By early 1579 the Dutch Revolt was bleeding momentum. The Union of Arras had pulled the southern Catholic provinces back toward Philip II of Spain. The unpaid Dutch States Army, led in the field by the Huguenot commander Francois de la Noue after the death of the Count of Bossu, had been chased from Weert and turned up at Antwerp's gates asking for shelter. The city council said no. So la Noue and the English captain John Norreys entrenched their men - between three and four thousand infantry, the backbone of the rebel army - in Borgerhout, fortifying the village with earthen ramparts and bridges over a hand-dug moat. Farnese, meanwhile, was planning to besiege Maastricht. The attack on Borgerhout was a feint, designed to fix Dutch attention on Antwerp while the real campaign developed elsewhere.

Farnese's assault was a small masterpiece of engineering. Three battalions of picked men advanced in parallel from his camp at Ranst: a Spanish tercio under Lope de Figueroa on the right, a Lower German regiment under Francisco de Valdes in the center, and Walloons under Claude de Berlaymont, called Haultpenne, on the left. Each column carried a wheeled bridge meant to span the rebel moat, and each was screened by a hundred musketeers and a team of axemen to chop the palisades. To keep his own Walloons from being mistaken for the enemy's Walloons - they wore the same regional uniforms - Farnese ordered his men to pull white shirts over their armor, a trick called a camisade. Haultpenne's troops were the first to lay a bridge, taking it at Deurne over the Groot Schijn. Once inside, the fighting became close, two hours of street combat among barricades.

La Noue and Norreys held longer than anyone expected. But when the line began to crack, la Noue made the only choice he could and pulled his men back toward Antwerp, setting fire to their own quarters as they went. The Spanish chased them to the city's moat. Orange ordered the artillery on the walls to open up; the Flemish chronicler Guillaume Baudart wrote that the shrapnel made arms and legs fly through the air, while the Spanish soldier Alonso Vazquez insisted the smoke from burning Borgerhout had blinded the gunners. Contemporary accounts put the Dutch dead at somewhere between six hundred and a thousand men. Antwerp's citizens then did the one thing the city had refused before the battle: they opened the gates, but to carry the wounded French, English, and Walloon soldiers inside for treatment. The villages of Borgerhout and Deurne were left in ruins; a 1580 survey counted 280 burned buildings in Borgerhout alone.

Six days later, Farnese was at the walls of Maastricht. The city fell on 29 June. The feint had worked exactly as designed. Politically, the consequences ran further still. Defections from the States General accelerated, with Emanuel Philibert de Lalaing taking five thousand Walloon troops over to the Spanish side. The peace conference held at Cologne that summer under Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II collapsed under the weight of confessional disputes. Antwerp itself, the city whose walls had sheltered the survivors of Borgerhout, would surrender to Farnese six years later, in 1585, after a long and exhausting siege. The two-hour fight in the gardens of Borgerhout opened a nine-year window in which Spain reclaimed most of the southern Netherlands.