s were only to be beaten with rods. All people
who sang hymns at the burial of their relations were sentenced to the
gallows. Parents who allowed their newly-born children to be baptized by
other hands than those of the Catholic priest were sentenced to the
gallows. The same punishment was denounced against the persons who should
christen the child or act as its sponsors. Schoolmasters who should teach
any error or false doctrine were likewise to be punished with death.
Those who infringed the statutes against the buying and selling of
religious books and songs were to receive the same doom; after the first
offence. All sneers or insults against priests and ecclesiastics were
also made capital crimes. Vagabonds, fugitives; apostates, runaway monks,
were ordered forthwith to depart from every city on pain of death. In all
cases confiscation of the whole property of the criminal was added to the
hanging.

This edict, says a contemporary historian, increased the fear of those
professing the new religion to such an extent that they left the country
"in great heaps." It became necessary, therefore, to issue a subsequent
proclamation forbidding all persons, whether foreigners or natives, to
leave the land or to send away their property, and prohibiting all
shipmasters, wagoners, and other agents of travel, from assisting in the
flight of such fugitives, all upon pain of death.

Yet will it be credited that the edict of 24th May, the provisions of
which have just been sketched, actually excited the wrath of Philip on
account of their clemency? He wrote to the Duchess, expressing the pain
and dissatisfaction which he felt, that an edict so indecent, so illegal,
so contrary to the Christian religion, should have been published.
Nothing, he said, could offend or distress him more deeply, than any
outrage whatever, even the slightest one, offered to God and to His Roman
Catholic Church. He therefore commanded his sister instantly to revoke
the edict. One might almost imagine from reading the King's letter that
Philip was at last appalled at the horrors committed in his name. Alas,
he was only indignant that heretics had been suffered to hang who ought
to have been burned, and that a few narrow and almost impossible
loopholes had been left through which those who had offended alight
effect their escape.

And thus, while the country is paralyzed with present and expected woe,
the swiftly advancing trumpets of the Spanish army reso