ory so monstrous, repeated though
it has been by successive writers without the least distrust of its
correctness. Not that anything can be too monstrous to be believed of
the Inquisition. But it is not easy to believe that a sagacious prince
like Philip the Second, however willing he might be to shelter himself
under the mantle of the Holy Office, could have lent himself to an act
as impolitic as it was absurd; one that, confounding the innocent with
the guilty, would drive both to desperation,--would incite the former,
from a sense of injury, to take up rebellion, by which there was nothing
more to lose, and the latter to persist in it, since there was nothing
more to hope.[1051]

The messenger who brought to Margaret the royal permission to resign the
regency delivered to Alva his commission as captain-general of the
Netherlands. This would place the duke, as Philip wrote to him, beyond
the control of the council of finance, in the important matter of the
confiscations.[1052] It raised him, indeed, not only above that council,
but above every other council in the country. It gave him an authority
not less than that of the sovereign himself. And Alva prepared to
stretch this to an extent greater than any sovereign of the Netherlands
had ever ventured on. The time had now come to put his terrible
machinery into operation. The regent was gone, who, if she could not
curb, might at least criticize his actions. The prisons were full; the
processes were completed. Nothing remained but to pass sentence and to
execute.

On the fourth of January, 1568, we find eighty-four persons sentenced to
death at Valenciennes, on the charge of having taken part in the late
movements,--religious or political.[1053] On the twentieth of February,
ninety-five persons were arraigned before the Council of Blood, and
thirty-seven capitally convicted.[1054] On the twentieth of March
thirty-five more were condemned.[1055] The governor's emissaries were
out in every direction. "I heard that preaching was going on at
Antwerp," he writes to Philip; "and I sent my own provost there, for I
cannot trust the authorities. He arrested a good number of heretics.
They will never attend another such meeting. The magistrates complain
that the interference of the provost was a violation of their
privileges. The magistrates may as well take it patiently."[1056] The
pleasant manner in which the duke talks over the fate of his victims
with his master may remind