Alva wrote, with his usual complacency in such cases, to his sovereign, that “they had cut the throats of the burghers and all the garrison, and that they had not left a mother’s son alive.”  The statement was almost literally correct, nor was the cant with which these bloodhounds commented upon their crimes less odious than their guilt.  “It was a permission of God,” said the Duke, “that these people should have undertaken to defend a city, which was so weak that no other persons would have attempted such a thing.”  Nor was the reflection of Mendoza less pious.  “The sack of Naarden,” said that really brave and accomplished cavalier, “was a chastisement which must be believed to have taken place by express permission of a Divine Providence; a punishment for having been the first of the Holland towns in which heresy built its nest, whence it has taken flight to all the neighboring cities.”

It is not without reluctance, but still with a stern determination, that the historian—­should faithfully record these transactions.  To extenuate would be base; to exaggerate impossible.  It is good that the world should not forget how much wrong has been endured by a single harmless nation at the hands of despotism, and in the sacred name of God.  There have been tongues and pens enough to narrate the excesses of the people, bursting from time to time out of slavery into madness.  It is good, too, that those crimes should be remembered, and freshly pondered; but it is equally wholesome to study the opposite picture.  Tyranny, ever young and ever old, constantly reproducing herself with the same stony features, with the same imposing mask which she has worn through all the ages, can never be too minutely examined, especially when she paints her own portrait, and when the secret history of her guilt is furnished by the confessions of her lovers.  The perusal of her traits will not make us love popular liberty the less.

The history of Alva’s administration in the Netherlands is one of those pictures which strike us almost dumb with wonder.  Why has the Almighty suffered such crimes to be perpetrated in His sacred name?  Was it necessary that many generations should wade through this blood in order to acquire for their descendants the blessings of civil and religious freedom?  Was it necessary that an Alva should ravage a peaceful nation with sword and flame—­that desolation should be spread over a happy land, in order that the pure and heroic character of a William of Orange should stand forth more conspicuously, like an antique statue of spotless marble against a stormy sky?