of the captors. "If
you want Ensign Hasselaer, I am the man. Let this innocent person
depart," he cried. Before the sun set his head had fallen. All the
officers were taken to the House of Kleef, where they were immediately
executed.--Captain Ripperda, who had so heroically rebuked the craven
conduct of the magistracy, whose eloquence had inflamed the soldiers and
citizens to resistance, and whose skill and courage had sustained the
siege so long, was among the first to suffer. A natural son of Cardinal
Granvelle, who could have easily saved his life by proclaiming a
parentage which he loathed, and Lancelot Brederode, an illegitimate scion
of that ancient house, were also among these earliest victims.

The next day Alva came over to the camp. He rode about the place,
examining the condition of the fortifications from the outside, but
returned to Amsterdam without having entered the city. On the following
morning the massacre commenced. The plunder had been commuted for two
hundred and forty thousand guilders, which the citizens bound themselves
to pay in four instalments; but murder was an indispensable accompaniment
of victory, and admitted of no compromise. Moreover, Alva had already
expressed the determination to effect a general massacre upon this
occasion. The garrison, during the siege, had been reduced from four
thousand to eighteen hundred. Of these the Germans, six hundred in
number, were, by Alva's order, dismissed, on a pledge to serve no more
against the King. All the rest of the garrison were immediately
butchered, with at least as many citizens. Drummers went about the city
daily, proclaiming that all who harbored persons having, at any former
period, been fugitives, were immediately to give them up, on pain of
being instantly hanged themselves in their own doors. Upon these refugees
and upon the soldiery fell the brunt of the slaughter; although, from day
to day, reasons were perpetually discovered for putting to death every
individual at all distinguished by service, station, wealth, or liberal
principles; for the carnage could not be accomplished at once, but, with
all the industry and heartiness employed, was necessarily protracted
through several days. Five executioners, with their attendants, were kept
constantly at work; and when at last they were exhausted with fatigue, or
perhaps sickened with horror, three hundred wretches were tied two and
two, back to back, and drowned in the Harlem Lake.

At