e young women, and girls of upwards of ten years, and then
placing their parents in a circle, they ordered them to sing psalms,
while they ravished their children, or else they swore they would cut
them to pieces afterward. They then took all the married women who had
young children, and threatened, if they did not consent to the
gratification of their lusts, to burn their children before their faces
in a large fire, which they had kindled for that purpose.

A band of count Tilly's soldiers meeting a company of merchants
belonging to Basil, who were returning from the great market of
Strasburg, they attempted to surround them: all escaped, however, but
ten, leaving their properties behind. The ten who were taken begged hard
for their lives; but the soldiers murdered them saying, You must die
because you are heretics, and have got no money.

The same soldiers met with two countesses, who, together with some young
ladies, the daughters of one of them, were taking an airing in a landau.
The soldiers spared their lives, but treated them with the greatest
indecency, and having stripped them all stark naked, bade the coachman
drive on.

By means and mediation of Great Britain, peace was at length restored to
Germany, and the protestants remained unmolested for several years, till
some new disturbances broke out in the Palatinate which were thus
occasioned.

The great church of the Holy Ghost, at Heidelburg, had, for many years,
been shared equally by the protestants and Roman catholics in this
manner: the protestants performed divine service in the nave or body of
the church; and the Roman catholics celebrated mass in the choir. Though
this had been the custom time immemorial, the elector Palatinate, at
length, took it into his head not to suffer it any longer, declaring,
that as Heidelburg was the place of his residence, and the church of the
Holy Ghost the cathedral of his principal city, divine service ought to
be performed only according to the rites of the church of which he was a
member. He then forbade the protestants to enter the church, and put the
papists in possession of the whole.

The aggrieved people applied to the protestant powers for redress, which
so much exasperated the elector, that he suppressed the Heidelburg
catechism. The protestant powers, however, unanimously agreed to demand
satisfaction, as the elector, by this conduct, had broke an article of
the treaty of Westphalia; and the courts of Great