History of Protestantism in the Netherlands - James Aitken Wylie

people. Their patience has its limits, however, and
these limits once passed, their determination and
ire are in proportion to their former forbearance. As
yet their submissiveness had not been exhausted;
they permitted their houses to be entered at
midnight, and themselves dragged from their beds
and conducted to the Inquisition, with the
meekness of a lamb that is being led to the
slaughter; or if they opened their mouths it was
only to sing one of Marot's psalms. The familiars
of this abhorred tribunal, therefore, encountered
hardly any resistance in executing their dreadful
office. The nation as yet stood by in silence, and
saw the agents of Granvelle and Philip hewing
their victims in pieces with axes, or strangling them
with halters, or drowning them in ponds, or digging
graves for their living entombment, and gave no
sign. But all the while these cruelties were writing
on the nation's heart, in ineffaceable characters, an
abhorrence of the Spanish tyrant, and a stern
unconquerable resolve, when the hour came, to
throw off his yoke. In the crowd of those monsters
who were now revelling in the blood and lives of
the Netherlanders, there stands out one
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