the boon, for they struck his only son dead, and tore his heart out before his father’s eyes.  Hardly any man or woman survived, except by accident.  A body of some hundred burghers made their escape across the snow into the open country.  They were, however, overtaken, stripped stark naked, and hung upon the trees by the feet, to freeze, or to perish by a more lingering death.  Most of them soon died, but twenty, who happened to be wealthy, succeeded, after enduring much torture, in purchasing their lives of their inhuman persecutors.  The principal burgomaster, Heinrich Lambertszoon, was less fortunate.  Known to be affluent, he was tortured by exposing the soles of his feet to a fire until they were almost consumed.  On promise that his life should be spared, he then agreed to pay a heavy ransom; but hardly had he furnished the stipulated sum when, by express order of Don Frederic himself, he was hanged in his own doorway, and his dissevered limbs afterwards nailed to the gates of the city.

Nearly all the inhabitants of Naarden, soldiers and citizens, were thus destroyed; and now Don Frederic issued peremptory orders that no one, on pain of death, should give lodging or food to any fugitive.  He likewise forbade to the dead all that could now be forbidden them—­a grave.  Three weeks long did these unburied bodies pollute the streets, nor could the few wretched women who still cowered within such houses as had escaped the flames ever wave from their lurking-places without treading upon the festering remains of what had been their husbands, their fathers, or their brethren.  Such was the express command of him whom the flatterers called the “most divine genius ever known.”  Shortly afterwards came an order to dismantle the fortifications, which had certainly proved sufficiently feeble in the hour of need, and to raze what was left of the city from the surface of the earth.  The work was faithfully accomplished, and for a longtime Naarden ceased to exist.

Alva wrote, with his usual complacency in such cases, to his sovereign, that “they had cut the throats of the burghers and all the garrison, and that they had not left a mother’s son alive.”  The statement was almost literally correct, nor was the cant with which these bloodhounds commented upon their crimes less odious than their guilt.  “It was a permission of God,” said the Duke, “that these people should have undertaken to defend a city, which was so weak that no other persons would have attempted such a thing.”  Nor was the reflection of Mendoza less pious.  “The sack of Naarden,” said that really brave and accomplished cavalier, “was a chastisement which must be believed to have taken place by express permission of a Divine Providence; a punishment for having been the first of the Holland towns in which heresy built its nest, whence it has taken flight to all the neighboring cities.”