The chronicles contain the lists of these obscure martyrs; but their names, hardly pronounced in their life-time, sound barbarously in our ears, and will never ring through the trumpet of fame.  Yet they were men who dared and suffered as much as men can dare and suffer in this world, and for the noblest cause which can inspire humanity.  Fanatics they certainly were not, if fanaticism consists in show, without corresponding substance.  For them all was terrible reality.  The Emperor and his edicts were realities, the axe, the stake were realities, and the heroism with which men took each other by the hand and walked into the flames, or with which women sang a song of triumph while the grave-digger was shovelling the earth upon their living faces, was a reality also.

Thus, the people of the Netherlands were already pervaded, throughout the whole extent of the country, with the expanding spirit of religious reformation.  It was inevitable that sooner or later an explosion was to arrive.  They were placed between two great countries, where the new principles had already taken root.  The Lutheranism of Germany and the Calvinism of France had each its share in producing the Netherland revolt, but a mistake is perhaps often made in estimating the relative proportion of these several influences.  The Reformation first entered the provinces, not through the Augsburg, but the Huguenot gate.  The fiery field-preachers from the south of France first inflamed the excitable hearts of the kindred population of the south-western Netherlands.  The Walloons were the first to rebel against and the first to reconcile themselves with papal Rome, exactly as their Celtic ancestors, fifteen centuries earlier, had been foremost in the revolt against imperial Rome, and precipitate in their submission to her overshadowing power.  The Batavians, slower to be moved but more steadfast, retained the impulse which they received from the same source which was already agitating their “Welsh” compatriots.  There were already French preachers at Valenciennes and Tournay, to be followed, as we shall have occasion to see, by many others.  Without undervaluing the influence of the German Churches, and particularly of the garrison-preaching of the German military chaplains in the Netherlands, it may be safely asserted that the early Reformers of the provinces were mainly Huguenots in their belief:  The Dutch Church became, accordingly, not Lutheran, but Calvinistic, and the founder of the commonwealth hardly ceased to be a nominal Catholic before he became an adherent to the same creed.