Decline
Over the years, Caspar de Robles increasingly became hated by friend and foe. The Spanish soldiers were already a month's pay behind and were very dissatisfied and he asked the Duke of Alva to be paid for his work. In 1576 he went to Groningen in order to soothe the feelings of the soldiers, but was captured by his own soldiers when Spain was declared bankrupt. That was the end of the power of Caspar de Robles in the north of the Netherlands.
Caspar de Robles died in 1585 at the Siege of Antwerp. During the siege the Spaniards had blocked the Schelde with a bridge of ships in order to starve the city. Dutch troops made several attempts to break through the blockade, but those attempts all failed. However, one of the attempts involved sending in two ships that were filled with gunpowder. The first ship exploded harmlessly against the shore, but the other reached the bridge and exploded with devastating force, instantly killing over 800 Spanish soldiers. Caspar de Robles was one of the casualties.
Read more about this topic: Caspar De Robles
Famous quotes containing the word decline:
“Our achievements speak for themselves. What we have to keep track of are our failures, discouragements, and doubts. We tend to forget the past difficulties, the many false starts, and the painful groping. We see our past achievements as the end result of a clean forward thrust, and our present difficulties as signs of decline and decay.”
—Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)
“We have our little theory on all human and divine things. Poetry, the workings of genius itself, which, in all times, with one or another meaning, has been called Inspiration, and held to be mysterious and inscrutable, is no longer without its scientific exposition. The building of the lofty rhyme is like any other masonry or bricklaying: we have theories of its rise, height, decline and fall—which latter, it would seem, is now near, among all people.”
—Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881)
“I heard a Californian student in Heidelberg say, in one of his calmest moods, that he would rather decline two drinks than one German adjective.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)