If he sent the Inquisition to the Netherlands
and burned his subjects at the stake, he would lose the
greater part of his income.
Being a man of uncertain will-power he hesitated a long
time. He tried kindness and sternness and promises and
threats. The Hollanders remained obstinate, and continued to
sing psalms and listen to the sermons of their Lutheran and
Calvinist preachers. Philip in his despair sent his ``man of
iron,'' the Duke of Alba, to bring these hardened sinners to
terms. Alba began by decapitating those leaders who had not
wisely left the country before his arrival. In the year 1572
(the same year that the French Protestant leaders were all
killed during the terrible night of Saint Bartholomew), he
attacked a number of Dutch cities and massacred the inhabitants
as an example for the others. The next year he laid siege
to the town of Leyden, the manufacturing center of Holland.
Meanwhile, the seven small provinces of the northern
Netherlands had formed a defensive union, the so-called union
of Utrecht, and had recognised William of Orange, a German
prince who had been the private secretary of the Emperor
Charles V, as the leader of their army and as commander of
their freebooting sailors, who were known as the Beggars of
the Sea. William, to save Leyden, cut the dykes, created a
shallow inland sea, and delivered the town with the help of a
strangely equipped navy consisting of scows and flat-bottomed
barges which were rowed and pushed and pulled through the
mud until they reached the city walls.
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