he Blood Council to mercy; he dissuaded the
monarch from attempting the path of clemency, which, for secret reasons,
Philip was inclined at one period to attempt. The Governor had, as he
assured the King, been using gentleness in vain, and he was now
determined to try what a little wholesome severity could effect. These
words were written immediately after the massacres at Harlem.

With all the bloodshed at Mons, and Naarden, and Mechlin, and by the
Council of Tumults, daily, for six years long, still crying from the
ground, he taxed himself with a misplaced and foolish tenderness to the
people. He assured the King that when Alkmaar should be taken, he would,
not spare a "living soul among its whole population;" and, as his parting
advice, he recommended that every city in the Netherlands should be
burned to the ground, except a few which could be occupied permanently by
the royal troops. On the whole, so finished a picture of a perfect and
absolute tyranny has rarely been presented to mankind by history, as in
Alva's administration of the Netherlands.

The tens of thousands in those miserable provinces who fell victims to
the gallows, the sword, the stake, the living grave, or to living
banishment, have never been counted; for those statistics of barbarity
are often effaced from human record. Enough, however, is known, and
enough has been recited in the preceding pages. No mode in which human
beings have ever caused their fellow-creatures to suffer, was omitted
from daily practice. Men, women, and children, old and young, nobles and
paupers, opulent burghers, hospital patients, lunatics, dead bodies, all
were indiscriminately made to furnish food for-the scaffold and the
stake. Men were tortured, beheaded, hanged by the neck and by the legs,
burned before slow fires, pinched to death with red hot tongs, broken
upon the wheel, starved, and flayed alive. Their skins stripped from the
living body, were stretched upon drums, to be beaten in the march of
their brethren to the gallows. The bodies of many who had died a natural
death were exhumed, and their festering remains hanged upon the gibbet,
on pretext that they had died without receiving the sacrament, but in
reality that their property might become the legitimate prey of the
treasury. Marriages of long standing were dissolved by order of
government, that rich heiresses might be married against their will to
foreigners whom they abhorred. Women and children were execu