before Vargas.  It was the first time he had laid eyes upon them, and they were, moreover, written in a language of which he did not understand a word.  Such, however, was his capacity for affairs, that a glance only at the outside of the case enabled him to form his decision.  Within half an hour afterwards, booted and spurred, he was saying mass in the church of Saint Gudule, on his way to pronounce sentence at Antwerp.  That judgment was rendered the same day, and confirmed the preceding act of condemnation.  Vargas went to his task as cheerfully as if it had been murder.  The act of outlawry and beggary was fulminated against the city and province, and a handsome amount of misery for others, and of plunder for himself, was the result of his promptness.  Many thousand citizens were ruined, many millions of property confiscated.

Thus was Utrecht deprived of all its ancient liberties, as a punishment for having dared to maintain them.  The clergy, too, of the province, having invoked the bull “in Coena Domini,” by which clerical property was declared exempt from taxation, had excited the wrath of the Duke.  To wield so slight a bulrush against the man who had just been girded with the consecrated and jewelled sword of the Pope, was indeed but a feeble attempt at defence.  Alva treated the Coena Domini with contempt, but he imprisoned the printer who had dared to-republish it at this juncture.  Finding, moreover, that it had been put in press by the orders of no less a person than Secretary La Torre, he threw that officer also into prison, besides suspending him from his functions for a year.

The estates of the province and the magistracy of the city appealed to his Majesty from the decision of the Duke.  The case did not directly concern the interests of religion, for although the heretical troubles of 1566 furnished the nominal motives of the condemnation, the resistance to the tenth and twentieth penny was the real crime for which they were suffering.  The King, therefore, although far from clement, was not extremely rigorous.  He refused the object of the appeal, but he did not put the envoys to death by whom it was brought to Madrid.  This would have certainly been the case in matters strictly religious, or even had the commissioners arrived two years before, but even Philip believed, perhaps, that for the moment almost enough innocent blood had been shed.  At any rate he suffered the legates from Utrecht to return, not with their petition, granted, but at least with their heads upon their shoulders.  Early in the following year, the provinces still remaining under martial law, all the Utrecht charters were taken into the possession of government, and deposited in the castle of Vredenberg.  It was not till after the departure of Alva, that they were restored; according to royal command, by the new governor, Requesens.

By the middle of the year 1569, Alva wrote to the King, with great cheerfulness of tone, announcing that the estates of the provinces had all consented to the tax.  He congratulated his Majesty upon the fact that this income might thenceforth be enjoyed in perpetuity, and that it would bring at least two millions yearly into his coffers, over and above the expenses of government.  The hundredth penny, as he calculated, would amount to at least five millions.