Under this universal condemnation the reader will see the real spirit of popery, and what all had to expect who did not yield an absolute, though blind submission, to all her idolatries and superstitions. Men in the highest and humblest positions were daily and hourly dragged to the stake. Alva, in writing to Philip about this time, seeks to satisfy his master by assuring him that the executions, which were to take place immediately after the expiration of holy week, would not be less than eight hundred heads. To prevent the victims on their way to the scaffold from addressing their friends or the bystanders, the tongue of each prisoner was screwed into an iron ring, and then seared with a hot iron.
The tendency of this monster's policy was evidently to effect the utter depopulation of the country. History informs us, that the "death-bell tolled hourly in every village; not a family that was not called to mourn for its dearest relatives; the blood of its best and bravest citizens had already stained the scaffold; the men to whom the nation had 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 that had not been made desolate.... The door-posts of private houses, the fences in the fields, were laden with human carcasses, strangled, beheaded, and burned. The orchards in the country bore on many a tree the hideous fruit of human bodies." It was about this time that Don Carlos, the king's son, died in prison, or, as it was believed by some, was put to death by his father's orders. "This conduct of his in not sparing his only son, as being a favorer of heretics, was highly extolled by Pope Pius V."
Such was the character of the reign of Alva for nearly six years. The heart sickens in attempting to detail the atrocities of this furious tyrant. The extent of the appalling massacres may be imagined from the boast of Alva himself, who gloried in having caused eighteen thousand of the inhabitants to perish, without reckoning those who fell in war. And it is thought that more than a hundred thousand effected their escape, and fled into other countries. Crowds flocked to the English ports, bringing with them that industrial skill which amply repaid this country for the hospitality they received.
We wonder that the church was not consumed in the flames or drowned in blood. But God had mercy on the Netherlands in preserving many of His faithful witnesses through their fiery trial that they might testify for Him in a future day. When the grass began to grow in the streets of those cities which had recently employed so many artisans, a national synod of the Dutch Reformed Church was held at Dort in 1578; at Middleburg in 1581; and at the Hague in 1586. The very means which the royal bigot, with his inquisitors and Jesuits, employed to preserve the old religion, instead of securing it from the dangers to which it was exposed, occasioned its total overthrow. The civil war, which broke out both by sea and land, resulted in the formation of a new Protestant state in Europe, under the title of THE SEVEN UNITED PROVINCES.