Fast, fast wove the loom of God during those fateful years, and the web thereof was the story of a people’s agony and its woof was dyed red with their blood.  Edict had followed edict, crime had been heaped upon crime.  Alva, like some inhuman and incarnate vengeance, had marched his army, quiet and harmless as is the tiger when he stalks his prey, across the fields of France.  Now he was at Brussels, and already the heads of the Counts Egmont and Hoorn had fallen; already the Blood Council was established and at its work.  In the Low Countries law had ceased to exist, and there anything might happen however monstrous or inhuman.  Indeed, with one decree of the Holy Office, confirmed by a proclamation of Philip of Spain, all the inhabitants of the Netherlands, three millions of them, had been condemned to death.  Men’s minds were full of terror, for on every side were burnings and hangings and torturings.  Without were fightings, within were fears, and none knew whom they could trust, since the friend of to-day might be the informer or judge of to-morrow.  All this because they chose to worship God in their own fashion unaided by images and priests.

Although so long a time had passed, as it chanced those personages with whom we have already made acquaintance in this history were still alive.  Let us begin with two of them, one of whom we know and one of whom, although we have heard of him before, will require some introduction—­Dirk van Goorl and his son Foy.

Scene—­an upper room above a warehouse overlooking the market-place of Leyden, a room with small windows and approached by two staircases; time, a summer twilight.  The faint light which penetrated into this chamber through the unshuttered windows, for to curtain them would have been to excite suspicion, showed that about twenty people were gathered there, among whom were one or two women.  For the most part they were men of the better class, middle-aged burghers of sober mien, some of whom stood about in knots, while others were seated upon stools and benches.  At the end of the room addressing them was a man well on in middle life, with grizzled hair and beard, small and somewhat mean of stature, yet one through whose poor exterior goodness seemed to flow like light through some rough casement of horn.  This was Jan Arentz, the famous preacher, by trade a basket-maker, a man who showed himself steadfast to the New Religion through all afflictions, and who was gifted with a spirit which could remain unmoved amidst the horrors of perhaps the most terrible persecution that Christians have suffered since the days of the Roman Emperors.  He was preaching now and these people were his congregation.

“I come not to bring peace but a sword,” was his text, and certainly this night it was most appropriate and one easy of illustration.  For there, on the very market-place beneath them, guarded by soldiers and surrounded with the rabble of the city, two members of his flock, men who a fortnight before had worshipped in that same room, at this moment were undergoing martyrdom by fire!