Let it not be thought that these trifles are beneath the dignity of history.  Matters like these filled the whole soul of Philip, swelled the bills of indictment for thousands of higher and better men than Brederode, and furnished occupation as well for secret correspondents and spies as for the most dignified functionaries of Government.  Capons or sausages on Good Friday, the Psalms of Clement Marot, the Sermon on the Mount in the vernacular, led to the rack, the gibbet, and the stake, but ushered in a war against the inquisition which was to last for eighty years.  Brederode was not to be the hero of that party which he disgraced by his buffoonery.  Had he lived, he might, perhaps, like many of his confederates, have redeemed, by his bravery in the field, a character which his orgies had rendered despicable.  He now left Antwerp for the north of Holland, where, as he soon afterwards reported to Count Louis, “the beggars were as numerous as the sands on the seashore.”

His “nephew Charles,” two months afterwards, obeyed his father’s injunction, and withdrew formally from the confederacy.

Meantime the rumor had gone abroad that the Request of the nobles had already produced good fruit, that the edicts were to be mitigated, the inquisition abolished, liberty of conscience eventually to prevail.  “Upon these reports,” says a contemporary, “all the vermin of exiles and fugitives for religion, as well as those who had kept in concealment, began to lift up their heads and thrust forth their horns.”  It was known that Margaret of Parma had ordered the inquisitors and magistrates to conduct themselves “modestly and discreetly.”  It was known that the privy council was hard at work upon the project for “moderating” the edicts.  Modestly and discreetly, Margaret of Parma, almost immediately after giving these orders, and while the “moderation” was still in the hands of the lawyers, informed her brother that she had given personal attention to the case of a person who had snatched the holy wafer from the priest’s hand at Oudenarde.  This “quidam,” as she called him—­for his name was beneath the cognizance of an Emperor’s bastard daughter—­had by her orders received rigorous and exemplary justice.  And what was the “rigorous and exemplary justice” thus inflicted upon the “quidam?” The procurator of the neighboring city of Tournay has enabled us to answer.  The young man, who was a tapestry weaver, Hans Tiskaen by name, had, upon the 30th May, thrown the holy wafer upon the ground.  For this crime, which was the same as that committed on Christmas-day of the previous year by Bertrand le Blas, at Tournay, he now met with a similar although not quite so severe a punishment.  Having gone quietly home after doing the deed, he was pursued, arrested, and upon the Saturday ensuing taken to the market-place of Oudenarde.  Here the right hand with which he had committed the offence was cut off, and he was then fastened to the stake and burned to death over a slow fire.  He was fortunately not more than a quarter of an hour in torment, but he persisted in his opinions, and called on God for support to his last breath.