The next remarkable characteristic of these tumults was the almost entire abstinence of the rioters from personal outrage and from pillage.  The testimony of a very bitter, but honest Catholic at Valenciennes, is remarkable upon this point.  “Certain chroniclers,” said he, “have greatly mistaken the character of this image-breaking.  It has been said that the Calvinists killed a hundred priests in this city, cutting some of them into pieces, and burning others over a slow fire.  I remember very well every thing which happened upon that abominable day, and I can affirm that not a single priest was injured.  The Huguenots took good care not to injure in any way the living images.”  This was the case every where.  Catholic and Protestant writers agree that no deeds of violence were committed against man or woman.

It would be also very easy to accumulate a vast weight of testimony as to their forbearance from robbery.  They destroyed for destruction’s sake, not for purposes of plunder.

Although belonging to the lowest classes of society, they left heaps of jewellery, of gold and silver plate, of costly embroidery, lying unheeded upon the ground.  They felt instinctively that a great passion would be contaminated by admixture with paltry motives.  In Flanders a company of rioters hanged one of their own number for stealing articles to the value of five Shillings.  In Valenciennes the iconoclasts were offered large sums if they would refrain from desecrating the churches of that city, but they rejected the proposal with disdain.  The honest Catholic burgher who recorded the fact, observed that he did so because of the many misrepresentations on the subject, not because he wished to flatter heresy and rebellion.

At Tournay, the greatest scrupulousness was observed upon this point.  The floor of the cathedral was strewn with “pearls and precious stones, with chalices and reliquaries of silver and gold;” but the ministers of the reformed religion, in company with the magistrates, came to the spot, and found no difficulty, although utterly without power to prevent the storm, in taking quiet possession of the wreck.  “We had every thing of value,” says Procureur-General De la Barre, “carefully inventoried, weighed, locked in chests, and placed under a strict guard in the prison of the Halle, to which one set of keys were given to the ministers, and another to the magistrates.”  Who will dare to censure in very severe language this havoc among stocks and stones in a land where so many living men and women, of more value than many statues, had been slaughtered by the inquisition, and where Alva’s “Blood Tribunal” was so soon to eclipse even that terrible institution in the number of its victims and the amount of its confiscations?