the constables, the whole penal
machinery of each province; yet the officers often refused to act, and
had even dared to close the prisons. Nevertheless, it had been intended,
as fully appeared by the imperial and royal instructions to the
inquisitors, that their action through the medium of the provincial
authorities should be unrestrained. Not satisfied with these
representations to the Regent, the inquisitors had also made a direct
appeal to the King. Judocus Tiletanus and Michael de Bay addressed to
Philip a letter from Louvain. They represented to him that they were the
only two left of the five inquisitors-general appointed by the Pope for
all the Netherlands, the other three having been recently converted into
bishops. Daily complaints, they said, were reaching them of the
prodigious advance of heresy, but their own office was becoming so
odious, so calumniated, and exposed to so much resistance, that they
could not perform its duties without personal danger. They urgently
demanded from his Majesty, therefore, additional support and assistance.
Thus the Duchess, exposed at once to the rising wrath of a whole people
and to the shrill blasts of inquisitorial anger, was tossed to and fro,
as upon a stormy sea. The commands of the King, too explicit to be
tampered with, were obeyed. The theological assembly had met and given
advice. The Council of Trent was here and there enforced. The edicts were
republished and the inquisitors encouraged. Moreover, in accordance with
Philip's suggestion, orders were now given that the heretics should be
executed at midnight in their dungeons, by binding their heads between
their knees, and then slowly suffocating them in tubs of water. Secret
drowning was substituted for public burning, in order that the heretic's
crown of vainglory, which was thought to console him in his agony, might
never be placed upon his head.

In the course of the summer, Magaret wrote to her brother that the
popular frenzy was becoming more and more intense. The people were crying
aloud, she said, that the Spanish inquisition, or a worse than Spanish
inquisition, had been established among them by means of bishops and
ecclesiastics. She urged Philip to cause the instructions for the
inquisitors to be revised. Egmont, she said, was vehement in expressing
his dissatisfaction at the discrepancy between Philip's language to him
by word of mouth and that of the royal despatches on the religious
question. The oth