Then, turning to the people, the rector, canon, and inquisitor exclaimed—‘Beware, therefore, you who are here present, and let the danger which threatens you, and the fear of losing your souls, restrain you from despising the power of the Roman pontiffs. This wretch is condemned to be degraded from the priesthood and delivered over to the secular arm to undergo the punishment which he deserves.’
The rector was followed by Father Stryroy, prior of the Dominicans, a vehement man, whose voice was a thunder-peal of audacity and impudence. But some laughed at his storm of words, and others abhorred a course so disgraceful. Many even talked of driving the orator and the judges from their seats and of rescuing the priest Paul.[[865]] But no one was willing to be captain and bell the cat. One glance from Paul would have sufficed; but the poor priest, weakened in body as well as in mind, remained motionless and silent, and thus disheartened his partisans. The priests also had noticed the dejection of the old man. They determined to take advantage of it; and, retiring into an adjoining hall, they employed for the purpose of inducing him to recant vehement entreaties, supplications, flattery, promises, and allurements. ‘The old man resisted all.’ The inquisitors then, provoked, calling to remembrance the tyrant of Agrigentum, who had his enemies burnt at a slow fire and his friends in a copper bull, said to him—‘We will make you suffer more grievous torture than any Phalaris ever inflicted.’ Paul trembled at these words. He was led back to prison, and monks and theologians came every day and talked to him about the cruel sufferings which were in preparation for him.
His End.
Meanwhile the attorney-general was preparing for the trial of the laymen. This lasted from March 21 to the end of April; but no sufficient evidence was obtained. The judges now had the prisoners taken into the great prison, where the rack was, and there they began that frightful and marvellous process of which it has been said that it is perfectly certain to ruin an innocent man who has a feeble constitution, and to save a guilty man if he were born robust. This lasted fifteen days. The torturers knew no pity for age, or sex, or infirmity. The poor women were victimized (géhennées) and tormented as well as the men. The piteous cries of these cruelly-tortured wretched ones were heard in the streets of Louvain. Their voices, raised by grief to a higher pitch, were borne to a distance. Inarticulate sounds, piercing words, repeated exclamations, lamentations, weeping, mournful noises, broken sobs, and dying voices spread terror everywhere. Throughout the town there was nothing but sighs, tears, and lamentations from people of every class, whose hearts were filled with grief.[[866]] Almost all were steadfast, but one sad victim consoled the tyrants, as the chronicler calls them. They had so terrified poor Paul that the wretched old man was seen ascending the platform with trembling steps, and there he read a statement which the theologians had prepared. He declared, with a voice scarcely audible, ‘that he detested that religion which at the instigation of Satan he had hitherto followed.’ Deep sighs and broken sobs every moment interrupted him. Good men who heard him were touched with compassion at the sight of this unfortunate victim. At the command of his masters, the poor man took his books and cast them into the fire; while the doctors and the judges, with an air of pride and triumph, insulted the Gospel of God. The wretched man was placed in close confinement in the castle of Vilvorde, was fed on bread and water only, and was not allowed to read or to write, or to see any body. He was ‘like a dead body in a grave, until at length he died there of exhaustion.’
It was now the turn of the other prisoners. Jan Vicart and Jan Schats were taken to the town-hall, and there the attorney-general turned towards them a cruel countenance and said—‘My friends, I am grieved at your fate; but the devil has deceived you, and consequently you are condemned to be burnt and reduced to ashes as men relapsed into Lutheranism. If I were to act otherwise, I should not be Cæsar’s friend.[[867]]
The whole city of Louvain was in a state of great excitement. Although executions usually took place outside the town, the inquisitors had determined that in this case the victims should suffer in the open space before St. Peter’s Church, for the sake of terrifying the people. The young Spaniard who relates these facts, and who was at this time on a visit to Louvain, went to the spot at five o’clock in the morning. Many workmen were already very busily engaged in enclosing a part of the space, that no one might pass the barrier. They next set up in the middle two crosses about the height of a man, and piled round them ‘a great quantity of faggots and other wood.’ Afterwards, the attorney-general and his attendants entered a house opposite to the church, the windows of which looked out on the two crosses. All the town companies had been ordered up ‘for daybreak,’ that the people might not rescue the prisoners. The militiamen, who had escorted the magistrates, encompassed the place, and showed by the expression of their faces that they were there ‘by compulsion and with great reluctance.’ The two prisoners at length appeared. There was first Jan Schats, now about forty-three years old, whose principal crime was having had in his house a German Bible, and read it, as well as the Life of our Lord, the Sinner’s Consolation, the Little Garden of the Soul, Emmaus, and other works bound together ‘in a leather cover.’ In addition to this, he was accused of having visited those of his own creed who fell sick and of having assisted them with his alms. By the side of Schats was Jan Vicart, haberdasher, who was charged with the like offences.[[868]] These two men, coming from rigorous confinement, and having suffered cruel torture, were weak and almost half dead. Nevertheless, the bystanders heard them lamenting their sins before God, and asserting that they welcomed death, having confidence in the divine mercy.[[869]]
Martyrdom.
When their prayer was finished, the deathsman bound them to the two stakes, placed a rope with a slip-knot round their necks, and then piled faggots round them with straw and powder. At a signal from the attorney-general, he tightened the rope to strangle them. The magistrate then ‘displaying as much light-heartedness as if he had been named emperor of the Romans,’ says an eye-witness, handed to the deathsman a lighted torch, and in doing this he leaned forward so eagerly that he narrowly missed falling from the window. The eyes of the multitude were fastened on him, and they contemplated with astonishment, says the chronicler, ‘his hideous face afire with rage, his fierce eyes, his mouth which breathed out flames more terrible than those of the torch in his hand. Many there were who uttered horrible imprecations against this sanguinary monster.’[[870]] ‘Ere long the fire was so large that one might have said the flames touched the clouds and would set them on fire. Some jets of flame rose to such a height and made so much noise that it might have been imagined loud voices were crying from heaven for vengeance.’
The next day it was the turn of the women. Two of them, both quite elderly, who above all had steadfastly maintained the truth of the Gospel, were condemned to the most cruel punishment, namely, to be buried alive.[[871]]
One of these women was Antoinette van Roesmals, the friend of John Alasco, of Hardenberg, and of Don Francisco de Enzinas, whose ancestors had governed the state. She was now about sixty years of age, and was full of faith and of good works. It was said in the town that her kinsfolk, her friends, and even the bailiff, had offered a large sum of money that she might be set at liberty, but in vain. She drew near to the spot where she was to be laid alive in the ground. Gudule, her beautiful daughter, in the flower of her age, who cherished the deepest affection for her mother, would not be separated from her. ‘I will,’ she said, ‘be a spectator of the sacrifice of my mother.’[[872]] It was however agreed that she should not stand by the brink of the grave in which she who had brought her into the world was to be buried alive, and she consented to remain at a distance, if only she could see her mother. Thus concealed in a place apart,[[873]] she saw the pious Antoinette led to execution; she saw the grave prepared, and that her mother still remained calm. Gudule was overwhelmed, silent and motionless. She shed no tears; her whole life was in her gaze.[[874]] With fixed eye she watched the progress of the dismal execution. But when she saw her mother going down alive to the place of the dead, when the servants of the executioners threw upon her some shovelfuls of earth and she began to be covered with it, Gudule uttered a cry. From this moment she could not refrain; her outcries were terrible. ‘O God!’ says an eye-witness, ‘with what lamentations, with what wailings she filled the air!‘[[875]] Her tongue was at length loosed, she was no longer motionless. Reduced to despair, she began to run about the streets of the town as if she had lost her reason. Tears ran down from her eyes as from a fountain. She plucked out her hair, she tore her face.[[876]] ‘The poor girl is still living,’ says the witness who has left us the narrative of these events, ‘and I have good hope that she will never be forsaken of the everlasting God, the Father of our deliverer, Jesus Christ, who is also the Father of the orphan.’