e in their own country, decided to remain
where they were.

For a very brief time they thought they had decided rightly, for the
Duke of Alva was courteous to them. He invited them to his house to
dinner and made them his guests--but while they were eating his bread
and drinking his wine, an armed guard surrounded his house and the two
unfortunate nobles were arrested by the treacherous Spaniard and
promptly thrown into prison. They never regained their liberty. After
being held as captives for the better part of a year they met their
fate courageously on the public scaffold where so many of the bravest
and best heads of the Netherlands were falling by the Duke of Alva's
orders.

A reign of terror then swept over the Netherlands that has had
practically no equal in history. Alva was relentless as flint in every
dealing with the people under his charge. To meet the numerous trials
that were necessary under his regime he appointed what was called the
Council of Troubles--a name that was quickly changed by the people
themselves to the Council of Blood, for it never acquitted, never
showed mercy. Prisoners were led before it and condemned in batches of
a hundred or more at a time, and sometimes prisoners were delivered to
the executioners without even the poor formality of a trial that this
council afforded.

Nor was this all--for to fill his coffers the Duke of Alva established
a system of taxation that if carried out would reduce to beggary every
man, woman and child in the Low Countries.

William the Silent was not idle in Germany, where he had fled on the
coming of this Spanish tyrant; he was engaged in raising money and
enlisting the sympathy of German princes in the cause of his oppressed
people. Aided by his brother Louis, who was a fine soldier, he worked
day and night to raise an army to march against the Spaniards, and at
last was able to send his forces into the Netherlands, while he himself
remained with a small reserve ready to support them when necessary.

But although William's brother and the other leaders of his new army
were fine soldiers, they failed against the brilliant military genius
of the Duke of Alva. At first they seemed partly successful and won a
minor victory at a place called Heiliger Lee,--but then the Duke of
Alva himself marched against them at the head of a splendid army, and
wiped out the forces of his adversary at Jemmingen, killing the wounded
and taking no prisoners, but extermin