The rabble welcomed his coming with effusion, singing a ready parody of an Easter hymn:[8]

  “Christ is arisen, the landvogt is in prison,
  Let us all rejoice, Sigismund is our choice. 
  Kyrie Eleison! 
  Had he not been snared, evil had it fared,
  But now that he is ta’en, his craft is all in vain. 
  Kyrie Eleison!”

Thus it was under Sigismund’s auspices that the late governor was brought to trial.  Instruments of torture sent from Basel were employed to make Hagenbach confess his crimes.  But there was nothing to confess.  As a matter of fact the charges against him were for well-known deeds the character of which depended on the point of view.  What the Alsatians declared were infringements of their rights, the duke’s deputy stoutly asserted were acts justified by the terms of the treaty.  In regard to his private career the prisoner persisted in his statement that he was no worse than other men and that all his so-called victims had been willing and well rewarded for their submission to him.

On May 9th, the preliminaries were declared over and the trial began before a tribunal whose composition is not perfectly well known, but which certainly included delegates from the chief cities of the landgraviate, and from Strasburg, Basel, and Berne.[9]

The trial was practically lynch law in spite of the cloak of legality thrown over it.  Charles alone was Hagenbach’s principal and he alone was responsible for his lieutenant’s acts.  The intrinsic incompetence of the court was hotly urged by Jean Irma of Basel, Hagenbach’s self-appointed advocate, but his defence was rejected.  Public opinion insisted upon extreme measures, and the sentence of capital punishment was promptly followed by execution.

Petitions from the prisoner that he might die by the sword and be permitted to bequeath a portion of his property to the church of St. Etienne at Brisac were granted.  The remainder of his wealth was confiscated by Sigismund, who had withdrawn to Fribourg during the progress of the trial.  Even Hagenbach’s bitterest foes acknowledged that the late governor made a dignified and Christian exit from the life he had not graced.

Charles is said to have beaten well the messenger who brought him the news of this trial and execution, in the very presence of Sigismund who had not yet bought back his rights in the landgraviate, where he had appointed Oswald von Thierstein as governor, and where he was thus presuming to use sovereign power.  This was not sufficient, however, to make the duke change his own plans.  Stephen von Hagenbach was entrusted with the commission of punishing the Alsatians for his brother’s ignominious deposition, and he did his task grimly.  According to the Strasburg chronicler, this Hagenbach, at the north, and his colleague, the Count of Blamont, at the south, did not have more than six or eight thousand men apiece, but they left Hun-like reputations behind them.  Devastation, slaughter, pillage in houses and churches, all in the name of the duke, contributed to the zeal with which the Austrian’s return was ratified by popular acclamation, and with which the contingents sent to Alsace by the confederates were received.