seven men and five
women, inspired by the Holy Ghost, threw off their clothes and rushed
naked and raving through the streets, shrieking "Wo, wo, wo! the wrath of
God, the wrath of God!" When arrested, they obstinately refused to put on
clothing. "We are," they observed, "the naked truth." In a day or two,
these furious lunatics, who certainly deserved a madhouse rather than the
scaffold, were all executed. The numbers of the sect increased with the
martyrdom to which they were exposed, and the disorder spread to every
part of the Netherlands. Many were put to death in lingering torments,
but no perceptible effect was produced by the chastisement. Meantime the
great chief of the sect, the prophet John, was defeated by the forces of
the Bishop of Munster, who recovered his city and caused the "King of
Zion" to be pinched to death with red-hot tongs.

Unfortunately the severity of government was not wreaked alone upon the
prophet and his mischievous crew. Thousands and ten-thousands of
virtuous, well-disposed men and women, who had as little sympathy with
anabaptistical as with Roman depravity; were butchered in cold blood,
under the sanguinary rule of Charles, in the Netherlands. In 1533, Queen
Dowager Mary of Hungary, sister of the Emperor, Regent of the provinces,
the "Christian widow" admired by Erasmus, wrote to her brother that "in
her opinion all heretics, whether repentant or not, should be prosecuted
with such severity as that error might be, at once, extinguished, care
being only taken that the provinces were not entirely depopulated." With
this humane limitation, the "Christian Widow" cheerfully set herself to
superintend as foul and wholesale a system of murder as was ever
organized. In 1535, an imperial edict was issued at Brussels, condemning
all heretics to death; repentant males to be executed with the sword,
repentant females to be buried alive, the obstinate, of both sexes, to be
burned. This and similar edicts were the law of the land for twenty
years, and rigidly enforced. Imperial and papal persecution continued its
daily deadly work with such diligence as to make it doubtful whether the
limits set by the Regent Mary might not be overstepped. In the midst of
the carnage, the Emperor sent for his son Philip, that he might receive
the fealty of the Netherlands as their future lord and master.
Contemporaneously, a new edict was published at Brussels (29th April,
1549), confirming and reenacting all previ