This was the treatment to which thousands, and tens of thousands, had been subjected in the provinces.  Men, women, and children were burned, and their “cinders” thrown away, for idle words against Rome, spoken years before, for praying alone in their closets, for not kneeling to a wafer when they met it in the streets, for thoughts to which they had never given utterance, but which, on inquiry, they were too honest to deny.  Certainly with this work going on year after year in every city in the Netherlands, and now set into renewed and vigorous action by a man who wore a crown only that he might the better torture his fellow-creatures, it was time that the very stones in the streets should be moved to mutiny.

Thus it may be seen of how much value were the protestations of Philip and of Granvelle, on which much stress has latterly been laid, that it was not their intention to introduce the Spanish inquisition.  With the edicts and the Netherland inquisition, such as we have described them, the step was hardly necessary.

In fact, the main difference between the two institutions consisted in the greater efficiency of the Spanish in discovering such of its victims as were disposed to deny their faith.  Devised originally for more timorous and less conscientious infidels who were often disposed to skulk in obscure places and to renounce without really abandoning their errors, it was provided with a set of venomous familiars who glided through every chamber and coiled themselves at every fireside.  The secret details of each household in the realm being therefore known to the holy office and to the monarch, no infidel or heretic could escape discovery.  This invisible machinery was less requisite for the Netherlands.  There was comparatively little difficulty in ferreting out the “vermin”—­to use the expression of a Walloon historian of that age—­so that it was only necessary to maintain in good working order the apparatus for destroying the noxious creatures when unearthed.  The heretics of the provinces assembled at each other’s houses to practise those rites described in such simple language by Baldwin Ogier, and denounced under such horrible penalties by the edicts.  The inquisitorial system of Spain was hardly necessary for men who had but little prudence in concealing, and no inclination to disavow their creed.  “It is quite a laughable matter,” wrote Granvelle, who occasionally took a comic view of the inquisition, “that the King should send us depositions made in Spain by which we are to hunt for heretics here, as if we did not know of thousands already.  Would that I had as many doubloons of annual income,” he added, “as there are public and professed heretics in the provinces.”  No doubt the inquisition was in such eyes a most desirable establishment.  “To speak without passion,” says the Walloon, “the inquisition well administered is a laudable institution, and not less necessary than all the other offices of spirituality and temporality