Don Juan began to fear and hate his second-in-command, the Prince of Parma, Alessandro Farnese, a man of his own age, but his nephew, for Farnese’s mother was Margaret, daughter of Charles V. This man was in the confidence of the King; Don Juan knew and feared that fact. He began to dread the sight of the dark Italian face; the figure of Farnese seemed to him like that of a spy–or executioner. When he had fought Boussu at Rynemants he had been ill; when he had held the useless conference with the English envoys he had scarcely been able to hold himself on his horse, and when he returned to the camp on the heights of Bouges outside Namur he fell to his knees as he dismounted and could not rise for the weight of his armour. They carried him to the quarter of the regiment of Figueroa and lodged him in a pigeon-house or place for fowls belonging to a Flemish farm the Spanish guns had demolished. No one knew what illness ailed him; some spoke of the plague, some of the Dutch fever, others said he had worn himself out with the fatigues of war and the delights of Italy. The fever increased on him; he wrote to Mendoza, the Spanish agent at Genoa; he wrote to Andrea D’Aria, his companion in arms of Lepanto; he wrote to the King. But with little hope, for he felt himself abandoned. Monseigneur François D’Anjou, brother of the King of France, was at Mons and had taken on himself the title of Defender of the Low Countries against the Spanish Tyranny; Don Juan had only eighteen thousand men, of which six thousand were Spanish, old, tried troops, and the rest merely Walloon and German mercenaries of doubtful loyalty. They had scarcely any artillery and but little powder. The plague appeared in the camp, numbers of the small army sickened and died. There came news that the English were sailing for Flushing and that William of Orange was advancing on Namur. Don Juan of Austria lay in the pigeon-house, prostrate with fever, sad and silent. It was the end of September; day after day was sunny, with a honey-coloured peaceful light resting on the camp, on the two rivers, on the fortifications of Namur; the windmills stood motionless in the stagnant air; the few willows by the river turned from grey-green to dull amber and shook their long leaves on the soft, muddy bank; the horizon was veiled in mist, yellow, soft and mournful; at night the moon rose pale gold through languid dusky vapours; in the morning the sun rose, glimmering through melancholy mists, and above the camp hung, day and night, the fumes of the plague, of fever, the exhalations of decay and sickness, the close odours of death.