The next day Alva came over to the camp.  He rode about the place, examining the condition of the fortifications from the outside, but returned to Amsterdam without having entered the city.  On the following morning the massacre commenced.  The plunder had been commuted for two hundred and forty thousand guilders, which the citizens bound themselves to pay in four instalments; but murder was an indispensable accompaniment of victory, and admitted of no compromise.  Moreover, Alva had already expressed the determination to effect a general massacre upon this occasion.  The garrison, during the siege, had been reduced from four thousand to eighteen hundred.  Of these the Germans, six hundred in number, were, by Alva’s order, dismissed, on a pledge to serve no more against the King.  All the rest of the garrison were immediately butchered, with at least as many citizens.  Drummers went about the city daily, proclaiming that all who harbored persons having, at any former period, been fugitives, were immediately to give them up, on pain of being instantly hanged themselves in their own doors.  Upon these refugees and upon the soldiery fell the brunt of the slaughter; although, from day to day, reasons were perpetually discovered for putting to death every individual at all distinguished by service, station, wealth, or liberal principles; for the carnage could not be accomplished at once, but, with all the industry and heartiness employed, was necessarily protracted through several days.  Five executioners, with their attendants, were kept constantly at work; and when at last they were exhausted with fatigue, or perhaps sickened with horror, three hundred wretches were tied two and two, back to back, and drowned in the Harlem Lake.

At last, after twenty-three hundred human creatures had been murdered in cold blood, within a city where so many thousands had previously perished by violent or by lingering deaths; the blasphemous farce of a pardon was enacted.  Fifty-seven of the most prominent burghers of the place were, however, excepted from the act of amnesty, and taken into custody as security for the future good conduct of the other citizens.  Of these hostages some were soon executed, some died in prison, and all would have been eventually sacrificed, had not the naval defeat of Bossu soon afterwards enabled the Prince of Orange to rescue the remaining prisoners.  Ten thousand two hundred and fifty-six shots had been discharged against the walls during the siege.  Twelve thousand of the besieging army had died of wounds or disease, during the seven months and two days, between the, investment and the surrender.  In the earlier part of August, after the executions had been satisfactorily accomplished, Don Frederic made his triumphal entry, and the first chapter in the invasion of Holland was closed.  Such was the memorable siege of Harlem, an event in which we are called upon to wonder equally at human capacity to inflict and to endure misery.