untryman, as a former pupil of
Melancthon at Wittemberg, might himself be under suspicion of heresy, and
therefore of possible treason.

Be this as it may, one cannot but suspect some strain of truth in the
story about the Inquisition; perhaps in that, also, of his wife's
unkindness; for, whether or not Vesalius operated on Don Carlos, he had
seen with his own eyes that miraculous Virgin of Atocha at the bed's foot
of the prince. He had heard his recovery attributed, not to the
operation, but to the intercession of Fray, now Saint, Diego; {408} and
he must have had his thoughts thereon, and may, in an unguarded moment,
have spoken them.

For he was, be it always remembered, a Netherlander. The crisis of his
country was just at hand. Rebellion was inevitable, and, with rebellion,
horrors unutterable; and, meanwhile, Don Carlos had set his mad brain on
having the command of the Netherlands. In his rage at not having it, as
all the world knows, he nearly killed Alva with his own hands, some two
years after. If it be true that Don Carlos felt a debt of gratitude to
Vesalius, he may (after his wont) have poured out to him some wild
confidence about the Netherlands, to have even heard which would be a
crime in Philip's eyes. And if this be but a fancy, still Vesalius was,
as I just said, a Netherlander, and one of a brain and a spirit to which
Philip's doings, and the air of the Spanish court, must have been growing
even more and more intolerable. Hundreds of his country folk, perhaps
men and women whom he had known, were being racked, burnt alive, buried
alive, at the bidding of a jocular ruffian, Peter Titelmann, the chief
inquisitor. The "day of the _mau-brulez_," and the wholesale massacre
which followed it, had happened but two years before; and, by all the
signs of the times, these murders and miseries were certain to increase.
And why were all these poor wretches suffering the extremity of horror,
but because they would not believe in miraculous images, and bones of
dead friars, and the rest of that science of unreason and unfact, against
which Vesalius had been fighting all his life, consciously or not, by
using reason and observing fact? What wonder if, in some burst of noble
indignation and just contempt, he forgot a moment that he had sold his
soul, and his love of science likewise, to be a luxurious, yet uneasy,
hanger-on at the tyrant's court; and spoke unadvisedly some word worthy
of a German man?

A