a fate scarcely less
dreadful, in banishment and confiscation of property. The persecution
very soon took this direction; and persecution when prompted by avarice
is even more odious than when it springs from fanaticism, which,
however degrading in itself, is but the perversion of the religious
principle.

Sentence of perpetual exile and confiscation was pronounced at once
against all who fled the country.[1070] Even the dead were not spared;
as is shown by the process instituted against the marquis of Bergen, for
the confiscation of his estates on the charge of treason. That nobleman
had gone with Montigny, as the reader may remember, on his mission to
Madrid, where he had recently died,--more fortunate than his companion,
who survived for a darker destiny. The duke's emissaries were everywhere
active in making inventories of the property of the suspected parties.
"I am going to arrest some of the richest and worst offenders," writes
Alva to his master, "and bring them to a pecuniary composition."[1071]
He shall next proceed, he says, against the delinquent cities. In this
way a round sum will flow into his majesty's coffers.[1072] The victims
of this class were so numerous, that we find a single sentence of the
council sometimes comprehending eighty or a hundred individuals. One
before me, in fewer words than are taken up by the names of the parties,
dooms no less than a hundred and thirty-five inhabitants of Amsterdam to
confiscation and exile.[1073]

One may imagine the distress brought on this once flourishing country by
this wholesale proscription; for besides the parties directly
interested, there was a host of others incidentally affected,--hospitals
and charitable establishments, widows and helpless orphans, now reduced
to want by the failure of the sources which supplied them with their
ordinary subsistence.[1074] Slow and sparing must have been the justice
doled out to such impotent creditors, when they preferred their claims
to a tribunal like the Council of Blood! The effect was soon visible in
the decay of trade and the rapid depopulation of the towns.
Notwithstanding the dreadful penalties denounced against fugitives,
great numbers, especially from the border states, contrived to make
their escape. The neighboring districts of Germany opened their arms to
the wanderers; and many a wretched exile from the northern provinces,
flying across the frozen waters of the Zuyder Zee, found refuge within
the hospi