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
ever 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 _maubrulez_," 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?

As to the story of his unhappy quarrels with his wife, there may be a
grain of truth in it likewise. Vesalius's religion must have sat very
lightly on him. The man who had robbed churchyards and gibbets from his
youth was not likely to be much afraid of apparitions and demons. He had
handled too many human bones to care much for those of saints. He was
probably, like his friends of Basle, Montpellier, and Paris, somewhat of
a heretic at heart, probably somewhat of a pagan, while his lady, Anne
van Hamme, was probably a strict Catholic, as her father, being a
councillor and master of the exchequer at Brussels, was bound to be; and
freethinking in the husband, crossed by superstition in the wife, may
have caused in them that wretched _vie a part_, that want of any true
communion of soul, too common to this day