The Sun Over Breda

It took three days of negotiation, half payment of back wages, and a personal appearance from our General don Ambrosio Spínola to restore obedience among the Oudkerk mutineers. Three days in which the discipline of the old Cartagena tercio

was more iron-fisted than ever, with officers and standards of all the companies gathered together in the town and the tercio

itself camped outside the walls. I have already reported how the tercios

were never more disciplined than when they were mutinying. On this occasion they even reinforced the advanced watch posts to prevent the Dutch from taking advantage of circumstances and falling upon us like pigs upon grain. As for the soldiers, the system of order established by elected representatives functioned very efficiently and without oversight, even going so far as to execute, this time without protest from anyone, five scruffy miscreants who had thought they could sack the town on their own. They were reported by citizens, and in a summary trial, before a tribunal composed of their fellow soldiers, they were sentenced to be shot in front of the cemetery wall, where they would find peace and later glory. In fact, at first there were only four men, but two other criminals guilty of lesser crimes had been sentenced to have their ears cut off, and one of them protested the judgment with many “’Pon my lifes” and “’Fore Gods,” averring that an hidalgo and old Christian like himself, a descendent of Mendozas and Guzmáns, would rather see himself dead than suffer such insult. So, the tribunal—unlike our commander and being composed of soldiers and comrades—was understanding on points of honor and decided to show mercy upon the ear, exchanging it for the ball from a harquebus and without according the scoundrel the change of heart—he was no doubt a fickle hidalgo—that overcame him when he found himself with both ears intact by the cemetery wall.

That was the first time I saw don Ambrosio Spínola y Grimaldi, otherwise known as Marqués de las Balbases, grandee of Spain, captain of the Flanders forces, whose image—wearing blued, gold-studded armor, a general’s baton in his left hand, large white collar of Flemish lace, red sash, and antelope boots, courteously preventing the conquered Dutchman from bowing before him—would live forever in history thanks to the brushes of Diego Velázquez. I will speak more of that famous painting when the time comes, for it is not irrelevant that it was I who, years later, provided the painter with the details he required.

At the time of Oudkerk and Breda our general was fifty-five or fifty-six years old, slim in body and face, pale, with gray beard and hair. His astute and resolute character was not at odds with his Genoese homeland, which he had left by choice in order to serve our kings. A patient soldier favored by fate, he did not have the charisma of the iron man the Duque de Alba, nor the cunning of some of his other ancestors. His enemies at court, a number that increased with each of his successes—it could be no other way among Spaniards—had accused him both of being a foreigner and of becoming overly ambitious. But the indisputable fact was that he had achieved Spain’s grandest military triumphs in the Palatinate and in Flanders, investing his personal fortune in those successes and mortgaging his family estates to pay his troops. He even lost his brother Federico in a naval battle against rebellious Hollanders. In that period his military prestige was enormous, to the degree that when Mauricio de Nassau, a general in the enemy camp, was asked who was the best soldier of the era, he had replied, “Spínola is the second.” Our don Ambrosio was a man with a great deal of backbone, which had earned him a reputation among the troops in campaigns prior to the Twelve Years’ Truce. Diego Alatriste could give personal testimony to that from his own memories of Spínola when he came to lend aid at Sluys, and also during the siege of Ostend. In the latter, the marqués had been in such a dangerous position in the midst of the fray that the soldiers, Alatriste among them, lowered their pikes and harquebuses, refusing to fight until their general took himself to a place of safety.