The archduke was fain to pawn his jewelry, his plate, his furniture, to support the daily expenses of his household.  Meantime he was to set an army in the field to relieve a city, beleaguered by the most warlike monarch in Christendom.  Fortunately for him, that prince was in very similar straits, for the pressure upon the public swindlers and the auction sales of judicial ermine throughout his kingdom were not as rapidly productive as had been hoped.

It was precisely at this moment, too, that an incident of another nature occurred in Antwerp, which did not tend to make the believers in the possibility of religious or political freedom more in love with the system of Spain and Rome.  Those blood-dripping edicts against heresy in the Netherlands, of which enough has been said in previous volumes of this history, and which had caused the deaths, by axe, faggot, halter, or burial alive, of at least fifty thousand human creatures—­however historical scepticism may shut its eyes to evidence—­had now been, dormant for twenty years.  Their activity had ceased with the pacification of Ghent; but the devilish spirit which had inspired them still lived in the persons of the Jesuits, and there were now more Jesuits in the obedient provinces than there had been for years.  We have seen that Champagny’s remedy for the ills the country was enduring was “more Jesuits.”  And this, too, was Albert’s recipe.  Always “more Jesuits.”  And now the time had come when the Jesuits thought that they might step openly with their works into the daylight again.  Of late years they had shrouded themselves in comparative mystery, but from their seminaries and colleges had gone forth a plentiful company of assassins against Elizabeth and Henry, Nassau, Barneveld, and others who, whether avowedly or involuntarily, were prominent in the party of human progress.  Some important murders had already been accomplished, and the prospect was fair that still others might follow, if the Jesuits persevered.  Meantime those ecclesiastics thought that a wholesome example might be by the spectacle of a 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.