This comedy preceded by a few days only the actual disaster.  On the 22d of August the news reached Tournay that the churches in Antwerp, Ghent, and many other places, had been sacked.  There was an instantaneous movement towards imitating the example on the same evening.  Pasquier de la Barre, procureur-general of the city, succeeded by much entreaty in tranquillizing the people for the night.  The “guard of terror” was set, and hopes were entertained that the storm might blow over.  The expectation, was vain.  At daybreak next day, the mob swept upon the churches and stripped them to the very walls.  Pictures, statues; organs, ornaments, chalices of silver and gold, reliquaries, albs, chasubles, copes, ciboriea, crosses, chandeliers, lamps; censers, all of richest material, glittering with pearls, rubies, and other precious stones, were scattered in heaps of ruin upon the ground.

As the Spoilers burrowed among the ancient tombs, they performed, in one or two instances, acts of startling posthumous justice.  The embalmed body of Duke Adolphus of Gueldres, last of the Egmonts, who had reigned in that province, was dragged from its sepulchre and recognized.  Although it had been there for ninety years, it was as uncorrupted, “Owing to the excellent spices which had preserved it from decay,” as upon the day of burial.  Thrown upon the marble floor of the church, it lay several days exposed to the execrations of the multitude.  The Duke had committed a crime against his father, in consequence of which the province which had been ruled by native races, had passed under the dominion of Charles the Bold.  Weary of waiting for the old Duke’s inheritance, he had risen against him in open rebellion.  Dragging him from his bed at midnight in the depth of winter, he had compelled the old man, with no covering but his night gear, to walk with naked feet twenty-five miles over ice and snow from Grave to Buren, while he himself performed the same journey in his company on horseback.  He had then thrown him into a dungeon beneath the tower of Buren castle, and kept him a close prisoner for six months.

[Memoires de Philippe de Comines (Loud. et Paris, 1747), liv. iv. 194-196.  In the Royal Gallery at Berlin is a startling picture by Rembrandt, in which the old Duke is represented looking out of the bars of his dungeon at his son, who is threatening him with uplifted hand and savage face.  No subject could be imagined better adapted to the gloomy and sarcastic genius of that painter.]

At last, the Duke of Burgundy summoned the two before his council, and proposed that Adolphus should allow his father 6000 florins annually, with the title of Duke till his death.  “He told us,” said Comines, “that he would sooner throw the old man head-foremost down a well and jump in himself afterwards.  His father had been Duke forty-four years, and it was time for him to retire.”  Adolphus being thus intractable, had been kept in