Battle of Nieuwpoort

The Battle of Nieuwpoort was fought on 2 July 1600 near the Flemish coast during the Eighty Years’ War. The army of the Dutch Republic, which included English troops in its service, confronted Spanish forces while campaigning in the southern Netherlands.

The battle ended in a Dutch victory but did not produce the decisive strategic result the campaign’s planners had hoped for. For the soldiers involved, musketry, pike fighting, cavalry action and battlefield surgery made Nieuwpoort a brutal example of early modern warfare.

Karen Haden opens Paying in Blood with the fictional Alexander Baxby serving amid this campaign and being forced to assist with amputations. Baxby and his immediate comrades are invented, while the battle and the Anglo-Dutch military setting are historical.