The Relief of Leyden by W. A. S.

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Washington, D. C. · May 19, 1910

The Relief of Leyden

By W. A. S.

THE armies of Spain and the Inquisition were seeking to subdue Holland. The city of Leyden was invested until its inhabitants were famishing. In order to send relief and food to the starving city, William of Orange conceived the desperate plan of opening the dykes to the sea, and flooding the land to drive away the enemy, and to allow a flotilla of relief ships under Boisot to sail to the gates of the city.

The great dykes were broken through, but the waters failed to flood the country deep enough to be effective. The investing army scoffed at the failure of the plan. Still Leyden held out, and prayed

to Heaven to send succor, determined to die one by one within the walls rather than to yield religion and liberty to the invader. Wylie says:—

At last Heaven heard the cry of the suffering city, and issued its fiat to the ocean. On the first of October, the equinoctial gales, so long delayed, gave signs of their immediate approach. On that night a strong wind sprang up from the northwest, and the waters of the rivers were forced back into their channels. After blowing for some hours from that quarter, the gale shifted into the southwest with increased fury. The strength of the winds heaped up the waters of the German Ocean upon the coast of Holland; the deep lifted up itself; its dark flood, driven before the tempest’s breath with mighty roar, like shout of giant loosed from his fetters and rushing to assail the foe, came surging onward, and poured its tumultuous billows over the broken dykes. At midnight on the second of October the flotilla of Boisot was afloat, and under weigh for Leyden, on whose walls crowds of gaunt, famished, almost exanimate men waited its coming.

But a mile distant from the gates of the city the Lammen fort, held by the enemy, blocked the way, towering high and strong, and full of soldiers. Night fell with hope well-nigh gone. Again Wylie continues the story of the providential deliverance:—

Seldom has blacker night descended on more tragic scene, or the gloom of nature been more in unison with the anxiety and distress of man. At midnight a terrible crash was heard. What that ominous sound, so awful in the stillness of the night, could be, no one could conjecture. A little after came a strange apparition, equally inexplicable. A line of lights was seen to issue from Lammen, and move over the face of the deep. The darkness gave terror and mystery to every occurrence. All waited for the coming of day to explain these appearances. At last the dawn broke; it was now seen that a large portion of the city walls of Leyden had fallen overnight, and hence the noise that had caused such alarm. The Spaniards, had they known, might have entered the city at the last hour, and massacred the inhabitants; instead of this, they were seized with panic, believing these terrible sounds to be those of the enemy rushing to attack them; and so, kindling their torches and lanterns, they fled when no man pursued. Instead of the cannonade which was this morning to be opened against the formidable Lammen, the fleet of Boisot sailed under the silent guns of the now evacuated fort, and entered the city gates. On the morning of the third of October, Leyden was relieved.

The citizens felt that their first duty was to offer thanks to that Power to whom exclusively they owed their deliverance. Despite their own heroism and Boisot’s valor they would have fallen, had not God, by a mighty wind, brought up the ocean and overwhelmed their foes. A touching procession of haggard but heroic forms, headed by Admiral Boisot and the magistrates, and followed by the Zealanders and sailors, walked to the great church, and there united in solemn prayer. A hymn of thanksgiving was next raised, but of the multitude of voices by which its first notes were pealed forth, few were able to continue singing to the close. Tears choked their voices, and sobs were mingled with the music.

We may even at this late day study with thankful hearts the evidences of an overruling Providence in the rolling back of the power of Rome in the Netherlands; for there first, in modern times, the principles of religious liberty were clearly enunciated by the head of a state. And short-lived though this recognition was, it was from the soil of Holland, in good part at least, that these principles were transplanted to the New World.

W. A. S.