With the departure of Orange, a total eclipse seemed to come over the Netherlands.  The country was absolutely helpless, the popular heart cold with apprehension.  All persons at all implicated in the late troubles, or suspected of heresy, fled from their homes.  Fugitive soldiers were hunted into rivers, cut to pieces in the fields, hanged, burned, or drowned, like dogs, without quarter, and without remorse.  The most industrious and valuable part of the population left the land in droves.  The tide swept outwards with such rapidity that the Netherlands seemed fast becoming the desolate waste which they had been before the Christian era.  Throughout the country, those Reformers who were unable to effect their escape betook themselves to their old lurking-places.  The new religion was banished from all the cities, every conventicle was broken up by armed men, the preachers and leading members were hanged, their disciples beaten with rods, reduced to beggary, or imprisoned, even if they sometimes escaped the scaffold.  An incredible number, however, were executed for religious causes.  Hardly a village so small, says the Antwerp chronicler,—­[Meteren]—­but that it could furnish one, two, or three hundred victims to the executioner.  The new churches were levelled to the ground, and out of their timbers gallows were constructed.  It was thought an ingenious pleasantry to hang the Reformers upon the beams under which they had hoped to worship God.  The property of the fugitives was confiscated.  The beggars in name became beggars in reality.  Many who felt obliged to remain, and who loved their possessions better than their creed, were suddenly converted into the most zealous of Catholics.  Persons who had for years not gone to mass, never omitted now their daily and nightly visits to the churches.  Persons who had never spoken to an ecclesiastic but with contumely, now could not eat their dinners without one at their table.  Many who were suspected of having participated in Calvinistic rites, were foremost and loudest in putting down and denouncing all forms and shows of the reformation.  The country was as completely “pacified,” to use the conqueror’s expression, as Gaul had been by Caesar.

The, Regent issued a fresh edict upon the 24th May, to refresh the memories of those who might have forgotten previous statutes, which were, however, not calculated to make men oblivious.  By this new proclamation, all ministers and teachers were sentenced to the gallows.  All persons who had suffered their houses to be used for religious purposes were sentenced to the gallows.  All parents or masters whose children or servants had attended such meetings were sentenced to the gallows, while the children and servants were only to be beaten with rods.  All people who sang hymns at the burial of their relations were sentenced to the gallows.  Parents who allowed their newly-born children to be baptized by other hands than those of the Catholic priest were sentenced to the gallows.  The same