public execution.

Two maiden ladies lived on the north rampart of Antwerp. They had
formerly professed the Protestant religion, and had been thrown into
prison for that crime; but the fear of further persecution, human
weakness, or perhaps sincere conviction, had caused them to renounce the
error of their ways, and they now went to mass. But they had a
maidservant, forty years of age, Anna van den Hove by name, who was
staunch in that reformed faith in which she had been born and bred. The
Jesuits denounced this maid-servant to the civil authority, and claimed
her condemnation and execution under the edicts of 1540, decrees which
every one had supposed as obsolete as the statutes of Draco, which they
had so entirely put to shame.

The sentence having been obtained from the docile and priest-ridden
magistrates, Anna van den Hove was brought to Brussels and informed that
she was at once to be buried alive. At the same time, the Jesuits told
her that by converting herself to the Church she might escape punishment.

When King Henry IV. was summoned to renounce that same Huguenot faith, of
which he was the political embodiment and the military champion, the
candid man answered by the simple demand to be instructed. When the
proper moment came, the instruction was accomplished by an archbishop
with the rapidity of magic. Half an hour undid the work of half a
life-time. Thus expeditiously could religious conversion be effected when
an earthly crown was its guerdon. The poor serving-maid was less open to
conviction. In her simple fanaticism she too talked of a crown, and saw
it descending from Heaven on her poor forlorn head as the reward, not of
apostasy, but of steadfastness. She asked her tormentors how they could
expect her to abandon her religion for fear of death. She had read her
Bible every day, she said, and had found nothing there of the pope or
purgatory, masses, invocation of saints, or the absolution of sins except
through the blood of the blessed Redeemer. She interfered with no one who
thought differently; she quarrelled with no one's religious belief. She
had prayed for enlightenment from Him, if she were in error, and the
result was that she felt strengthened in her simplicity, and resolved to
do nothing against her conscience. Rather than add this sin to the
manifold ones committed by her, she preferred, she said, to die the
death. So Anna van den Hove was led, one fine midsummer morning, to the
hayfield ou