"You can do me no greater
pleasure," wrote Noircarmes to the council, "than to make quick work with
all these rebels, and to proceed with the confiscation of their estates,
real and personal. Don't fail to put all those to the torture out of whom
anything can be got."

Notwithstanding the unexampled docility of the commissioners, they found
it difficult to extract from their redoubted chief a reasonable share in
the wages of blood. They did not scruple, therefore, to display their,
own infamy, and to enumerate their own crimes, in order to justify their
demand for higher salaries. "Consider," they said, in a petition to this
end, "consider closely, all that is odious in our office, and the great
number of banishments and of executions which we have pronounced among
all our own relations and friends."

It may be added, moreover, as a slight palliation for the enormous crimes
committed by these men, that, becoming at last weary of their business,
they urged Noircarmes to desist from the work of proscription. Longehaye,
one of the commissioners, even waited upon him personally, with a plea
for mercy in favor of "the poor people, even beggars, who, although
having borne arms during the siege, might then be pardoned." Noircarmes,
in a rage at the proposition, said that "if he did not know the
commissioners to be honest men, he should believe that their palms had
been oiled," and forbade any farther words on the subject. When Longehaye
still ventured to speak in favor of certain persons "who were very poor
and simple, not charged with duplicity, and good Catholics besides," he
fared no better. "Away with you!" cried Noircarmes in a great fury,
adding that he had already written to have execution done upon the whole
of them. "Whereupon," said poor blood-councillor Longehaye, in his letter
to his colleagues, "I retired, I leave you to guess how."

Thus the work went on day after day, month after month. Till the 27th
August of the following year (1573) the executioner never rested, and
when Requesens, successor to Alva, caused the prisons of Mons to be
opened, there were found still seventy-five individuals condemned to the
block, and awaiting their fate.

It is the most dreadful commentary upon the times in which these
transactions occurred, that they could sink so soon into oblivion. The
culprits took care to hide the records of their guilt, while succeeding
horrors, on a more extensive scale, at other places, effaced the m