punishment was denounced against the persons who should christen the child or act as its sponsors.  Schoolmasters who should teach any error or false doctrine were likewise to be punished with death.  Those who infringed the statutes against the buying and selling of religious books and songs were to receive the same doom; after the first offence.  All sneers or insults against priests and ecclesiastics were also made capital crimes.  Vagabonds, fugitives; apostates, runaway monks, were ordered forthwith to depart from every city on pain of death.  In all cases confiscation of the whole property of the criminal was added to the hanging.

This edict, says a contemporary historian, increased the fear of those professing the new religion to such an extent that they left the country “in great heaps.”  It became necessary, therefore, to issue a subsequent proclamation forbidding all persons, whether foreigners or natives, to leave the land or to send away their property, and prohibiting all shipmasters, wagoners, and other agents of travel, from assisting in the flight of such fugitives, all upon pain of death.

Yet will it be credited that the edict of 24th May, the provisions of which have just been sketched, actually excited the wrath of Philip on account of their clemency?  He wrote to the Duchess, expressing the pain and dissatisfaction which he felt, that an edict so indecent, so illegal, so contrary to the Christian religion, should have been published.  Nothing, he said, could offend or distress him more deeply, than any outrage whatever, even the slightest one, offered to God and to His Roman Catholic Church.  He therefore commanded his sister instantly to revoke the edict.  One might almost imagine from reading the King’s letter that Philip was at last appalled at the horrors committed in his name.  Alas, he was only indignant that heretics had been suffered to hang who ought to have been burned, and that a few narrow and almost impossible loopholes had been left through which those who had offended alight effect their escape.

And thus, while the country is paralyzed with present and expected woe, the swiftly advancing trumpets of the Spanish army resound from beyond the Alps.  The curtain is falling upon the prelude to the great tragedy which the prophetic lips of Orange had foretold.  When it is again lifted, scenes of disaster and of bloodshed, battles, sieges, executions, deeds of unfaltering but valiant tyranny, of superhuman and successful resistance, of heroic self-sacrifice, fanatical courage and insane cruelty, both in the cause of the Wrong and the Right, will be revealed in awful succession—­a spectacle of human energy, human suffering, and human strength to suffer, such as has not often been displayed upon the stage of the world’s events.

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