The evening of Shrovetide, a favorite holiday in the Netherlands, afforded an occasion for arresting and carrying off a vast number of doomed individuals at a single swoop.  It was correctly supposed that the burghers, filled with wine and wassail, to which perhaps the persecution under which they lived lent an additional and horrible stimulus, might be easily taken from their beds in great numbers, and be delivered over at once to the council.  The plot was ingenious, the net was spread accordingly.  Many of the doomed were, however, luckily warned of the terrible termination which was impending over their festival, and bestowed themselves in safety for a season.  A prize of about five hundred prisoners was all which rewarded the sagacity of the enterprise.  It is needless to add that they were all immediately executed.  It is a wearisome and odious task to ransack the mouldy records of three centuries ago, in order to reproduce the obscure names of the thousands who were thus sacrificed..  The dead have buried their dead, and are forgotten.  It is likewise hardly necessary to state that the proceedings before the council were all ‘ex parte’, and that an information was almost inevitably followed by a death-warrant.  It sometimes happened even that the zeal of the councillors outstripped the industry of the commissioners.  The sentences were occasionally in advance of the docket.  Thus upon one occasion a man’s case was called for trial, but before the investigation was commenced it was discovered that he had been already executed.  A cursory examination of the papers proved, moreover, as usual, that the culprit had committed no crime.  “No matter for that,” said Vargas, jocosely, “if he has died innocent, it will be all the better for him when he takes his trial in the other world.”

But, however the councillors might indulge in these gentle jests among themselves, it was obvious that innocence was in reality impossible, according to the rules which had been laid down regarding treason.  The practice was in accordance with the precept, and persons were daily executed with senseless pretexts, which was worse than executions with no pretexts at all.  Thus Peter de Witt of Amsterdam was beheaded, because at one of the tumults in that city he had persuaded a rioter not to fire upon a magistrate.  This was taken as sufficient proof that he was a man in authority among the rebels, and he was accordingly put to death.  Madame Juriaen, who, in 1566, had struck with her slipper a little wooden image of the Virgin, together with her maid-servant, who had witnessed without denouncing the crime, were both drowned by the hangman in a hogshead placed on the scaffold.

Death, even, did not in all cases place a criminal beyond the reach of the executioner.  Egbert Meynartzoon, a man of high official rank, had been condemned, together with two colleagues, on an accusation of collecting money in a Lutheran church.  He died in prison of dropsy.  The sheriff was indignant with the physician, because, in spite of cordials and strengthening prescriptions, the culprit had slipped through his fingers before he had felt those of the hangman.  He consoled himself by placing the body on a chair, and having the dead man beheaded in company with his colleagues.