever think of carrying a city like Sluy's by
surprise, defended as it was by a splendid citadel and by a whole chain
of forts and water-batteries, and capable of withstanding three months
long, as it had so recently done, a siege in form by the acknowledged
master of the beleaguering science, the methodical governor event calmly
to bed one fine night in June. His slumbers were disturbed before morning
by the sound of trumpets sounding Spanish melodies in the streets, and by
a great uproar and shouting. Springing out of bed, he rushed
half-dressed to the rescue. Less vigilant than Paul Bax had been the year
before in Bergen, he found that Du Terrail had really effected a
surprise. At the head of twelve hundred Walloons and Irishmen, that
enterprising officer had waded through the drowned land of Cadzand, with
the promised support of a body of infantry under Frederic Van den Berg,
from Damm, had stolen noiselessly by the forts of that