The departure of the duchess of Parma having left Alva undisputed as well as unlimited authority, he proceeded rapidly in his terrible career.  The count of Beuren was seized at Louvain, and sent prisoner to Madrid; and wherever it was possible to lay hands on a suspected patriot, the occasion was not neglected.  It would be a revolting task to enter into a minute detail of all the horrors committed, and impossible to record the names of the victims who so quickly fell before Alva’s insatiate cruelty.  The people were driven to frenzy.  Bands of wretches fled to the woods and marshes; whence, half famished and perishing for want, they revenged themselves with pillage and murder.  Pirates infested and ravaged the coast; and thus, from both sea and land, the whole extent of the Netherlands was devoted to carnage and ruin.  The chronicles of Brabant and Holland, chiefly written in Flemish by contemporary authors, abound in thrilling details of the horrors of this general desolation, with long lists of those who perished.  Suffice it to say, that, on the recorded boast of Alva himself, he caused eighteen thousand inhabitants of the Low Countries to perish by the hands of the executioner, during his less than six years’ sovereignty in the Netherlands.

The most important of these tragical scenes was now soon to be acted.  The Counts Egmont and Horn, having submitted to some previous interrogatories by Vargas and others, were removed from Ghent to Brussels, on the 3d of June, under a strong escort.  The following day they passed through the mockery of a trial before the Council of Blood; and on the 5th they were both beheaded in the great square of Brussels, in the presence of Alva, who gloated on the spectacle from a balcony that commanded the execution.  The same day Van Straeten, and Casambrot shared the fate of their illustrious friends, in the castle of Vilvorde; with many others whose names only find a place in the local chronicles of the times.  Egmont and Horn met their fate with the firmness expected from their well-proved courage.

These judicial murders excited in the Netherlands an agitation without bounds.  It was no longer hatred or aversion that filled men’s minds, but fury and despair.  The outbursting of a general revolt was hourly watched for.  The foreign powers, without exception, expressed their disapproval of these executions.  The emperor Maximilian II., and all the Catholic princes, condemned them.  The former sent his brother expressly to the king of Spain, to warn him that without a cessation of his cruelties he could not restrain a general declaration from the members of the empire, which would, in all likelihood, deprive him of every acre of land in the Netherlands.  The princes of the Protestant states held no terms in the expression of their disgust and resentment; and everything seemed now ripe, both at home and abroad, to favor the enterprise on which the Prince of Orange was determined to risk his fortune