with the martyrdom to which they were exposed, and the disorder spread to every part of the Netherlands.  Many were put to death in lingering torments, but no perceptible effect was produced by the chastisement.  Meantime the great chief of the sect, the prophet John, was defeated by the forces of the Bishop of Munster, who recovered his city and caused the “King of Zion” to be pinched to death with red-hot tongs.

Unfortunately the severity of government was not wreaked alone upon the prophet and his mischievous crew.  Thousands and ten-thousands of virtuous, well-disposed men and women, who had as little sympathy with anabaptistical as with Roman depravity; were butchered in cold blood, under the sanguinary rule of Charles, in the Netherlands.  In 1533, Queen Dowager Mary of Hungary, sister of the Emperor, Regent of the provinces, the “Christian widow” admired by Erasmus, wrote to her brother that “in her opinion all heretics, whether repentant or not, should be prosecuted with such severity as that error might be, at once, extinguished, care being only taken that the provinces were not entirely depopulated.”  With this humane limitation, the “Christian Widow” cheerfully set herself to superintend as foul and wholesale a system of murder as was ever organized.  In 1535, an imperial edict was issued at Brussels, condemning all heretics to death; repentant males to be executed with the sword, repentant females to be buried alive, the obstinate, of both sexes, to be burned.  This and similar edicts were the law of the land for twenty years, and rigidly enforced.  Imperial and papal persecution continued its daily deadly work with such diligence as to make it doubtful whether the limits set by the Regent Mary might not be overstepped.  In the midst of the carnage, the Emperor sent for his son Philip, that he might receive the fealty of the Netherlands as their future lord and master.  Contemporaneously, a new edict was published at Brussels (29th April, 1549), confirming and reenacting all previous decrees in their most severe provisions.  Thus stood religious matters in the Netherlands at the epoch of the imperial abdication.

XIII.

The civil institutions of the country had assumed their last provincial form, in the Burgundo-Austrian epoch.  As already stated, their tendency, at a later period a vicious one, was to substitute fictitious personages for men.  A chain of corporations was wound about the liberty of the Netherlands; yet that liberty had been originally sustained by the system in which it, one day, might be strangled.  The spirit of local self-government, always the life-blood of liberty, was often excessive in its manifestations.  The centrifugal force had been too much developed, and, combining with the mutual jealousy of corporations, had often made the nation weak against a common foe.  Instead of popular rights there were state rights, for the large cities, with extensive districts and