September, 1567. In less
than three months this tribunal put to death eighteen hundred
persons, including Horn, Egmont, and other eminent patriots. As many
as one hundred thousand of the population are said to have emigrated
at this time to England.

William of Orange, the great leader of the Netherlanders, refused to
appear before the Council of Blood. He had resigned his offices,
civil and military, and now retired to Dillenburg, still proclaiming
his adhesion to the Protestant faith. But in 1568 he gathered two
armies. Alva destroyed one of them, and the other was disbanded. In
1570 William issued letters of marque to seamen who were nicknamed
"Sea Beggars," and bore a prominent part in the war of independence.
In 1572 they captured Briel. That year Mons was captured by Louis of
Nassau, William's brother, but in September it was retaken by Alva.
In Dyer's narrative the subsequent course of events, to the
Pacification of Ghent, is clearly and succinctly traced.

Soon after the capture of Mons, Alva went to Brussels and left the
conduct of the war to his son, Frederick de Toledo. Zutphen and Naarden
successively yielded to Frederick's arms, and became the scenes of the
most detestable violence. Alva ordered his son not to leave a single man
alive in Zutphen, and to burn down all the houses--commands which were
almost literally obeyed. The treatment of Naarden was still more
revolting. The town had capitulated, and Don Julian Romero, an officer
of Don Frederick's, had pledged his word that the lives and property of
the inhabitants should be respected. Romero then entered the town with
some five hundred musketeers, for whom the citizens provided a sumptuous
feast; and he summoned the inhabitants to assemble in the Gast Huis
Church, then used as a town hall. More than five hundred of them had
entered the church when a priest, suddenly rushing in, bade them prepare
for death. Scarcely had the announcement been made when a band of
Spanish soldiers entered and, after discharging a volley into the
defenceless crowd, attacked them sword in hand. The church was then
fired and the dead and dying consumed together.

But these cruelties only steeled the Hollanders to a more obstinate
resistance; nor must it be concealed that in these _plusquam civilia
bella_, where civil hatred was still further embittered by sectarian
malignancy, the Dutch sometimes displayed as muc