and rewarded.  Multitudes of accused were hauled before the tribunal and were condemned by batches almost without the form of a trial.  For long hours day by day Vargas and del Rio revelled in their work of butchery; and in all parts of the Netherlands the executioners were busy.  It was of no use for the accused to appeal to the charters and privileges of their provinces.  All alike were summoned to Brussels; non curamus privilegios vestros declared Vargas in his ungrammatical Latin.  Hand in hand with the wholesale sentences of death went the confiscation of property.  Vast sums went into the treasury.  The whole land for awhile was terror-stricken.  All organised opposition was crushed, and no one dared to raise his voice in protest.

The Prince of Orange was summoned to appear in person before the council within six weeks, under pain of perpetual banishment and confiscation of his estates.  He refused to come, and energetically denied that the council had any jurisdiction over him.  The same sentence was passed upon all the other leaders who had placed themselves out of reach of Alva’s arm—­Sainte Aldegonde, Hoogstraeten, Culemburg, Montigny, Lewis of Nassau and others.  Unable to lay hands upon the prince himself, the governor-general took dastardly advantage of William’s indiscretion in leaving his eldest son at Louvain to pursue his studies at the university.  At the beginning of 1568 Philip William, Count of Buren in right of his mother, was seized and sent to Madrid to be brought up at the court of Philip to hate the cause to which his father henceforth devoted his life.  Already indeed, before the abduction of his son, Orange from his safe retreat at Dillenburg had been exerting himself to raise troops for the invasion of the Netherlands.  He still professed loyalty to the king and declared that in the king’s name he wished to restore to the provinces those liberties and privileges which Philip himself had sworn that he would maintain.  The difficulty was to find the large sum of money required for such an enterprise, and it was only by extraordinary efforts that a sufficient amount was obtained.  Part of the money was collected in Antwerp and various towns of Holland and Zeeland, the rest subscribed by individuals.  John of Nassau pledged his estates, Orange sold his plate and jewels, and finally a war-chest of 200,000 florins was gathered together.  It was proposed to attack the Netherlands from three directions.  From the north Lewis of Nassau was to lead an army from the Ems into Friesland; Hoogstraeten on the east to effect an entrance by way of Maestricht; while another force of Huguenots and refugees in the south was to march into Artois.  It was an almost desperate scheme in the face of veteran troops in a central position under such a tried commander as Alva.  The last-named French force and that under Hoogstraeten were easily defeated and scattered by Spanish detachments sent to meet them.  Lewis of Nassau was at first more successful.  Entering