Sancho’s Dream – the Story of a Nightmare

 

It is a little known fact. One of the best lovedbest loved novels, in fact the mother of all European novels and the father of literary escapism, was published under the explicit patronage of the Spanish Inquisition Inquisition. In 1608, Don Bernardo de Sandoval y Rojas (1546 – 1618), Archbishop of Toledo, Primate of Spain and President of the Supreme Council of the Inquisition, not only prevented the Holy Office from intervening against the publication of the 2nd edition of the Don Quixote, he also provided the author with a small pension, virtually the only regular income Cervantes would receive in his final years.

The Grand Inquisitor did not lend his support entirely out of human kindness. Already in 1553, Emperor Charles V had prohibited by law the shipping of chivalrous romances into the Americas; five years later the Cortes of Castile followed suit for Spain itself and threatened to penalize any publication of books of chivalry. With approval, the legislator noted the long-standing attack of scholars, preachers and mystics against the uncounted adaptations in the vein of Amadis de Gaul. Yet even among the Spanish grandees many continued to keep this kind of literature in vogue, and were just as ardent readers as the innkeeper in the first part of Cervantes’ novel. After fifty years of dissolutely prosecuting novels of knight-errantry, Juan de Silva thought it still worthwhile to publish his Don Policisne de Beocia in 1602. The book was placed on the index of forbidden books within days. Three years later appeared the first part of the Don Quixote, apparently a satire on the chivalrous romance, of which the reprint was to receive explicit approbation by the highest authority. Hardly a coincidence! De Silva’s book was to remain the last of its kind, but the Don Quixote was not the cause of it. In other words, Cervantes’ publication appeared to be strictly toeing the line of existing law. The satirical gripe was more than a frivolous ploy of the author. Yet notice the curate’s defense of some of the forbidden books in Part 1, Chapter VI. The Amadis of Gaul is given a stay of execution, the Palmin of England honorably exiled to the upper bookshelf and the curate even praises the History of the famous Knight Tirante el Blanco as “a treasury of enjoyment and a mine of recreation.” Either the chief inquisitor of Spain – obviously an intelligent man – was in a generous mood, or he already considered the whole affair as a nonissue, and was willing to overlook the faux pas.

Cervantes himself had a way of referring to his novelistic endeavor with condescension, almost negligence; his ambition was to be a playwright, a reformer of the stage. So it is not entirely beyond conjecture, that the Don Quixote might have been started as commissioned work. The task fell on Cervantes, not only because he was inexpensive.

Cervantes had every reason to tread with care. The Inquisition had set her sight on him since the year 1580. As “a soldier for many years and a prisoner of war for six and a half years, which has taught him patience, if nothing else” (Cervantes, Exemplary Novellas), Cervantes was subjected to an inquiry after his return. The capture had occurred in 1575, when he and his brother embarked on the galley “El Sol.” Pirates boarded the ship and the brothers were held for ransom in Algiers. Rodrigo was ransomed in 1577 while Miguel spent another three years in the slave pens until his family could raise 500 escudos. He returned to Madrid to a life in poverty and trumped up accusations in the typical fashion of the Inquisition: assuming guilt before proven innocent. Cervantes would not have been the first prisoner of war, who after years of imprisonment might have fallen from the true faith and converted to Islam.

The name of the turd framing the accusation – Blanco de Paz – is still a matter of record. Cervantes was forced to produce an elaborate deposition with testimonies of eleven of his fellow prisoners. Fortunately he was not arrested.

If an inquisitor wanted to have more than just a word with you, masked men would force entrance into your house, in the dead of night when the streets are still, pull a hood over your head and drag you from your bedchamber to the dungeons for an interrogation behind closed doors and without witnesses. You simply disappeared from public sight, keeping your family in the dark about your whereabouts, sometimes for years. The procedure was calculated to create a pervasive climate of anxiety and mutual incrimination in the community. A bench of clerics executed decrees without appeal, owing neither allegiance nor accountability to the secular authorities. The charge, invariably, was heresy, and the terms of this accusation were invented and framed by the Inquisition. Arresting on suspicion, torturing till confession, and punishing by fire, the Inquisition scrutinized and condemned what was on your mind, not what you did.

Every testimony was kept strictly confidential; two witnesses, even if testifying to separate facts, were sufficient to summon you as a suspect. Every discrepancy in the witness statements was conferred to a separate charge, thus multiplying the indictments. In the initial stages of an interrogation you were not even informed of the accusation.

All this was in glaring violation of secular law. The penal codes of the period gave the defendant the right to council, burdened the prosecuting party with the task of collecting proof, and excluded witnesses whose impartiality was doubtful. It also required that the denouncer confronted the defendant. There was still no such thing as a public prosecutor. Instead, the judge presided over the trial as the representative of the sovereign. No testimony from criminals and people openly hostile to the defendant was admissible and there was a right of appeal. A proven miscarriage of justice could lead to charges, even a murder charge against the judge himself. Under the influence of the Inquisition, this was about to change! 

Accusations were admitted without limitation, anonymous as well as signed. A secretary took down the testimony and after reading it back had it confirmed. Council was permitted but the parties not allowed to confer. The defendant's nominal advocate was not permitted to communicate with the prisoner, and was furnished neither with documents nor with power to procure evidence, a mere puppet, aggravating the evident lawlessness of the proceedings by the mockery of legal forms.

A prisoner persisting in the avowal of his innocence was finally informed of the testimony against him, but never confronted with the witnesses, nor told their names. The accuser might be his son, father, or the wife, for all were enjoined, under penalty of death, to inform the inquisitors of every suspicious word which might fall from their nearest relatives. Since the 2nd of August 1483, edicts were published annually on the first two Sundays of Lent, enjoining as sacred duty to everybody to report on people suspected of heresy. The clergy was instructed to refuse absolution to everybody hesitating to comply, even if the suspected person might stand in the relation of parent, child, husband or wife. No wonder the Inquisition seemed omniscient, since the whole country was infested with “venomous familiars who glided through every chamber and coiled themselves at every fireside.” The Holy Office knew the “secret details of each household in the realm,” says a former functionary of the Inquisition, and “no infidel or heretic could escape discovery” (Juan Antonio Llorente, 1756 – 1823). The sudden hush when a stranger listens into the conversation became habitual.

If you failed to be forthcoming, the interrogator would show you the instruments of torture and then lock you away to think it over. Sparingly supplied with food, forbidden to speak or even to sing, you were left to stew in your own juices until deemed ready to be examined. Nicolau Aymerich (1320 – 1399) was the Inquisitor General of the Inquisition of the Crown of Aragon. In his manual he instructed the interrogator "to introduce to the prisoner some one of his accomplices, or any other converted heretic, who shall feign that he still persists in his heresy, telling him that he had abjured for the sole purpose of escaping punishment, by deceiving the inquisitors. Having thus gained his confidence, he shall go into his cell some day after dinner, and, keeping up the conversation till night, shall remain with him under pretext of its being too late for him to return home. He shall then urge the prisoner to tell him the particulars of his past life, having first told him the whole of his own; and in the meantime spies shall be kept in hearing at the door, as well as a notary, in order to certify what may be said within." If the result still was not to the inquisitor's satisfaction they moved on to the rack, the rope and the pulley. Torture took place at midnight, in the light of torches.

The prisoner – man, matron, and virgin – was stripped naked and stretched upon the wooden bench. Water, weights, fires, pulleys and screws were applied to strain the sinews without cracking, crack the bones without breaking them, and rack the body short of dying. Splinters of wood were driven underneath the fingernails and the metatarsals crushed in iron contraptions, the notorious "Spanish boots." The executioner was enveloped in a black robe from head to foot, with his eyes glaring through the holes in his hood.

The period during which torture might be inflicted was unlimited in duration. It could only be terminated by a confession, making the scaffold a refuge from the rack. King Philip II was not one of the squeamish by any account, yet even he attempted to curb the use of torture by strictly prohibiting the repeated use on the same charge. The inquisitors sidestepped the decree by pretending, after the first infliction, that the procedure was merely suspended, not terminated. We know of individuals who have borne torture and dungeon for many years. On August 22, 1559, the archbishop of Toledo, Bartolomé Carranza, was arrested on suspicion of being a Lutheran sympathizer. He was a popular cleric; six years after his disappearance his parishioners continued asking questions. The Inquisition hustled the prisoner to another country and to a more discrete setting for the tribunal. The prisoner died of exhaustion before he could be convicted, in 1566.

And should you, after months and sometimes years of interrogation, be fortunate enough to be offered a release, there was still no formal repeal of the charges. At the release you were to sign a waver never to divulge anything of what had happened to you. We still have examples of such wavers. Apologetic historians record these as "acquittals."

Throughout your imprisonment the interrogator would impress on you to “recant,” initially without telling you what it is you were supposed to denounce. After months of neglect and duress, with no communication to the world on the other side of the prison wall, your only option may have seemed to give up all hopes of proving your innocence and beg for “reconciliation.” Yet life for a “reconciled” was a toil under incessant supervision. The release of Ponce Roger stipulated to have the penitent stripped of his clothes and his priest beat him with rods from the gate of the city to the door of his church, for three Sundays in succession. With broken bones in the feet this could be a long stretch. The reconciled was not to eat meat for the rest of his life, he had to keep three Lents a year, and abstain from fish, oil, and wine, for three days in the week. His only dress was a religious garb with small crosses embroidered on each side of the chest. He had to attend mass wherever possible on every day and vespers on Sundays and festivals. He was to recite service twice a day and pray the pater noster for seven times in the morning, ten times at sunset, and twenty times at midnight. All his possessions fell to the Inquisition. The penal provisions extended even to the family. Children from the mother's side, and the grandchildren of the father were prohibited from holding office in the Privy Council, courts of justice, or functions in the municipalities. The Nazis would have called it “sippenhaft.” Failure to comply was punished with immolation as a relapsed heretic.  

Confession was followed by execution, but death row could become a stretch, since the number of condemned prisoners was allowed to accumulate. The auto-da-fe was a solemn festival. On the appointed morning, the convicted was attired in a yellow robe without sleeves, embroidered all over with black figures of demons. A large conical paper miter was placed upon your head, with a picture on it of a man surrounded by flames. They would prey open your mouth and arrest your tongue with a wooden clamp, that prevented you from opening or shutting your mouth. At this point a breakfast was carried in and placed before you, the best food you had seen for a long time. With ironical politeness, the executioners would urge you to satisfy your hunger. Then the gates opened to the public square and you were made to fall in with the procession, headed by school children. Behind you and your fellow convicts came the magistrates and nobility, the prelates and dignitaries of the Church. The inquisitors and their staff followed on horseback, with the blood-red flag of the "sacred office" waving above them. After reaching the scaffold a sermon was preached to the assembled multitude. Then the sentences were read out individually to the convicts. The clergy would chant the 51st psalm, the whole throng uniting in the Miserere. If a priest happened to be among the culprits, he was stripped of the canonicals only now, and in plain sight, while his hands, lips, and shaven head were scraped with a bit of glass: it was supposed to remove the oil of consecration. Up to this point the reconciled had been joining the procession of the convicted and were now permitted to step aside.

For you this was the signal to mount the scaffold, where the executioner was standing ready to tie you up and kindle the fire. While you were climbing over the pile of firewood, the inquisitor formally delivered you into the executioner’s hands with the ironic request “to deal with you tenderly, and without bloodletting or injury.” If you were one of the steadfast, you received a slow roasting on green faggots, a "sweet savor to the Lord" (Exodus 29:18; Ezekiel. 20:41). If you renounced in this last extremity and kissed the crucifix – but how are you supposed to do that with this gag in your mouth – they mercifully strangled you before throwing you on the flames. Recanting without the kiss earned you a layer of dry, more quickly burning wood under your feet. Such was the Spanish Inquisition, according to the biographer of Philip the Second, a "heavenly remedy, a guardian angel of Paradise, a lions' den in which Daniel and other just men could sustain no injury, but in which perverse sinners were torn to pieces" (Luis Cabrera de Córdoba, 1559 – 1623, Felipe II Rey de España, 1619). Even the cemeteries offered no refuge. The inquisitors rifled the graves for the remains of dead heretics. The corpses were exhumed, mutilated and burned, sometimes in effigy, when the digging unearthed only a pile of dirt. And yet, even in our day and age, one can still hear certain “historians” defend as "due process" and “cutting edge of the law” the sinister machinery of an institution, that, if it still had the power, would abolish their privilege of free speech first thing. Due process? The process is the atrocity! Cutting edge indeed!

By carefully misdirecting our attention to periods where comparably few had actually been burned and not even so much as mention the years that would spoil these statistics, such “experts” want us to believe that the scandal lies only in the numbers and not in the miscarriage of justice. I even have read the claim that altogether only two people ever had been burned.

A common misunderstanding is to think of the Inquisition as a strictly centralized organization. It was more of a two-tear system, resting on the Episcopal Inquisitions with a local bishop as the head inquisitor in his own see. This goes back a long way. Then, in 1233, Pope Gregory IX issued the founding charter of the papal inquisition, putting its execution exclusively into the hands of the Dominican order. The money to run the operation was to be taken from the victims’ confiscated property, a strong motive to establish “guilt” in every conceivable way. The tribunal was introduced first in France to persecute the Albigensians and successively adopted in Italy and Germany. Additional provisions were framed on the synod of Tarragona and in Aragon in 1242. If a city in France or Germany had the misfortune to draw on itself the Inquisition's unwanted attention, a sizable train of people would knock at the gate: investigators, notaries, secretaries, scribes and the enforcers: soldiers, bailiffs, prison guards. The newcomers would establish headquarters in a public building and proclaim a "day of grace." Those who reported during this period, could not be punished with death, prison, or loss of property, but still be penalized, while their testimonies would weave the net of suspicion. The dubious legality of the operation was immediately noted. A local nobleman complained to the Pope about “interrogating witnesses behind closed doors, refusing legal assistance, putting the dead on trial and spreading such fear that the terrified citizens denounce the innocent. The inquisitors upset the country, and because of their abuses the population is turning against the monks and clerics" (Count Raymond, 1234). The situation was rife with frictions between the local inquisitions and Rome.

Thomas de Torquemada was the son of a converted Jewish mother. He became the Spanish Inquisition's Heinrich Himmler. The similarities are more than superficial. The same anal retentive nature of a micromanaging bureaucrat, the same hypochondria, the same foxy superstition – only in Torquemada's case it was not about Valkyries and "lebensborn," but transubstantiation and reliquaries – both were well educated and of a strict catholic upbringing and both held the same racist prejudice of “limpizza de sangre:” pure blood. Both shared the same disregard for human life and the same cowardice in the face of real danger. Torquemada did not always please his superiors in Rome and was repeatedly arraigned by the pope to account for his actions.

Wisely, Torquemada decided not to show and instead sent his delegates. Pope Alexander VI was a compulsive serial killer with a nasty habit of mixing poison into the food of his guests and then confiscate their properties; he sired 61 children and lived in incest with his oldest daughter. His son became the prototype for Machiavelli’s Prince. In 1494 this pope appointed four coadjutors to look over Torquemada's shoulder. By then Torquemada had advanced to the position of Grand Inquisitor of Castile and Aragon and delegated his inquisitorial faculties to other inquisitors of his own choosing, assuming authority over appeals originally made to the Holy See. He set up tribunals at Valladolid, Seville, Jaen, Avila, Cordova, and Villarreal, and, in 1484, at Saragossa. He instituted a High Council, consisting of five members, whose chief duty was to assist him in the hearing of appeals. During the eight years of Torquemada's tenure at the tribunal of Toledo, no less than 10,220 people were convicted and burnt, 6860 burnt in effigy, and 97,321 of the accused were "reconciled" – we know by now what this really means. The figure gives an idea of the orphaned families’ misery after the Inquisition had confiscated all their property. Nevertheless, many of the reconciled were afterwards sentenced as relapsed and immolated as well.

Not surprising, Emperor Charles V began to appreciate the value of the Inquisition as a means to secure his grip on his extended possessions. The Habsburgs were an incestuous and degenerate lot wielding their authority like a New York mobster. It was not beyond these “aristocrats” of the bluest blood to write out a contract on their opponents. King Phillip II, a small-minded bureaucrat by nature, was stupid enough to leave a paper trail connecting him with the assassinations of Floris of Montigny and Prince William of Orange. First cousin marriages kept their gains within the family and gradually the Habsburgs managed to impose their protection racket virtually on every European principality with only the dynasties in France and England begging to differ.

In 1522, Charles V appointed Francis van der Hulst as Inquisitor-General of the Netherlands with the full authority to cite, arrest, imprison and torture heretics and to have his sentences executed without appeal, although at this point his authority was not yet superseding those exercised by the bishops in their own dioceses. Only two years later the Emperor demoted Van der Hulst from his office on charges of fraud and in 1525 left it to Pope Clement VII, another of the Emperor’s ill chosen creatures, to appoint Buedens, Houseau and Coppin as the successors of Van der Hulst. In 1531, Ruard Tapper and Michael Drutius replaced the deceased Coppin. By 1545, the papal inquisitors became entirely independent of the Episcopal Inquisition even acquired jurisdiction over bishops and archbishops, arresting and imprisoning them with impunity.

The inquisitors also exercised the privilege of appointing deputies of their own choosing. The most notorious among these deputies were Barbier, De Monte, Titelmann, Fabry, Campo de Zon, and Stryen. They had authority “to summon all subjects of his Majesty, whatever their rank, quality, or station, and to compel them to give evidence, or to communicate suspicions.” A refusal to provide such deposition carried the death penalty. The imperial edict from April 26, 1550, instructed the presidents, judges, sheriffs, and all other judicial and executive officers to render all possible assistance to “the inquisitors and their familiars in their holy and pious inquisition, whenever required to do so,” by arresting and detaining every person suspected of heresy, “notwithstanding of privileges or charters to the contrary.” In short, the inquisitors were not subject to the civil authority, but the civil authority to them. The imperial edict empowered them "to chastise, degrade, denounce, and then deliver heretics to the secular judges for punishment; to imprison and make arrests without ordinary warrant, but merely with notice given to a single counselor, who was obliged to give sentence according to their desire, without application to the ordinary judge."

Everywhere functionaries of the inquisition traveled the land, alone or accompanied by a notary, and collected written information concerning every person in the district, whether merely "infected or vehemently suspected" of heresy. Whenever the inquisitor was satisfied of your heresy, he was to order your detention by the local judge. A judge refusing to comply made himself an accessory to heresy. If you were suspected but not convicted, the inquisitor could proceed with your chastisement at "the discretion of a counselor or some other expert." Should the suspect be a man of the cloth, the inquisitor was to deal with him summarily "without noise or form in the process.” In conclusion, the Emperor ordered the "inquisitors to make it known that they were not doing their own work, but that of Christ, and to persuade all persons of this fact." These instructions were renewed and confirmed by Philip II on November 28, 1555.

Nevertheless, despite all this administrative muscle and solemn spectacle, the Inquisition would hardly have been able to sustain her stranglehold without the victims’ psychological disposition to yield.

Peter Titelmann executed his function as inquisitor in Flanders, Douay, and Tournay, the most thriving and populous portions of the Netherlands. The chronicles depict him as some grotesque goblin, traveling the country by night and day, most of the time alone, on horseback, dragging suspects away from their families, and imprisoning, arresting, torturing, strangling, burning them, with hardly the shadow of a warrant, information, or process. There was a kind of grim humor about the man. When asked how he could "venture to go about alone, or at most with an attendant or two, arresting people on every side,” he answered that he had nothing to fear, since he seized "only the innocent and virtuous, who make no resistance, and let themselves be taken like lambs."

When Titelmann summoned one of these lambs, the schoolmaster Geleyn de Muler, of Audenarde, before him, the man thought he knew his rights and demanded, if he were guilty of any crime, to be tried before the judges of his town. "You are to answer to me and none other," said Titelmann, and proceeded to catechize the prisoner and soon satisfied himself of the schoolmaster's heresy, commanding immediate recantation. The schoolmaster refused. "Do you not love your wife and children?" said Titelmann – a fair question, coming to think of it – and then passed his sentence. The man was strangled and thrown into the flames. Titelmann’s next victim was a Thomas Calberg, tapestry weaver, of Tournay. He was burned alive without the mercy strangling. On the same occasion a fellow convict was hacked to death with seven blows of a rusty sword. His wife was made to watch it. Taken by a seizure, she died on the spot. Her cousin Walter Kapell was the next to follow. He was a man of some property, and the poor loved him for his generous charity. During Kapell’s slow death, there was commotion and outcries. With the words, "ye are bloody murderers; that man has done no wrong; but has given me bread to eat," one of these people rushed forward and threw himself headlong into the flames, to be rescued by the officers only with difficulty. Two days later, the same man, still badly burned, carried on his shoulders Walter Kapell’s charred corpse from the place of execution to the townhall, where the magistrates were sitting in session. With his load forcing his way into their presence he cried: "There, you animals! Ye have eaten his flesh, now eat his bones!" It has not been recorded what became of him afterwards.

A velvet manufacturer, Bertrand le Blas was condemned for heresy, chained to a piece of fence and dragged to the marketplace. An iron gag closed the mouth while his right hand and foot were burned and twisted off between two red-hot irons. After tearing out his tongue by the roots the iron gag was again applied, because Bertrand still endeavored to call upon the name of God. With his limbs fastened together behind his back, he was then hooked by the middle of his body to an iron chain, and made to swing to and fro over a slow fire until he was entirely roasted. He remained conscious almost to the end. At Bergen-op-Zoom, Simon the huckster, neglected to prostrate himself before the host when it was carried by in procession and was immolated the same day. There are multiple instances of the same offence on record, leading to the same punishment. In this particular incident the sheriff overseeing the execution was so much affected by the courage of the victim, that he went home, became delirious and died, "notwithstanding the monks at his bed trying to console him.”

On his arrival in Ryssel, in Flanders, Titelmann arrested one Robert Ogier together with his wife and sons. Their crime consisted in not going to mass and instead practicing private worship at home. When asked what rites they observed, the younger of the two boys said: "We fall on our knees, and pray to God that he may enlighten our hearts, and forgive our sins. We pray for our sovereign, that his reign may be prosperous, and his life peaceful. We also pray for the magistrates and others in authority, that God may protect and preserve them all." The father and the older son were condemned to burn. The following week Ogier’s wife and her youngest, too, were made to clamber on the firewood pile and immolated before a silent crowd.

As a farewell gift to the good people of Ryssel, Titelmann forced entry into the house of John de Swarte, seizing him, his wife and four children, “together with two newly-married couples, and two other persons.” He convicted the lot of covertly reading the Bible and had them immediately burned. The register of municipal expenses at Tournay, has preserved the costs of these accomplishments. Under the entries for June 1549 we read: "To Mr. Jacques Barra, executioner, for having tortured, twice, Jean de Lannoy, ten sous. To the same, for having executed, by fire, said Lannoy, sixty sous. For having thrown his cinders into the river, eight sous." Men, women, and children were burned, and their "cinders" thrown away for not kneeling to a wafer, or for thoughts to which they had never given utterance, but which, on inquiry, they were too honest to deny. There was comparatively little difficulty in ferreting out the "vermin," to use the expression of a Walloon historian of that age: "To speak without passion," he says, "the inquisition well administered is a laudable institution, and not less necessary than all the other offices of spirituality and temporality belonging both to the bishops and to the commissioners of the Roman see." When however, at Valenciennes two popular clerics, Faveau and Mallart, were condemned to burn in 1561, the commotion in the streets held up their execution for almost seven months. Day and night the crowds hurled threats and defiance at the authorities and through the prison windows encouraged the prisoners, promising to come to their rescue.

On April 27, 1562, Faveau and Mallart were at last taken from their jail and yanked to the marketplace, where the stake was waiting for them. The executioner was binding Simon Faveau to the stake, when a woman in the crowd took off her shoe and threw it at the pile of firewood. This was the signal. Suddenly men in great numbers rushed forward and seized and scattered the burning fagots. The executioner was prevented from carrying out the sentence, but the guards managed to hurtle away the culprits back to prison.

The magistrates discussed what to do next. The inquisitor was for putting the prisoners to death in prison, and tossing their heads to the crowds in the street. The assembly had still not reached a decision, when a vast throng of people began approaching the prison. "You should have seen this vile populace," says an eyewitness, "moving, pausing, recoiling, sweeping forward, swaying to and fro like the waves of the sea when it is agitated by contending winds." Despite the previous exchanges of harsh language, the authorities had not expected such fierce demonstration. The prisoners were rescued, and succeeded in making their escape from the city. The day would live on in memory as the "day of the ill-burned" (Journee des mau-brulez). One of the escapees, however, Simon Faveau, was apprehended again and, as the chronicler cheerfully noted, was "burned well and finally" in the same place from which he had been rescued before.

The authorities were stumped. They just could not believe that the same people who previously had allowed to be slaughtered like lambs would be capable of such determined resistance. The imperial government at Brussels responded with rage. On April 29, the regiment of the Duke of Aerschot arrived in Valenciennes. All over town, men and women were arrested for their actual or suspected participation in the recue of the prisoners. The orders were clear. On May 16, the executions commenced. The numbers of the immolated and beheaded were frightful. "Nothing was left undone by the magistrates," says our eyewitness, with great approbation, "which could serve for the correction and amendment of the poor people."

(Collect. Gerard, Histoire des choses les plus memorables qui se sent passees en la ville et Compte de Valenciennes depuis le commencement des troubles des Pays-Bas sons le regne de Phil. II., jusqu' a l'annee 1621. Manuscript of the Royal Library at La Hague. Its author was a citizen of Valenciennes, and a personal witness of most of the events. He appears to have attained to a great age, as he minutely narrates, from personal observation many scenes, which occurred before 1566, and his work is continued till the year 1621. The anonymous author was a very sincere Catholic.)

© - 9/1/2008 - by michael sympson, 5,500 words, all rights reserved