sal
fortunes of from sixty thousand to one hundred thousand florins, were
seen with their hands tied behind their backs, dragged like common
vagabonds at the horse's tail to execution, and in Valenciennes
fifty-five persons were decapitated at one time. All the prisons--and the
duke immediately on commencing his administration had built a great
number of them--were crammed full with the accused; hanging, beheading,
quartering, burning were the prevailing and ordinary occupations of the
day; the punishment of the galleys and banishment were more rarely heard
of, for there was scarcely any offence which was reckoned too trival to
be punished with death. Immense sums were thus brought into the treasury,
which, however, served rather to stimulate the new viceroy's and his
colleagues' thirst for gold than to quench it. It seemed to be his insane
purpose to make beggars of the whole people, and to throw all their
riches into the hands of the king and his servants. The yearly income
derived from these confiscations was computed to equal the revenues of
the first kingdoms of Europe; it is said to have been estimated, in a
report furnished to the king, at the incredible amount of twenty million
of dollars. But these proceedings were the more inhuman, as they often
bore hardest precisely upon the very persons who were the most peaceful
subjects, and most orthodox Roman Catholics, whom they could not want to
injure. Whenever an estate was confiscated all the creditors who had
claims upon it were defrauded. The hospitals, too, and public
institutions, which such properties had contributed to support, were now
ruined, and the poor, who had formerly drawn a pittance from this source,
were compelled to see their only spring of comfort dried up. Whoever
ventured to urge their well-grounded claims on the forfeited property
before the council of twelve (for no other tribunal dared to interfere
with these inquiries), consumed their substance in tedious and expensive
proceedings, and were reduced to beggary before they saw the end of them.
The histories of civilized states furnish but one instance of a similar
perversion of justice, of such violation of the rights of property, and
of such waste of human life; but Cinna, Sylla, and Marius entered
vanquished Rome as incensed victors, and practised without disguise what
the viceroy of the Netherlands performed under the venerable veil of the
laws.

Up to the end of the year 1567 the king's ar