It is the most dreadful commentary upon the times in which these transactions occurred, that they could sink so soon into oblivion.  The culprits took care to hide the records of their guilt, while succeeding horrors, on a more extensive scale, at other places, effaced the memory of all these comparatively obscure murders and spoliations.  The prosperity of Mons, one of the most flourishing and wealthy manufacturing towns in the Netherlands, was annihilated, but there were so many cities in the same condition that its misery was hardly remarkable.  Nevertheless, in our own days, the fall of a mouldering tower in the ruined Chateau de Naast at last revealed the archives of all these crimes.  How the documents came to be placed there remains a mystery, but they have at last been brought to light.

The Spaniards had thus recovered Mons, by which event the temporary revolution throughout the whole Southern Netherlands was at an end.  The keys of that city unlocked the gates of every other in Brabant and Flanders.  The towns which had so lately embraced the authority of Orange now hastened to disavow the Prince, and to return to their ancient, hypocritical, and cowardly allegiance.  The new oaths of fidelity were in general accepted by Alva, but the beautiful archiepiscopal city of Mechlin was selected for an example and a sacrifice.

There were heavy arrears due to the Spanish troops.  To indemnify them, and to make good his blasphemous prophecy of Divine chastisement for its past misdeeds, Alva now abandoned this town to the licence of his soldiery.  By his command Don Frederic advanced to the gates and demanded its surrender.  He was answered by a few shots from the garrison.  Those cowardly troops, however, having thus plunged the city still more deeply into the disgrace which, in Alva’s eyes, they had incurred by receiving rebels within their walls after having but just before refused admittance to the Spanish forces, decamped during the night, and left the place defenceless.

Early next morning there issued from the gates a solemn procession of priests, with banner and crozier, followed by a long and suppliant throng of citizens, who attempted by this demonstration to avert the wrath of the victor.  While the penitent psalms were resounding, the soldiers were busily engaged in heaping dried branches and rubbish into the moat.  Before the religious exercises were concluded, thousands had forced the gates or climbed the walls; and entered the city with a celerity which only the hope of rapine could inspire.  The sack instantly commenced.  The property of friend and foe, of Papist and Calvinist, was indiscriminately rifled.  Everything was dismantled and destroyed.  “Hardly a nail,” said a Spaniard, writing soon afterwards from Brussels, “was left standing in the walls.”  The troops seemed to imagine themselves in a Turkish town, and wreaked the Divine vengeance which Alva had denounced upon the city with an energy which met with his fervent applause.