than executions with no
pretexts at all. Thus Peter de Witt of Amsterdam was beheaded, because at
one of the tumults in that city he had persuaded a rioter not to fire
upon a magistrate. This was taken as sufficient proof that he was a man
in authority among the rebels, and he was accordingly put to death.
Madame Juriaen, who, in 1566, had struck with her slipper a little wooden
image of the Virgin, together with her maid-servant, who had witnessed
without denouncing the crime, were both drowned by the hangman in a
hogshead placed on the scaffold.

Death, even, did not in all cases place a criminal beyond the reach of
the executioner. Egbert Meynartzoon, a man of high official rank, had
been condemned, together with two colleagues, on an accusation of
collecting money in a Lutheran church. He died in prison of dropsy. The
sheriff was indignant with the physician, because, in spite of cordials
and strengthening prescriptions, the culprit had slipped through his
fingers before he had felt those of the hangman. He consoled himself by
placing the body on a chair, and having the dead man beheaded in company
with his colleagues.

Thus the whole country became a charnel-house; the deathbell tolled
hourly in every village; not a family but was called to mourn for its
dearest relatives, while the survivors stalked listlessly about, the
ghosts of their former selves, among the wrecks of their former homes.
The spirit of the nation, within a few months after the arrival of Alva,
seemed hopelessly broken. The blood of its best and bravest had already
stained the scaffold; the men to whom it bad been accustomed to look for
guidance and protection, were dead, in prison, or in exile. Submission
had ceased to be of any avail, flight was impossible, and the spirit of
vengeance had alighted at every fireside. The mourners went daily about
the streets, for there was hardly a house which had not been made
desolate. The scaffolds, the gallows, the funeral piles, which had been
sufficient in ordinary times, furnished now an entirely inadequate
machinery for the incessant executions. Columns and stakes in every
street, the door-posts of private houses, the fences in the fields were
laden with human carcasses, strangled, burned, beheaded. The orchards in
the country bore on many a tree the hideous fruit of human bodies.

Thus the Netherlands were crushed, and but for the stringency of the
tyranny which had now closed their gates, would have