Such in general outline and in certain individual details, was the celebrated iconomachy of the Netherlands.  The movement was a sudden explosion of popular revenge against the symbols of that Church from which the Reformers had been enduring such terrible persecution.  It was also an expression of the general sympathy for the doctrines which had taken possession of the national heart.  It was the depravation of that instinct which had in the beginning of the summer drawn Calvinists and Lutherans forth in armed bodies, twenty thousand strong, to worship God in the open fields.  The difference between the two phenomena was, that the field-preaching was a crime committed by the whole mass of the Reformers; men, women, and children confronting the penalties of death, by a general determination, while the imagebreaking was the act of a small portion of the populace.  A hundred persons belonging to the lowest order of society sufficed for the desecration of the Antwerp churches.  It was, said Orange, “a mere handful of rabble” who did the deed.  Sir Richard Clough saw ten or twelve persons entirely sack church after church, while ten thousand spectators looked on, indifferent or horror-struck.  The bands of iconoclasts were of the lowest character, and few in number.  Perhaps the largest assemblage was that which ravaged the province of Tournay, but this was so weak as to be entirely routed by a small and determined force.  The duty of repression devolved upon both Catholics and Protestants.  Neither party stirred.  All seemed overcome with special wonder as the tempest swept over the land.

The ministers of the Reformed religion, and the chiefs of the liberal party, all denounced the image-breaking.  Francis Junius bitterly regretted such excesses.  Ambrose Wille, pure of all participation in the crime, stood up before ten thousand Reformers at Tournay—­even while the storm was raging in the neighboring cities, and, when many voices around him were hoarsely commanding similar depravities to rebuke the outrages by which a sacred cause was disgraced.  The Prince of Orange, in his private letters, deplored the riots, and stigmatized the perpetrators.  Even Brederode, while, as Suzerain of his city of Viane, he ordered the images there to be quietly taken from the churches, characterized this popular insurrection as insensate and flagitious.  Many of the leading confederates not only were offended with the proceedings, but, in their eagerness to chastise the iconoclasts and to escape from a league of which they were weary, began to take severe measures against the Ministers and Reformers, of whom they had constituted themselves in April the especial protectors.