These instructions to the inquisitors had been renewed and confirmed by Philip, in the very first month of his reign (28th Nov. 1555).  As in the case of the edicts, it had been thought desirable by Granvelle to make use of the supposed magic of the Emperor’s name to hallow the whole machinery of persecution.  The action of the system during the greater part of the imperial period had been terrible.  Suffered for a time to languish during the French war, it had lately been renewed with additional vigor.  Among all the inquisitors, the name of Peter Titelmann was now pre-eminent.  He executed his infamous functions throughout Flanders, Douay, and Tournay, the most thriving and populous portions of the Netherlands, with a swiftness, precision, and even with a jocularity which hardly seemed human.  There was a kind of grim humor about the man.  The woman who, according to Lear’s fool, was wont to thrust her live eels into the hot paste, “rapping them o’ the coxcombs with a stick and crying reproachfully, Wantons, lie down!” had the spirit of a true inquisitor.  Even so dealt Titelmann with his heretics writhing on the rack or in the flames.  Cotemporary chronicles give a picture of him as of some grotesque yet terrible goblin, careering through the country by night or day, alone, on horseback, smiting the trembling peasants on the head with a great club, spreading dismay far and wide, dragging suspected persons from their firesides or their beds, and thrusting them into dungeons, arresting, torturing, strangling, burning, with hardly the shadow of warrant, information, or process.

The secular sheriff, familiarly called Red-Rod, from the color of his wand of office, meeting this inquisitor Titelmann one day upon the high road, thus wonderingly addressed him—­“How can you venture to go about alone, or at most with an attendant or two, arresting people on every side, while I dare not attempt to execute my office, except at the head of a strong force, armed in proof; and then only at the peril of my life?”

“Ah!  Red-Rod,” answered Peter, jocosely, “you deal with bad people.  I have nothing to fear, for I seize only the innocent and virtuous, who make no resistance, and let themselves be taken like lambs.”

“Mighty well,” said the other; “but if you arrest all the good people and I all the bad, ’tis difficult to say who in the world is to escape chastisement.”  The reply of the inquisitor has not been recorded, but there is no doubt that he proceeded like a strong man to run his day’s course.

He was the most active of all the agents in the religious persecution at the epoch of which we are now treating, but he had been inquisitor for many years.  The martyrology of the provinces reeks with his murders.  He burned men for idle words or suspected thoughts; he rarely waited, according to his frank confession, for deeds.  Hearing once that a certain schoolmaster, named Geleyn de Muler, of Audenarde, “was addicted