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 a natural death were exhumed, and their festering remains hanged upon the gibbet, on pretext that they had died without receiving the sacrament, but in reality that their property might become the legitimate prey of the treasury.  Marriages of long standing were dissolved by order of government, that rich heiresses might be married against their will to foreigners whom they abhorred.  Women and children were executed for the crime of assisting their fugitive husbands and parents with a penny in their utmost need, and even for consoling them with a letter, in their exile.  Such was the regular course of affairs as administered by the Blood Council.  The additional barbarities committed amid the sack and ruin of those blazing and starving cities, are almost beyond belief; unborn infants were torn from the living bodies of their mothers; women and children were violated by thousands; and whole populations burned and hacked to pieces by soldiers in every mode which cruelty, in its wanton ingenuity, could devise.  Such was the administration, of which Vargas affirmed, at its close, that too much mercy, “nimia misericordia,” had been its ruin.