The people of Antwerp might well have applied to themselves the words used by Gerard Truchses of Cologne, when lamenting the supineness of the German Princes during the death struggle against Rome and the Escurial: 'We shall find our destruction in our immoderate desire for peace.' Peace they had obtained, but a peace which brought them no relief, and left them face to face with starvation; for Sidney--that Sidney of whom tradition tells the well-known story of his cup of water given to the wounded soldier--saw to it that not one bushel of wheat was carried up the Scheldt past Flushing, which he held as Governor for the Queen of England, to what was now a Spanish town.[51] For twenty-four years the Scheldt was rigorously blocked by the fleets of Holland; and the commerce of Antwerp, which Parma would fain have restored, disappeared altogether. A gleam of hope came when, in 1609, the Twelve Years' Truce was signed at Antwerp by the representatives of the Archdukes Albert and Isabella and the States-General of Holland. But the city had fallen so low that many years would scarcely have sufficed to raise it; and whatever progress followed the truce came to an end with the Treaty of Münster. The closing of the Scheldt had become a political dogma with the Dutch; and the fourteenth article of the treaty kept it closed against the trade of Brabant and Flanders, to the great benefit of the seaports of Holland.[52] About the year 1590, amongst the pupils at one of the schools established by the Jesuits at Antwerp after the great siege, was a boy whose parents had given him the Apostolic name of Peter Paul. His father was Joannes Rubens, a distinguished lawyer, who had been a magistrate of Antwerp at the time of the image-breaking in the Cathedral, and whose name was in the list of persons suspected of Calvinism. The Burgomaster and magistrates solemnly assured the Government that he was above suspicion; but Rubens, who undoubtedly was a Calvinist, fearing the Inquisition, left the city and went to Germany with his wife. There he was involved in an intrigue with Anna, daughter of the Elector Maurice, and second wife of William the Silent. Rubens was sent to prison, and thereafter banished to Siegen, where his wife joined him. The Princess, after being kept in close confinement for some years, died in 1577. In that year, the year before the Spanish Fury, and on June 28, being the Eve of the Festival of St. Peter and St. Paul, was born the boy who afterwards became the famous painter. Ten years after the birth of his son Joannes Rubens died at Cologne, and his widow, returning to Antwerp, took up her abode in the house where she had formerly lived with her husband, in the Place de Meir. There young Rubens passed his schooldays. If the cupboards were bare at Antwerp at that time, the confessionals were full, and the widow, having abjured the errors of Calvinism, sent her son to the schools