Part 4

The Inquisition, that mediæval instrument for the detection of punishment of disbelievers in the established Church, had existed in all its horrible malignity for two hundred and fifty years. But it remained for Philip of Spain to make its name forever a byword and a hissing in the mouth of history. He had begun by employing it against the wealthy Jews and Moors, who made up the richest, the most intelligent and prosperous classes in Spain. During the first few years after its institution the Spanish population fell from 10,000,000 to 7,000,000. In eighteen years Torquemada burned 10,220 persons and confiscated the property of 97,321 others. Primarily, the Inquisition was a machine to search men's secret thoughts. It arrested on suspicion, "tortured for confession and then punished with fire." One witness brought a victim to the rack, and two to the flames.

The trial took place at midnight in a gloomy dungeon dimly lighted by torches. Lea tells us "the Grand Inquisitor was enveloped in a black robe with eyes glaring at his victim through holes cut in the hood." Preparatory to examination, the victim, whether man, maiden or matron, was stripped and stretched upon a bench, after which all the weights, pulleys, and screws by which "tendons could be strained without cracking, bones crushed without breaking, body tortured without dying, were put into operation." When condemnation was pronounced the tongue was mutilated so that the victim could neither speak nor swallow. When the morning came, a breakfast with rare delicacies was placed before the sufferer and with ironical invitation he was urged to satisfy his hunger. Then a procession was formed, headed by the magistrates, prelates and nobility, and the prisoner was led to the public square, where an address was given, lauding the Inquisition, condemning heresy and warning the people against want of subjection to the Pope and the Emperor. Then while hymns were sung, blazing fagots were piled about the prisoner until his body was reduced to a heap of ashes.

Such was the devilish institution Philip of Spain determined to set up in Holland as a means of accomplishing his twofold aim, the punishment of "disbelievers" and the despoiling of the Dutch burghers' treasure-chests. Little wonder that even this sturdy folk drew back from the thought in horror. They were not a people to submit to such barbarities as they had already proved, by giving shelter to foreign exiles. When the Inquisition was first inaugurated in Spain, and men first stretched upon the rack as heretics, Holland had opened her doors to the fugitives, who fled alike from the wrath of kings and priests. All over the world, with its darkness and superstition, its cruelty, its flames, its racks and thumbscrews, men of independent minds had secretly turned their thoughts toward little Holland, and their steps toward the seaports where the Dutch merchants bought and sold the treasures of the sea. So, now, there developed in the Netherlands a united protest, representing tens of thousands of people, who deserted the churches ruled by the officials of the Inquisition. These protestors went into the open air beyond the city walls where they sang songs, and listened to the preaching of the reformed ministers. Soon the Roman Catholics under the guidance of the Spanish army, and the Protestants under William of Orange, stood over against one another like two castles with cannon shotted to the muzzle. And finally the storm broke, and the protestors went into the churches their own hands had built, and covered the floor with rubbish of broken statues, effigies, and images, cleansing the walls with axe and hammer and broom, and leaving only the pulpit for the teacher, and the plain pews for the worshippers.

The spark which finally set aflame the powder-magazine of men's hearts was the entrance into Holland, in 1567, of the Duke of Alva, at the head of twenty thousand of Spain's finest troops. Bloody Alva was the most accomplished and capable general in Europe. He had been victorious in campaigns in Africa, Italy, France and Germany. He has been called the most bloodthirsty man who ever led troops to battle, and he was sent to Holland to satiate his wolfish instincts. His army included 6,000 horsemen, notorious for the cruelty with which they had butchered their captives in the Italian campaigns. Alva promised to turn these human wolves loose upon the sheep of Holland. Having arrived in Antwerp and established himself in the citadel, his first act was to organize the "Bloody Council." This monster, whose cruelty was never equalled by any savage beast, announced that if in the Roman era the Emperor contented himself with the heads of a few leaders, leaving the multitude in safety, _he_ would order the death of the multitude, naming a few who were to be permitted to live. Soon the streets were filled with dead bodies. Not content with hanging, burning, and beheading the leaders, Alva hung the corpses beside the road as a warning against free-thinking.

In seven brief years this man brought charges of heresy, treason and insubordination against 30,000 inhabitants. He boasted that he had executed 18,600, while the number of those who had perished by battle, siege, starvation and butchery defied all computation. And the more the people rebelled, the more cruel were the methods he devised to torment them. To the gallows he added the stake and the sword. Men were beheaded, roasted before slow fires, pitched to death with hot tongs, broken on the wheel, flayed alive. On one occasion the skins of leaders were stripped from the living bodies and stretched upon drums for beating at the funeral march of their brethren to the gallows. The barbarities committed during the sacking of starving villages, Motley tells us are beyond belief. "Unborn infants were torn from the living bodies of their mothers; women and children were violated by thousands; whole populations burned and hacked to pieces by soldiers, and every mode which cruelty in its wanton ingenuity could desire."

Such was the administration of the man of whom it was said: "He possessed no virtues, while the few vices he had were colossal." To Philip, Bloody Alva explained his failure to subdue the Hollanders by the statement that his "rule had been too merciful."

Over against this human monster, with his implacable hatreds and his bestial cruelties, stands William of Orange, the champion of liberty and the saviour of the Netherlands. By a strange coincidence, the first vivid picture we have of this prince who gave up a life of ease and luxury to defend the rights of his fellow men, is the scene at the abdication of Charles V, when, in the presence of a great multitude at Brussels, that ruler turned over the sovereignty of the Netherlands to his son, young Philip II of Spain. William of Orange was then a youth of twenty-two, a stadtholder, or imperial governor, of three rich provinces, and the commander of the official army on the French frontier.

"Arrayed in armour inlaid with gold," says the historian, "with a steel helmet under his left arm, he looked the picture of noble manhood." Beside him, as he fronted the assemblage, stood young Philip, a youth of twenty-eight, dressed in velvet and gold, but physically ill-shapen and already an object of dislike and distrust. Impressive indeed the contrast between these two young men, destined in a few short years to be pitted against each other like gladiators in the long struggle for liberty. "The one had a genius for government, the other possessed a talent for misgovernment. William of Orange had a passion for toleration; Philip II had a passion for crushing every form of toleration." Sovereign at twenty-eight, Philip was already a prey to that consuming ambition which, with his fierce bigotry, was soon to win him universal hatred.

How different this young prince William, with his godlike physique, his perfect balance of heart and intellect, his conscience that could not endure the thought of tyranny. Little wonder that men loved him. In person most elegant, in manners most accomplished, he had been educated by his mother, Juliana of Stolberg, a woman of rare abilities and deeply religious character. As a _grand seigneur_, with great estates and a brilliant retinue, he had known every temptation of wealth and luxury. But neither the flattery of his friends nor the adulation of his followers had sapped his manhood. He was already a seasoned soldier, and almost at once he was to win fame as a diplomatist. We see him serving at the head of his troops throughout one more campaign; then, at the age of twenty-six, acting as one of the three plenipotentiaries at the treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis. Sent to France as hostage for the fulfillment of this treaty, we find him the cynosure of all men's eyes at the greatest and most brilliant court of the day. Little here to warn those arch-plotters, Henry of France and Philip of Spain, that he was soon to become their deadliest foe. Yet already he was meditating rebellion against the horrors they were planning. And soon he was to give up all thoughts of court distinction, and go forth to organize peasants and rebels into an army, besieging his own castle in the cause of liberty.

It was while he was still at the French court that the incident took place which gave him his title of William the Silent. The peace between Henry and Philip had just been concluded, with one purpose in view as advised by cardinals and priests. "Both sovereigns were to massacre the Protestants in their dominions, and in the Netherlands the Spanish troops were to be employed for this special purpose." The Duke of Alva was in the secret, and King Henry supposed that William of Orange was also. One day while hunting, with William riding at his side, Henry of France unfolded the horrible scheme. The young prince heard him without a word. He had not been told of the project, but he betrayed his ignorance by no sign of speech or gesture. Henry assumed that he approved of the awful butchery. No man was ever more grievously in error. From that moment William of Orange knew that his call had come, from that hour he meditated his withdrawal from the political parties of the guilty leaders. And when at length the martyr fires were kindled in Holland, and the Inquisition, under Bloody Alva, began its hellish tasks of "Church discipline" William of Orange sold his plate and jewels, abandoned the great estates he had inherited, and throwing in his lot with the common people, went to the defense of the Netherlands in the struggle for liberty of thought.

William had already intervened, at the risk of his life, on more than one occasion of strife and bloodshed. But the harshness with which the laws against heretics were now carried out, the presence of Spanish troops, the filling up of ministerial offices by Spaniards and other foreigners was stirring the whole country, and presently his own son, studying at the University of Louvain, was seized and carried off to Spain. William himself was outlawed and his property confiscated. Finding that he had been for years the real head of the movement for liberty, Alva, as Governor-General, now set a price upon his head. It was the darkest hour of the long struggle. In constant danger of assassination, in constant fear of betrayal, unable to convince his own people that the contest could never be won, William wandered from place to place, a fugitive and an exile.

But he never once lost heart or capitulated to despair. In that hour he seemed to have the strength of ten. He was at once general, statesman, diplomat, financier and saviour of his people. Like David, he went through the forest collecting outlaws and men who had grievances; he organized a score of bands to prey upon the Spanish army; he developed a system of secret service by which he kept spies in Alva's citadel and informed his people of the enemy plans. He raised a little army--saw it defeated--raised another, and saw the crafty Alva refuse to fight until he was forced to allow it to disband. In seven years he organized four such armies, only to be overwhelmed again and again by force of numbers. With peasants armed with pikes and pistols he fought veterans who had guns, cannons and 6,000 horses. Attempt after attempt was a failure, but he would not confess defeat. When all seemed lost, he wrote to his brother, "With God's help, I am determined to go on." And at length, in the face of defeat on land, he turned to the sea and, organizing his little fleet of "Beggars," became a terror to the Spanish galleons.

Fascinating the story of how this term, "the Beggars," came to be the watchword of the Hollanders' revolt. One day when the clouds were at their blackest, the nobles of Brussels rode in a body to the Duchess Margaret to beseech the withdrawal of the Spanish troops. They came plainly dressed and unarmed, and marching four abreast into the council chamber, petitioned her to suspend the Inquisition. While Margaret, deeply touched, shed tears over the piteous appeal, one of her counsellors, named Berlaymont, spoke scornfully of the petitioners as "a troop of beggars." The dropping of that single word was like the dropping of a spark into a powder-magazine. That night a banquet was held, with three hundred nobles present, and "Long live the Beggars!" rose on every side. Born of a jibe, the name "Beggars" caught the imagination of the people; the revolt spread like wild-fire, and henceforth the phrase became a battle-cry, which was to ring out on every bloody field of the long struggle.

But the battle was only begun. Though the spring of 1572 brought hope, the hope was quickly dashed by the news of the terrible massacre of St. Bartholomew in France. Charles IX had aligned himself with Philip of Spain and was seeking to exterminate the Protestants. And Bloody Alva now redoubled his cruelties in Holland. With incredible ferocity, he attacked and captured the city of Naarden, butchering every man, woman, and child, and razing every building to the ground. Haarlem was next marked for destruction. The garrison, numbering less than two thousand men, was reinforced by Catherine van Hasselaar and her corps of three hundred women, who handled spade and pick, hot water and blazing hoops of tar during the assaults. Alkmaar came next. Sixteen thousand Spaniards under Don Frederic, Alva's son, began the siege, expecting the town to fall as Haarlem had. But the hated foreigners were met in the breaches by women, boys and girls, who fought with pick, stones, fire and hot water for a full month.

When the brutal Spanish troops threatened to beat the patriots down by sheer force of numbers, the peasants cut their dikes, flooded their own fields and homes and renewed the attack upon the Spaniards from the branches of their orchards and the tops of their houses. Clinging to the dikes by their finger-tips, these people fought their way back into the marshes, where the ground was more solid beneath their feet. No pen can describe and no brush can paint the scenes of this and the other sieges that followed. The history of heroism holds no more impressive spectacle than the sight of these patriots who, in the hour when the siege was suddenly lifted, left their dead in the streets and went staggering toward the church to give thanks to God and swear anew their hatred of tyranny before their lips had even tasted bread.

The struggle went on for a score of years. Driven out of their homes, with no shelter of tent or stable, fleeing constantly from the enemy, hiding under the slough grass and digging holes in the frozen sand, the patriots perished by the thousands. In winter, when the frost was bitter, and Alva looked out upon ice on every side, he ordered thousands of pairs of skates, that his men might the more easily hunt down the fugitives. At the climax of the struggle William the Silent, worn with excessive labours, his health undermined by weeks and months spent in the swamps and in the dikes, was stricken with fever and all but died. When the illness was at its height and he was only a skeleton, too weak to hold his pen in his hand, able only to whisper dispatches to his messengers, came the news that Leyden, already besieged for months, and now plague-stricken, was about to surrender.

The Spaniards were determined to win this defiant city, for it was the very heart of Holland and the most beautiful city in the Netherlands. It lay below the level of the ocean, protected by great dikes, and its canals, shaded on either side by lime trees, poplars, and willows, were crossed by one hundred and forty-five bridges. Its houses were beautiful, its public square spacious, its churches imposing. The Spanish commander had built sixty-six forts around the city and so severe was the blockade that no succour by land was possible. There were no troops in the town, save a small corps of freebooters and five companies of the burgher guards. "The sole reliance of the city was on the stout hearts of its inhabitants within the walls, and on the sleepless energy of William the Silent without." William, assuring them of deliverance, had implored them to hold out at least three months, and they had "relied on his calm and unflinching soul as on a rock of adamant." They were unaware of his illness, for he had said nothing of it in his messages, knowing that it would cast a deeper shadow on the city.

When the word reached him that the besieged could hold out no longer, he decided once more to call in the aid of the sea. Leyden lay fifteen miles from the ocean, but the ocean could be brought to Leyden, and though he had no army with which to overwhelm the besiegers he still had his veteran "Beggars" and a tiny fleet of vessels. He determined to sacrifice the neighbouring countryside, with its houses and villages, its fields and flocks, if only he might save the heroic city and its defenders. On a day in August, the great sluices were opened and the ocean began to pour in over the land. While he still lay desperately ill, waiting for the rising of the waters, his agents were busy assembling a fleet of flat-bottomed boats laden with herring and bread for the starving people.

Meanwhile, within the city all was silence and death. Pestilence stalked everywhere and the inhabitants fell like grass beneath the scythe. The only communication was by carrier pigeons, and only the messages from William kept up the hearts of the defenders. The scenes of tragedy within the walls are not to be described. And by a stroke of evil fate the wind, blowing steadily in the wrong direction, delayed the rising of the waters.

Even in its despair, the city was sublime. At the climax of its sufferings, a committee waited on the burgomaster to advise surrender. He was a tall, haggard, imposing figure, with dark visage and commanding eyes. He waved his broad-leafed hat for silence, and then, to use Motley's words, gave answer, "What would ye, my friends, why do ye murmur, that we do not break our vows, and surrender the city to the Spaniards--a fate more terrible than the agony which she now endures? I tell you I have made an oath before the city, and may God give me strength to keep my oath! I can die but once; whether by your hands, the enemy's, or by the hand of God. My own fate is indifferent to me; not so that of the city entrusted to my care. I know that I shall starve, if not soon relieved, but starvation is preferable to the dishonourable death which is the only alternative. Your menaces move me not; my life is at your disposal; here is my sword, plunge it into my breast; and divide my flesh among you. Take my body to appease your hunger, but expect no surrender so long as I remain alive."

Then came a gale from the northwest, and when the waters were piled up in huge waves, the ocean swept across the ruined dikes. The flotilla of the "Beggars," that had waited outside, unable to advance, a painted fleet upon a painted ocean, now surged forward in a wild rush to save the city. Spaniards by the hundreds sank beneath the deepening and treacherous flood. The fortress of Alva was destroyed. At midnight the enemy deserted their redoubts and fled, and at daybreak the ships of William the Silent came through the canals. Soldiers threw bread to the starving citizens, and two hours later every living person who could walk made his way to the church to sing a hymn of deliverance, during which the multitude broke down and wept like children. The day following, the wind shifted to the east, and blew a tempest. "It was," says the historian, "as if the waters having done their work of redemption, had been rolled back by an omnipotent hand, and when four days had passed the land was bare again, and the reconstruction of the dikes well advanced."

Such was the spirit of William the Silent, and his followers. The eventual outcome was inevitable. At length the Spaniards came to see that victory could be bought at one price and one price alone--extermination. From Spain came overtures to William of Orange. His reply is historic: "Peace only upon three conditions: (1) Freedom of worship, (2) A land dedicated to liberty, (3) All Spaniards in civil and military employment to be withdrawn forever." In April, 1576, an act of Union was agreed and signed at Delft, by which supreme authority was conferred upon him. In September of that year William entered Brussels in triumph, as the acknowledged leader of all the Netherlands, Catholic and Protestant alike. And at length, at Utrecht, a federal republic was established, with a written constitution--that republic which was to exist for two hundred years under the motto "by concord little things become great." William's struggle was over and the battle won.

But, all unconsciously, the architect of the new republic was moving toward his end. Like Moses, if he had led the people out of the wilderness it was not given him to see the promised land. For years his steps had been dogged by hired assassins. There had scarcely been an hour during his long warfare when bribes and gold were not offered for his death. It was a miracle that he had escaped the dagger, the club and the cup of poison. He was now fifty-one years of age. His portraits exhibit him as a man whose lips were locked with iron, whose face was furrowed with care, his look alert and strained, his air that "of a man at bay, having staked his life and life's work." And yet he was one of the most charming of companions, brilliant of address, of so winning a manner that it was said "every time he took off his hat he won a subject from the King of Spain."

One morning, while writing at his desk, a young Spaniard who had forged the seals obtained access to the Prince's writing room. Because he had been searched by the guard the visitor was without weapon. But having delivered his forged letter, he asked the Prince for a Bible and the loan of a few crowns. He received a gift of twelve pieces of silver, and went into the courtyard, where, with the Prince's own money, he purchased a pistol from the guard. Thence he returned to find a hiding place in the dark passageway, and to empty three shots into the Prince's breast.