Two maiden ladies lived on the north rampart of Antwerp.  They had formerly professed the Protestant religion, and had been thrown into prison for that crime; but the fear of further persecution, human weakness, or perhaps sincere conviction, had caused them to renounce the error of their ways, and they now went to mass.  But they had a maidservant, forty years of age, Anna van den Hove by name, who was staunch in that reformed faith in which she had been born and bred.  The Jesuits denounced this maid-servant to the civil authority, and claimed her condemnation and execution under the edicts of 1540, decrees which every one had supposed as obsolete as the statutes of Draco, which they had so entirely put to shame.

The sentence having been obtained from the docile and priest-ridden magistrates, Anna van den Hove was brought to Brussels and informed that she was at once to be buried alive.  At the same time, the Jesuits told her that by converting herself to the Church she might escape punishment.

When King Henry iv. was summoned to renounce that same Huguenot faith, of which he was the political embodiment and the military champion, the candid man answered by the simple demand to be instructed.  When the proper moment came, the instruction was accomplished by an archbishop with the rapidity of magic.  Half an hour undid the work of half a life-time.  Thus expeditiously could religious conversion be effected when an earthly crown was its guerdon.  The poor serving-maid was less open to conviction.  In her simple fanaticism she too talked of a crown, and saw it descending from Heaven on her poor forlorn head as the reward, not of apostasy, but of steadfastness.  She asked her tormentors how they could expect her to abandon her religion for fear of death.  She had read her Bible every day, she said, and had found nothing there of the pope or purgatory, masses, invocation of saints, or the absolution of sins except through the blood of the blessed Redeemer.  She interfered with no one who thought differently; she quarrelled with no one’s religious belief.  She had prayed for enlightenment from Him, if she were in error, and the result was that she felt strengthened in her simplicity, and resolved to do nothing against her conscience.  Rather than add this sin to the manifold ones committed by her, she preferred, she said, to die the death.  So Anna van den Hove was led, one fine midsummer morning, to the hayfield outside of Brussels, between two Jesuits, followed by a number of a peculiar kind of monks called love-brothers.  Those holy men goaded her as she went, telling her that she was the devil’s carrion, and calling on her to repent at the last moment, and thus save her life and escape eternal damnation beside.  But the poor soul had no ear for them, and cried out that, like Stephen, she saw the heavens opening, and the angels stooping down to conduct her far away from the power of the evil one.  When they came to the hay-field they found the pit already dug, and the maid-servant was ordered to descend into it.  The executioner then covered her with earth up to the waist, and a last summons was made to her to renounce her errors.  She refused, and then the earth was piled upon her, and the hangman jumped upon the grave till it was flattened and firm.