this important juncture without contempt. Bent only upon saving himself,
his property, and his reputation, he did not hesitate to bend before the
"most illustrious Duke," as he always denominated him, with fulsome and
fawning homage. While he declined to dip his own fingers in the innocent
blood which was about to flow in torrents, he did not object to officiate
at the initiatory preliminaries of the great Netherland holocaust. His
decent and dainty demeanor seems even more offensive than the jocularity
of the real murderers. Conscious that no man knew the laws and customs
of the Netherlands better than himself, he had the humble effrontery to
observe that it was necessary for him at that moment silently to submit
his own unskilfulness to the superior judgment and knowledge of others.
Having at last been relieved from the stone of Sisyphus, which, as he
plaintively expressed himself, he had been rolling for twenty years;
having, by the arrival of Tisnacq, obtained his discharge as President
of the state council, he was yet not unwilling to retain the emoluments
and the rank of President of the privy council, although both offices had
become sinecures since the erection of the Council of Blood. Although
his life had been spent in administrative and judicial employments,
he did not blush upon a matter of constitutional law to defer to the
authority of such jurisconsults as the Duke of Alva and his two Spanish
bloodhounds, Vargas and Del Rio. He did not like, he observed, in his
confidential correspondence, to gainsay the Duke, when maintaining, that
in cases of treason, the privileges of Brabant were powerless, although
he mildly doubted whether the Brabantines would agree with the doctrine.
He often thought, he said, of remedies for restoring the prosperity of
the provinces, but in action he only assisted the Duke, to the best of
his abilities, in arranging the Blood-Council. He wished well to his
country, but he was more anxious for the favor of Alva. "I rejoice,"
said he, in one of his letters, "that the most illustrious Duke has
written to the King in praise of my obsequiousness; when I am censured
here for so reverently cherishing him, it is a consolation that my
services to the King and to the governor are not unappreciated there."
Indeed the Duke of Alva, who had originally suspected the President's
character, seemed at last overcome by his indefatigable and cringing
homage. He wrote to the King, in whose good graces the learned Doctor
was most anxious at that portentous period to maintain himself, that the
President was very serviceable and diligent, and that he deserved to
receive a crumb of comfort from the royal hand. Philip, in consequence,
wrote in one of his letters a few lines of vague compliment, which could
be shown to Viglius, according to Alva's suggestion. It is, however, not
a little characteristic of the Spanish court and of the Spanish monarch,
that, on the very day before, he had sent to the Captain-General a few
documents of very different import. In order, as he said, that the Duke
might be ignorant of nothing which related to the Netherlands, he
forwarded to him copies of the letters written by Margaret of Parma from
Brussels, three years before. These letters, as it will be recollected,
contained an account of the secret investigations which the Duchess had
made as to the private character and opinions of Viglius--at the very
moment when he apparently stood highest in her confidence--and charged
him with heresy, swindling, and theft. Thus the painstaking and time-
serving President, with all his learning and experience, was successively
the dupe of Margaret and of Alva, whom he so obsequiously courted, and
always of Philip, whom he so feared and worshipped.
With his assistance, the list of blood-councillors was quickly completed.
No one who was offered the office refused it. Noircarmes and Berlaymont
accepted with very great eagerness. Several presidents and councillors
of the different provincial tribunals were appointed, but all the
Netherlanders were men of straw. Two Spaniards, Del Rio and Vargas,
were the only members who could vote; while their decisions, as already
stated, were subject to reversal by Alva. Del Rio was a man without
character or talent, a mere tool in the hands of his superiors, but Juan
de Vargas was a terrible reality.
No better man could have been found in Europe for the post to which he
was thus elevated. To shed human blood was, in his opinion, the only
important business and the only exhilarating pastime of life. His youth
had been stained with other crimes. He had been obliged to retire from
Spain, because of his violation of an orphan child to whom he was
guardian, but, in his manhood, he found no pleasure but in murder. He
executed Alva's bloody work with an industry which was almost superhuman,
and with a merriment which would have shamed a demon. His execrable
jests ring through the blood and smoke and death-cries of those days of
perpetual sacrifice. He was proud to be the double of the iron-hearted
Duke, and acted so uniformly in accordance with his views, that the right
of revision remained but nominal. There could be no possibility of
collision where the subaltern was only anxious to surpass an incomparable
superior. The figure of Vargas rises upon us through the mist of three
centuries with terrible distinctness. Even his barbarous grammar has not
been forgotten, and his crimes against syntax and against humanity have
acquired the same immortality. "Heretici fraxerunt templa, boni nihili
faxerunt contra, ergo debent omnes patibulare," was the comprehensive but
barbarous formula of a man who murdered the Latin language as ruthlessly
as he slaughtered his contemporaries.
Among the ciphers who composed the rest of the board, the Flemish
Councillor Hessels was the one whom the Duke most respected. He was not
without talent or learning, but the Duke only valued him for his cruelty.
Being allowed to take but little share in the deliberations, Hessels was
accustomed to doze away his afternoon hours at the council table, and
when awakened from his nap in order that he might express an opinion on
the case then before the court, was wont to rub his eyes and to call out
"Ad patibulum, ad patibulum," ("to the gallows with him, to the gallows
with him,") with great fervor, but in entire ignorance of the culprit's
name or the merits of the case. His wife, naturally disturbed that her
husband's waking and sleeping hours were alike absorbed with this
hangman's work, more than once ominously expressed her hope to him, that
he, whose head and heart were thus engrossed with the gibbet, might not
one day come to hang upon it himself; a gloomy prophecy which the Future
most terribly fulfilled.
The Council of Blood, thus constituted, held its first session on the
20th September, at the lodgings of Alva. Springing completely grown and
armed to the teeth from the head of its inventor, the new tribunal--at
the very outset in possession of all its vigor--forthwith began to
manifest a terrible activity in accomplishing the objects of its
existence. The councillors having been sworn to "eternal secrecy as to
any thing which should be transacted at the board, and having likewise
made oath to denounce any one of their number who should violate the
pledge," the court was considered as organized. Alva worked therein
seven hours daily. It may be believed that the subordinates were not
spared, and that their office proved no sinecure. Their labors, however,
were not encumbered by antiquated forms. As this supreme and only
tribunal for all the Netherlands had no commission or authority save the
will of the Captain-General, so it was also thought a matter of
supererogation to establish a set of rules and orders such as might be
useful in less independent courts. The forms of proceeding were brief
and artless. There was a rude organization by which a crowd of
commissioners, acting as inferior officers of the council, were spread
over the provinces, whose business was to collect information concerning
all persons who might be incriminated for participation in the recent
troubles. The greatest crime, however, was to be rich, and one which
could be expiated by no virtues, however signal. Alva was bent upon
proving himself as accomplished a financier as he was indisputably a
consummate commander, and he had promised his master an annual income of
500,000 ducats from the confiscations which were to accompany the
executions.
It was necessary that the blood torrent should flow at once through the
Netherlands, in order that the promised golden river, a yard deep,
according to his vaunt, should begin to irrigate the thirsty soil of
Spain. It is obvious, from the fundamental laws which were made to
define treason at the same moment in which they established the council,
that any man might be at any instant summoned to the court. Every man,
whether innocent or guilty, whether Papist or Protestant, felt his head
shaking on his shoulders. If he were wealthy, there seemed no remedy but
flight, which was now almost impossible, from the heavy penalties affixed
by the new edict upon all carriers, shipmasters, and wagoners, who should
aid in the escape of heretics.
A certain number of these commissioners were particularly instructed to
collect information as to the treason of Orange, Louis Nassau, Brederode,
Egmont, Horn, Culemberg, Vanden Berg, Bergen, and Montigny. Upon such
information the proceedings against those distinguished seigniors were to
be summarily instituted. Particular councillors of the Court of Blood
were charged with the arrangement of these important suits, but the
commissioners were to report in the first instance to the Duke himself,
who afterwards returned the paper into the hands of his subordinates.
With regard to the inferior and miscellaneous cases which were daily
brought in incredible profusion before the tribunal, the same
preliminaries were observed, by way of aping the proceedings in courts of
justice. Alva sent the cart-loads of information which were daily
brought to him, but which neither he nor any other man had time to read,
to be disposed of by the board of councillors. It was the duty of the
different subalterns, who, as already stated, had no right of voting,
to prepare reports upon the cases. Nothing could be more summary.
Information was lodged against a man, or against a hundred men, in one
document. The Duke sent the papers to the council, and the inferior
councillors reported at once to Vargas. If the report concluded with a
recommendation of death to the man, or the hundred men in question,
Vargas instantly approved it, and execution was done upon the man, or the
hundred men, within forty-eight hours. If the report had any other
conclusion, it was immediately sent back for revision, and the reporters
were overwhelmed with reproaches by the President.
Such being the method of operation, it may be supposed that the
councillors were not allowed to slacken in their terrible industry. The
register of every city, village, and hamlet throughout the Netherlands
showed the daily lists of men, women, and children thus sacrificed at the
shrine of the demon who had obtained the mastery over this unhappy land.
It was not often that an individual was of sufficient importance to be
tried--if trial it could be called--by himself. It was found more
expeditious to send them in batches to the furnace. Thus, for example,
on the 4th of January, eighty-four inhabitants of Valenciennes were
condemned; on another day, ninety-five miscellaneous individuals, from
different places in Flanders; on another, forty-six inhabitants of
Malines; on another, thirty-five persons from different localities, and
so on.
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.
Thus the whole country became a charnel-house; the deathbell tolled
hourly in every village; not a family but was called to mourn for its
dearest relatives, while the survivors stalked listlessly about, the
ghosts of their former selves, among the wrecks of their former homes.
The spirit of the nation, within a few months after the arrival of Alva,
seemed hopelessly broken. The blood of its best and bravest had already
stained the scaffold; the men to whom it bad been accustomed to look for
guidance and protection, were dead, in prison, or in exile. Submission
had ceased to be of any avail, flight was impossible, and the spirit of
vengeance had alighted at every fireside. The mourners went daily about
the streets, for there was hardly a house which had not been made
desolate. The scaffolds, the gallows, the funeral piles, which had been
sufficient in ordinary times, furnished now an entirely inadequate
machinery for the incessant executions. Columns and stakes in every
street, the door-posts of private houses, the fences in the fields were
laden with human carcasses, strangled, burned, beheaded. The orchards in
the country bore on many a tree the hideous fruit of human bodies.
Thus the Netherlands were crushed, and but for the stringency of the
tyranny which had now closed their gates, would have been depopulated.
The grass began to grow in the streets of those cities which had recently
nourished so many artisans. In all those great manufacturing and
industrial marts, where the tide of human life had throbbed so
vigorously, there now reigned the silence and the darkness of midnight.
It was at this time that the learned Viglius wrote to his friend Hopper,
that all venerated the prudence and gentleness of the Duke of Alva.
Such were among the first-fruits of that prudence and that gentleness.
The Duchess of Parma had been kept in a continued state of irritation.
She had not ceased for many months to demand her release from the odious
position of a cipher in a land where she had so lately been sovereign,
and she had at last obtained it. Philip transmitted his acceptance of
her resignation by the same courier who brought Alva's commission to be
governor-general in her place. The letters to the Duchess were full of
conventional compliments for her past services, accompanied, however,
with a less barren and more acceptable acknowledgment, in the shape of a
life income of 14,000 ducats instead of the 8000 hitherto enjoyed by her
Highness.
In addition to this liberal allowance, of which she was never to be
deprived, except upon receiving full payment of 140,000 ducats, she was
presented with 25,000 florins by the estates of Brabant, and with 30,000
by those of Flanders.
With these substantial tokens of the success of her nine years' fatigue
and intolerable anxiety, she at last took her departure from the
Netherlands, having communicated the dissolution of her connexion with
the provinces by a farewell letter to the Estates dated 9th December,
1567. Within a few weeks afterwards, escorted by the Duke of Alva across
the frontier of Brabant; attended by a considerable deputation of Flemish
nobility into Germany, and accompanied to her journey's end at Parma by
the Count and Countess of Mansfeld, she finally closed her eventful
career in the Netherlands.
The horrors of the succeeding administration proved beneficial to her
reputation. Upon the dark ground of succeeding years the lines which
recorded her history seemed written with letters of light. Yet her
conduct in the Netherlands offers but few points for approbation, and
many for indignant censure. That she was not entirely destitute of
feminine softness and sentiments of bounty, her parting despatch to her
brother proved. In that letter she recommended to him a course of
clemency and forgiveness, and reminded him that the nearer kings approach
to God in station, the more they should endeavor to imitate him in his
attributes of benignity. But the language of this farewell was more
tender than had been the spirit of her government. One looks in vain,
too, through the general atmosphere of kindness which pervades the
epistle; for a special recommendation of those distinguished and doomed
seigniors, whose attachment to her person and whose chivalrous and
conscientious endeavors to fulfil her own orders, had placed them upon
the edge of that precipice from which they were shortly to be hurled.
The men who had restrained her from covering herself with disgrace by a
precipitate retreat from the post of danger, and who had imperilled their
lives by obedience to her express instructions, had been long languishing
in solitary confinement, never to be terminated except by a traitor's
death--yet we search in vain for a kind word in their behalf.
Meantime the second civil war in France had broken out. The hollow truce
by which the Guise party and the Huguenots had partly pretended to
deceive each other was hastened to its end; among other causes, by the
march of Alva, to the Netherlands. The Huguenots had taken alarm, for
they recognized the fellowship which united their foes in all countries
against the Reformation, and Conde and Coligny knew too well that the
same influence which had brought Alva to Brussels would soon create an
exterminating army against their followers. Hostilities were resumed
with more bitterness than ever. The battle of St. Denis--fierce, fatal,
but indecisive--was fought. The octogenarian hero, Montmorency, fighting
like a foot soldier, refusing to yield his sword, and replying to the
respectful solicitations of his nearest enemy by dashing his teeth down
his throat with the butt-end of his pistol, the hero of so many battles,
whose defeat at St. Quintin had been the fatal point in his career, had
died at last in his armor, bravely but not gloriously, in conflict with
his own countrymen, led by his own heroic nephew. The military control
of the Catholic party was completely in the hand of the Guises; the
Chancellor de l'Hopital had abandoned the court after a last and futile
effort to reconcile contending factions, which no human power could
unite; the Huguenots had possessed themselves of Rochelle and of other
strong places, and, under the guidance of adroit statesmen and
accomplished generals, were pressing the Most Christian monarch hard in
the very heart of his kingdom.
As early as the middle of October, while still in Antwerp, Alva had
received several secret agents of the French monarch, then closely
beleaguered in his capital. Cardinal Lorraine offered to place several
strong places of France in the hands of the Spaniard, and Alva had
written to Philip that he was disposed to accept the offer, and to render
the service. The places thus held would be a guarantee for his expenses,
he said, while in case King Charles and his brother should die, "their
possession would enable Philip to assert his own claim to the French
crown in right of his wife, the Salic law being merely a pleasantry."
The Queen Dowager, adopting now a very different tone from that which
characterized her conversation at the Bayonne interview, wrote to Alva,
that, if for want of 2000 Spanish musketeers, which she requested him to
furnish, she should be obliged to succumb, she chose to disculpate
herself in advance before God and Christian princes for the peace which
she should be obliged to make. The Duke wrote to her in reply, that it
was much better to have a kingdom ruined in preserving it for God and the
king by war, than to have it kept entire without war, to the profit of
the devil and of his followers. He was also reported on another occasion
to have reminded her of the Spanish proverb--that the head of one salmon
is worth those of a hundred frogs. The hint, if it were really given,
was certainly destined to be acted upon.
The Duke not only furnished Catherine with advice, but with the
musketeers which she had solicited. Two thousand foot and fifteen
hundred horse, under the Count of Aremberg, attended by a choice band of
the Catholic nobility of the Netherlands, had joined the royal camp at
Paris before the end of the year, to take their part in the brief
hostilities by which the second treacherous peace was to be preceded.
Meantime, Alva was not unmindful of the business which had served as a
pretext in the arrest of the two Counts. The fortifications of the
principal cities were pushed on with great rapidity. The memorable
citadel of Antwerp in particular had already been commenced in October
under the superintendence of the celebrated engineers, Pacheco and
Gabriel de Cerbelloni. In a few months it was completed, at a cost of
one million four hundred thousand florins, of which sum the citizens, in
spite of their remonstrances, were compelled to contribute more than one
quarter. The sum of four hundred thousand florins was forced from the
burghers by a tax upon all hereditary property within the municipality.