on their own thresholds—­from the beheading of the twenty nobles on the Horse-market, in the opening of the Governor’s career, to the roasting alive of Uitenhoove at its close-from the block on which fell the honored head of Antony Straalen, to the obscure chair in which the ancient gentlewoman of Amsterdam suffered death for an act of vicarious mercy—­from one year’s end to another’s—­from the most signal to the most squalid scenes of sacrifice, the eye and hand of the great master directed, without weariness, the task imposed by the sovereign.

No doubt the work of almost indiscriminate massacre had been duly mapped out.  Not often in history has a governor arrived to administer the affairs of a province, where the whole population, three millions strong, had been formally sentenced to death.  As time wore on, however, he even surpassed the bloody instructions which he had received.  He waved aside the recommendations of the Blood Council to mercy; he dissuaded the monarch from attempting the path of clemency, which, for secret reasons, Philip was inclined at one period to attempt.  The Governor had, as he assured the King, been using gentleness in vain, and he was now determined to try what a little wholesome severity could effect.  These words were written immediately after the massacres at Harlem.

With all the bloodshed at Mons, and Naarden, and Mechlin, and by the Council of Tumults, daily, for six years long, still crying from the ground, he taxed himself with a misplaced and foolish tenderness to the people.  He assured the King that when Alkmaar should be taken, he would, not spare a “living soul among its whole population;” and, as his parting advice, he recommended that every city in the Netherlands should be burned to the ground, except a few which could he occupied permanently by the royal troops.  On the whole, so finished a picture of a perfect and absolute tyranny has rarely been presented to mankind by history, as in Alva’s administration of the Netherlands.

The tens of thousands in those miserable provinces who fell victims to the gallows, the sword, the stake, the living grave, or to living banishment, have never been counted; for those statistics of barbarity are often effaced from human record.  Enough, however, is known, and enough has been recited in the preceding pages.  No mode in which human beings have ever caused their fellow-creatures to suffer, was omitted from daily practice.  Men, women, and children, old and young, nobles and paupers, opulent burghers, hospital patients, lunatics, dead bodies, all were indiscriminately made to furnish food for-the scaffold and the stake.  Men were tortured, beheaded, hanged by the neck and by the legs, burned before slow fires, pinched to death with red hot tongs, broken upon the wheel, starved, and flayed alive.  Their skins stripped from the living body, were stretched upon drums, to be beaten in the march of their brethren to the gallows.  The bodies of many who had died