The resistance of Haarlem and other places determined Alva to try what might be done by an affectation of clemency; and on the 26th of July he issued a proclamation in which Philip was compared to a hen gathering its chickens under the parental wing. But in the same breath his subjects were admonished not to excite his rage, cruelty, and fury, and they were threatened that if his gracious offers of mercy were neglected, his majesty would strip bare and utterly depopulate the land, and cause it to be again inhabited by strangers. So ludicrous a specimen of paternal love was not calculated to excite much confidence in the breasts of the Hollanders, and Alkmaar, the next town to which Don Frederick laid siege, though defended only by eight hundred soldiers and thirteen hundred citizens against sixteen thousand veterans, also resolved to hold out to the last extremity. Enraged at this contempt of what he called his clemency, at Haarlem, Alva resolved to make Alkmaar an example of his cruelty, and he wrote to Philip that everyone in it should be put to the sword. But the inhabitants made a heroic defence and repulsed the besiegers in many a bloody assault; till at length the superstitious Spaniards, believing that the place was defended by the devil, whom they thought that the Protestants worshipped, refused to mount to the attack, suffering themselves rather to be run through the body by their officers; and Don Frederick, finding from an intercepted letter that the Prince of Orange contemplated cutting the dikes and flooding the country, in order to prevent the place from being surrendered, raised the siege (October 8th) after it had lasted seven weeks. About this time William published his _Epistle in the form of supplication to his Royal Majesty of Spain, from the Prince of Orange and States of Holland and Zealand_, which produced a profound impression. It demanded that the privileges of the country should be restored, and insisted on the recall of the Duke of Alva, whose atrocities were vigorously described and condemned. Orange, as stadtholder, was now acting as the King's representative in Holland, and gave all his orders in Philip's name. He had recently turned Calvinist, and in October publicly joined the Church at Dort. It was reserved for the two greatest princes of the age to alleviate by their apostasy, which, however, approached more nearly than the orthodoxy of their adversaries, the spirit of true Christianity, the evils inflicted on society by a consistent but bloody-minded and intolerant bigotry.