bid., p. 489.

[1063] "Les Bourgeois qui estoyet riches de quarante, soixante, et cent
mille florins, il les faysoit attacher a la queue d'un cheval, et ainsi
les faysoit trainer, ayant les mains liees sur les dos, jusques au lieu
ou on les debvoit pendre." Meteren, Hist. des Pays-Bas, fol. 55.

[1064] Ibid., ubi supra.

[1065] "Ille [Vargas] promiscue laqueo, igne, homines enecare."
Reidanus, Annales, p. 6.

[1066] Brandt, Reformation in the Low Countries, vol. I. p. 274.

[1067] "Hark how they sing!" exclaimed a friar in the crowd; "should
they not be made to dance too?" Brandt, Reformation in the Low
Countries, vol. I. p. 275.

[1068] It will be understood that I am speaking of the period embraced
in this portion of the history, terminating at the beginning of June,
1568, when the Council of Blood had been in active operation about four
months,--the period when the sword of legal persecution fell heaviest.
Alva, in the letter above cited to Philip, admits eight
hundred--including three hundred to be examined after Easter--as the
number of victims. (Documentos Ineditos, tom. IV. p. 489.) Viglius, in a
letter of the twenty-ninth of March, says fifteen hundred had been
already cited before the tribunal, the greater part of whom--they had
probably fled the country--were condemned for contumacy. (Epist. ad
Hopperum, p. 415.) Grotius, alluding to this period, speaks even more
vaguely of the multitude of the victims, as _innumerable_. "Stipatae reis
custodiae, innumeri mortales necati: ubique una species ut captae
civitatis." (Annales, p. 29.) So also Hooft, cited by Brandt: "The
gallows, the wheels, stakes, and trees in the highways, were loaden with
carcasses or limbs of such as had been hanged, beheaded, or roasted; so
that the air, which God had made for respiration of the living, was now
become the common grave or habitation of the dead." (Reformation in the
Low Countries, vol. I. p. 261.) Language like this, however expressive,
does little for statistics.

[1069] Correspondance de Philippe II., tom. II. p. 4.

[1070] Sentences passed by the Council of Blood against a great number
of individuals--two thousand or more--have been collected in a little
volume, (Sententien en Indagingen van Alba,) published at Amsterdam, in
1735. The parties condemned were for the most part natives of Holland,
Zealand, and Utrecht. They would seem, with very few exceptions, to have
been absentees, and, being pronounced guilty of c