of August the news reached Tournay that the churches in Antwerp, Ghent,
and many other places, had been sacked. There was an instantaneous
movement towards imitating the example on the same evening. Pasquier de
la Barre, procureur-general of the city, succeeded by much entreaty in
tranquillizing the people for the night. The "guard of terror" was set,
and hopes were entertained that the storm might blow over. The
expectation, was vain. At daybreak next day, the mob swept upon the
churches and stripped them to the very walls. Pictures, statues; organs,
ornaments, chalices of silver and gold, reliquaries, albs, chasubles,
copes, ciboriea, crosses, chandeliers, lamps; censers, all of richest
material, glittering with pearls, rubies, and other precious stones, were
scattered in heaps of ruin upon the ground.
As the Spoilers burrowed among the ancient tombs, they performed, in one
or two instances, acts of startling posthumous justice. The embalmed
body of Duke Adolphus of Gueldres, last of the Egmonts, who had reigned
in that province, was dragged from its sepulchre and recognized.
Although it had been there for ninety years, it was as uncorrupted,
"Owing to the excellent spices which had preserved it from decay," as
upon the day of burial. Thrown upon the marble floor of the church, it
lay several days exposed to the execrations of the multitude. The Duke
had committed a crime against his father, in consequence of which the
province which had been ruled by native races, had passed under the
dominion of Charles the Bold. Weary of waiting for the old Duke's
inheritance, he had risen against him in open rebellion. Dragging him
from his bed at midnight in the depth of winter, he had compelled the old
man, with no covering but his night gear, to walk with naked feet twenty-
five miles over ice and snow from Grave to Buren, while he himself
performed the same journey in his company on horseback. He had then
thrown him into a dungeon beneath the tower of Buren castle, and kept him
a close prisoner for six months.
[Memoires de Philippe de Comines (Loud. et Paris, 1747), liv. iv.
194-196. In the Royal Gallery at Berlin is a startling picture by
Rembrandt, in which the old Duke is represented looking out of the
bars of his dungeon at his son, who is threatening him with uplifted
hand and savage face. No subject could be imagined better adapted
to the gloomy and sarcastic genius of that painter.]
At last, the Duke of Burgundy summoned the two before his council, and
proposed that Adolphus should allow his father 6000 florins annually,
with the title of Duke till his death. "He told us," said Comines, "that
he would sooner throw the old man head-foremost down a well and jump in
himself afterwards. His father had been Duke forty-four years, and it
was time for him to retire." Adolphus being thus intractable, had been
kept in prison till after the death of Charles the Bold. To the
memorable insurrection of Ghent, in the time of the Lady Mary, he owed
his liberty. The insurgent citizens took him from prison, and caused him
to lead them in their foray against Tournay. Beneath the walls of that
city he was slain, and buried under its cathedral. And now as if his
offence had not been sufficiently atoned for by the loss of his ancestral
honors, his captivity, and his death, the earth, after the lapse of
nearly a century, had cast him forth from her bosom. There, once more
beneath the sunlight, amid a ribald crew of a later generation which had
still preserved the memory of his sin, lay the body of the more than
parricide, whom "excellent spices" had thus preserved from corruption,
only to be the mark of scorn and demoniac laughter.
A large assemblage of rioters, growing in numbers as they advanced, swept
over the province of Tournay, after accomplishing the sack of the city
churches. Armed with halberds, hammers, and pitchforks, they carried on
the war, day after day, against the images. At the convent of
Marchiennes, considered by contemporaries the most beautiful abbey in all
the Netherlands, they halted to sing the ten commandments in Marot's
verse. Hardly had the vast chorus finished the precept against graven
images;
Taiiler ne to feras imaige
De quelque chose que ce soit,
Sy bonneur luy fail on hommaige,
Bon Dieu jalousie en recoit,
when the whole mob seemed seized with sudden madness. Without waiting to
complete the Psalm, they fastened upon the company of marble martyrs, as
if they had possessed sensibility to feel the blows inflicted. In an
hour they had laid the whole in ruins.
Having accomplished this deed, they swept on towards Anchin. Here,
however, they were confronted by the Seigneur de la Tour, who, at the
head of a small company of peasants, attacked the marauders and gained
a complete victory. Five or six hundred of them were slain, others were
drowned in the river and adjacent swamps, the rest were dispersed.
It was thus proved that a little more spirit upon the part of the orderly
portion of the inhabitants, might have brought about a different result
than the universal image-breaking.
In Valenciennes, "the tragedy," as an eye-witness calls it, was performed
upon Saint Bartholomew's day. It was, however, only a tragedy of
statues. Hardly as many senseless stones were victims as there were to
be living Huguenots sacrificed in a single city upon a Bartholomew which
was fast approaching. In the Valenciennes massacre, not a human being
was injured.
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.
The next remarkable characteristic of these tumults was the almost entire
abstinence of the rioters from personal outrage and from pillage. The
testimony of a very bitter, but honest Catholic at Valenciennes, is
remarkable upon this point. "Certain chroniclers," said he, "have
greatly mistaken the character of this image-breaking. It has been said
that the Calvinists killed a hundred priests in this city, cutting some
of them into pieces, and burning others over a slow fire. I remember
very well every thing which happened upon that abominable day, and I can
affirm that not a single priest was injured. The Huguenots took good
care not to injure in any way the living images." This was the case
every where. Catholic and Protestant writers agree that no deeds of
violence were committed against man or woman.
It would be also very easy to accumulate a vast weight of testimony as to
their forbearance from robbery. They destroyed for destruction's sake,
not for purposes of plunder.
Although belonging to the lowest classes of society, they left heaps of
jewellery, of gold and silver plate, of costly embroidery, lying unheeded
upon the ground. They felt instinctively that a great passion would be
contaminated by admixture with paltry motives. In Flanders a company of
rioters hanged one of their own number for stealing articles to the value
of five Shillings. In Valenciennes the iconoclasts were offered large
sums if they would refrain from desecrating the churches of that city,
but they rejected the proposal with disdain. The honest Catholic burgher
who recorded the fact, observed that he did so because of the many
misrepresentations on the subject, not because he wished to flatter
heresy and rebellion.
At Tournay, the greatest scrupulousness was observed upon this point.
The floor of the cathedral was strewn with "pearls and precious stones,
with chalices and reliquaries of silver and gold;" but the ministers of
the reformed religion, in company with the magistrates, came to the spot,
and found no difficulty, although utterly without power to prevent the
storm, in taking quiet possession of the wreck. "We had every thing of
value," says Procureur-General De la Barre, "carefully inventoried,
weighed, locked in chests, and placed under a strict guard in the prison
of the Halle, to which one set of keys were given to the ministers, and
another to the magistrates." Who will dare to censure in very severe
language this havoc among stocks and stones in a land where so many
living men and women, of more value than many statues, had been
slaughtered by the inquisition, and where Alva's "Blood Tribunal" was so
soon to eclipse even that terrible institution in the number of its
victims and the amount of its confiscations?
Yet the effect of the riots was destined to be most disastrous for a time
to the reforming party. It furnished plausible excuses for many lukewarm
friends of their cause to withdraw from all connection with it. Egmont
denounced the proceedings as highly flagitious, and busied himself with
punishing the criminals in Flanders. The Regent was beside herself with
indignation and terror. Philip, when he heard the news, fell into a
paroxysm of frenzy. "It shall cost them dear!" he cried, as he tore
his beard for rage; "it shall cost them dear! I swear it by the soul
of my father!" The Reformation in the Netherlands, by the fury of these
fanatics, was thus made apparently to abandon the high ground upon which
it had stood in the early summer. The sublime spectacle of the
multitudinous field-preaching was sullied by the excesses of the image-
breaking. The religious war, before imminent, became inevitable.
Nevertheless, the first effect of the tumults was a temporary advantage
to the Reformers. A great concession was extorted from the fears of the
Duchess Regent, who was certainly placed in a terrible position. Her
conduct was not heroic, although she might be forgiven for trepidation.
Her treachery, however, under these trying circumstances was less venial.
At three o'clock in the morning of the 22nd of August, Orange, Egmont,
Horn, Hoogatraaten, Mansfeld, and others were summoned to the palace.
They found her already equipped for flight, surrounded by her waiting-
women, chamberlains and lackeys, while the mules and hackneys stood
harnessed in the court-yard, and her body-guard were prepared to mount at
a moment's notice. She announced her intention of retreating at once to
Mons, in which city, owing to Aerschot's care, she hoped to find refuge
against the fury of the rebellion then sweeping the country. Her alarm
was almost beyond control. She was certain that the storm was ready to
burst upon Brussels, and that every Catholic was about to be massacred
before her eyes. Aremberg, Berlaymont, and Noircarmes were with the
Duchess when the other seigniors arrived.
A part of the Duke of Aerschot's company had been ordered out to escort
the projected flight to Mons. Orange, Horn, Egmont, and Hoogstraaten
implored her to desist from her fatal resolution. They represented that
such a retreat before a mob would be the very means of ruining the
country. They denounced all persons who had counselled the scheme,
as enemies of his Majesty and herself. They protested their readiness
to die at her feet in her defence, but besought her not to abandon the
post of duty in the hour of peril. While they were thus anxiously
debating, Viglius entered the chamber. With tears streaming down her
cheeks, Margaret turned to the aged President, uttering fierce reproaches
and desponding lamentations. Viglius brought the news that the citizens
had taken possession of the gates, and were resolved not to permit her
departure from the city. He reminded her, according to the indispensable
practice of all wise counsellors, that he had been constantly predicting
this result. He, however, failed in administering much consolation,
or in suggesting any remedy. He was, in truth, in as great a panic as
herself, and it was, according to the statement of the Duchess, mainly in
order to save the President from threatened danger, that she eventually
resolved to make concessions. "Viglius," wrote Margaret to Philip,
"is so much afraid of being cut to pieces, that his timidity has become
incredible." Upon the warm assurance of Count Horn, that he would enable
her to escape from the city, should it become necessary, or would perish
in the attempt, a promise in which he was seconded by the rest of the
seigniors, she consented to remain for the day in her palace.--Mansfeld
was appointed captain-general of the city; Egmont, Horn, Orange, and the
others agreed to serve under his orders, and all went down together to
the townhouse. The magistrates were summoned, a general meeting of
the citizens was convened, and the announcement made of Mansfeld's
appointment, together with an earnest appeal to all honest men to
support the Government. The appeal was answered by a shout of unanimous
approbation, an enthusiastic promise to live or die with the Regent, and
the expression of a resolution to permit neither reformed preaching nor
image-breaking within the city.
Nevertheless, at seven o'clock in the evening, the Duchess again sent for
the seigniors. She informed them that she had received fresh and certain
information, that the churches were to be sacked that very night; that
Viglius, Berlaymont, and Aremberg were to be killed, and that herself and
Egmont were to be taken prisoners. She repeated many times that she had
been ill-advised, expressed bitter regret at having deferred her flight
from the city, and called upon those who had obstructed her plan, now to
fulfil their promises. Turning fiercely upon Count Horn, she uttered a
volley of reproaches upon his share in the transaction. "You are the
cause," said she, "that I am now in this position. Why do you not redeem
your pledge and enable me to leave the place at once." Horn replied that
he was ready to do so if she were resolved to stay no longer. He would
at the instant cut his way through the guard at the Caudenberg gate, and
bring her out in safety, or die in the effort. At the same time he
assured her that he gave no faith to the idle reports flying about the
city, reminded her that nobles, magistrates, and citizens were united in
her defence, and in brief used the, same arguments which had before been
used to pacify her alarm. The nobles were again successful in enforcing
their counsels, the Duchess was spared the ignominy and the disaster of a
retreat before an insurrection which was only directed against statues,
and the ecclesiastical treasures of Brussels were saved from sacrilege.
On the 25th August came the crowning act of what the Reformers considered
their most complete triumph, and the Regent her deepest degradation. It
was found necessary under the alarming aspect of affairs, that liberty of
worship, in places where it had been already established, should be
accorded to the new religion. Articles of agreement to this effect were
accordingly drawn up and exchanged between the Government and Lewis of
Nassau, attended by fifteen others of the confederacy. A corresponding
pledge was signed by them, that so long as the Regent was true to her
engagement, they would consider their previously existing league
annulled, and would assist cordially in every endeavor to maintain
tranquillity and support the authority of his Majesty. The important
Accord was then duly signed by the Duchess. It declared that the
inquisition was abolished, that his Majesty would soon issue a new
general edict, expressly and unequivocally protecting the nobles against
all evil consequences from past transactions, that they were to be
employed in the royal service, and that public preaching according to
the forms of the new religion was to be practised in places where it had
already taken place. Letters general were immediately despatched to the
senates of all the cities, proclaiming these articles of agreement and
ordering their execution. Thus for a fleeting moment there was a thrill
of joy throughout the Netherlands. The inquisition was thought forever
abolished, the era of religious reformation arrived.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
All denounced the image-breaking
Anxiety to do nothing wrong, the senators did nothing at all
Before morning they had sacked thirty churches
Bigotry which was the prevailing characteristic of the age
Enriched generation after generation by wealthy penitence
Fifty thousand persons in the provinces (put to death)
Furious fanaticism
Lutheran princes of Germany, detested the doctrines of Geneva
Monasteries, burned their invaluable libraries
No qualities whatever but birth and audacity to recommend him
Notre Dame at Antwerp
Persons who discussed religious matters were to be put to death
Premature zeal was prejudicial to the cause
Purchased absolution for crime and smoothed a pathway to heaven
Rearing gorgeous temples where paupers are to kneel
Schism which existed in the general Reformed Church
Storm by which all these treasures were destroyed (in 7 days)
The noblest and richest temple of the Netherlands was a wreck
Tyrannical spirit of Calvinism
Would not help to burn fifty or sixty thousand Netherlanders