SIEGE OF BERGEN-OP-ZOOM.

The confederates passed the Maese and encamped in the duchy of Limburgh, so as to cover Maestricht; while the French king remained with his army in the neighbourhood of Tongres. Mareschal Saxe, having amused the allies with marches and counter-marches, at length detached count Lowendahl with six-and-thirty thousand men to besiege Bergen-op-Zoom, the strongest fortification of Dutch Brabant, the favourite work of the famous engineer Coehorn, never conquered, and generally esteemed invincible. It was secured with a garrison of three thousand men, and well provided with artillery, ammunition, and magazines. The enemy appeared before it on the twelfth day of July, and summoned the governor to surrender. The prince of Saxe-Hildburghausen was sent to its relief, with twenty battalions and fourteen squadrons of the troops that could be most conveniently assembled; he entered the lines of Bergen-op-Zooin, where he remained in expectation of a strong reinforcement from the confederate army; and the old baron Cronstrom, whom the stadtholder had appointed governor of Brabant, assumed the command of the garrison The besiegers carried on their operations with great vivacity; and the troops in the town defended it with equal vigour. The eyes of all Europe were turned upon this important siege; count Lowendahl received divers reinforcements; and a considerable body of troops was detached from the allied army, under the command of baron Schwartzenberg, to co-operate with the prince of Saxe-Hildburghausen. The French general lost a great number of men by the close and continual fire of the besieged; while he, in his turn, opened such a number of batteries, and plied them so warmly, that the defences began to give way. From the sixteenth day of July to the fifteenth of September, the siege produced an unintermitting scene of horror and destruction: desperate sallies were made, and mines sprung with the most dreadful effect; the works began to be shattered; the town was laid in ashes; the trenches were filled with carnage; nothing was seen but fire and smoke; nothing heard but one continued roar of bombs and cannon. But still the damage fell chiefly on the besiegers, who were slain in heaps; while the garrison suffered very little, and could be occasionally relieved or reinforced from the lines. In a word, it was generally believed that count Lowendahl would be baffled in his endeavours; and by this belief the governor of Bergen-op-Zoom seems to have been lulled into a blind security. At length, some inconsiderable breaches were made in one ravelin and two bastions, and these the French general resolved to storm, though Cronstrom believed they were impracticable; ind on that supposition presumed that the enemy would not attempt an assault. For this very reason count Lowendahl resolved to hazard the attack, before the preparations should be made for his reception. He accordingly regulated his dispositions, and at four o’clock in the morning, on the sixteenth day of September, the signal was made for the assault. A prodigious quantity of bombs being thrown into the ravelin, his troops threw themselves into the fosse, mounted the breaches, forced open a sally-port, and entered the place almost without resistance. In a word, they had time to extend themselves along the curtains, and form in order of battle, before the garrison could be assembled. Cronstrom was asleep, and the soldiers upon duty had been surprised by the suddenness and impetuosity of the attack. Though the French had taken possession of the ramparts, they did not gain the town without opposition. Two battalions of the Scottish troops, in the pay of the states-general, were assembled in the market-place, and attacked them with such fury, that they were driven from street to street, until fresh reinforcements arriving, compelled the Scots to retreat in their turn; yet they disputed every inch of ground, and fought until two thirds of them were killed upon the spot. Then they brought off the old governor, abandoning the town to the enemy; the troops that were encamped in the lines retreating with great precipitation, all the forts in the neighbourhood immediately surrendered to the victors, who now became masters of the whole navigation of the Schelde. The French king was no sooner informed of Lowendahl’s success, than he promoted him to the rank of mareschal of France; appointed count Saxe governor of the conquered Netherlands; and returned in triumph to Versailles. In a little time after this transaction, both armies were distributed into winter quarters, and the duke of Cumberland embarked for England.

In Italy, the French arms did not triumph with equal success, though the mareschal de Belleisle saw himself at the head of a powerful army in Provence. In April he passed the Var without opposition, and took possession of Nice. He met with little or no resistance in reducing Montalban, Villafranca, and Ventimiglia; while general Brown, with eight-and-twenty thousand Aus-trians, retired towards Final and Savona. In the meantime, another large body under count Schuylemberg, Who had succeeded the marquis de Botta, co-operated with fifteen thousand Piedmontese in an attempt to recover the city of Genoa. The French king had sent their supplies, succours, and engineers, with the duke de Boufflers, as ambassador to the republic, who likewise acted as commander-in-chief of the forces employed for its defence. The Austrian general assembled his troops in the Milanese, having forced the passage of the Bochetta on the thirteenth of January, he advanced into the territories of Genoa, and the Eiviera was ravaged without mercy. On the last day of March he appeared before the city at the head of forty thousand men, and summoned the revolters to lay down their arms. The answer he received was, that the republic had fifty-four thousand men in arms, two hundred and sixty cannon, thirty-four mortars, with abundance of ammunition and provision; that they would defend their liberty with their last blood, and be buried in the ruins of their capital, rather than submit to the clemency of the court of Vienna, except by an honourable capitulation, guaranteed by the kings of Great Britain and Sardinia, the republic of Venice and the United Provinces. In the beginning of May, Genoa was invested on all sides; a furious sally was made by the duke de Boufflers, who drove the besiegers from their posts; but the Austrians rallying, he was repulsed in his turn, with the loss of seven hundred men. General Schuylemberg carried on his operations with such skill, vigour, and intrepidity, that he made himself master of the suburbs of Bisagno; and in all probability would have reduced the city, had he not been obliged to desist, in consequence of the repeated remonstrances made by the king of Sardinia and count Brown, who represented the necessity of his abandoning his enterprise, and drawing off his army to cover Piedmont and Lombardy from the efforts of mareschal de Belleisle. Accordingly he raised the siege on the tenth day of June, and returned into the Milanese in order to join his Sardinian majesty; while the Genoese made an irruption into the Parmesan and Placentia, where they committed terrible outrages, in revenge for the mischiefs they had undergone.