There came other news to Dillenburg, to agonize Count John and the waiting women there—news of more obscure victims. A lady and her servant who two years before had struck an image of the Virgin with a slipper were drowned by the hangman in a hogshead on the scaffold; a Lutheran who had died in prison was dragged to the place of execution and beheaded with his companions; people were arrested by the tens, the fifties, the hundreds, and put to death without trial.
Flight was no longer possible, as the ports were closed against heretics; trade was at a standstill, commerce at an end; all industries were destroyed, agriculture ruined; the rich properties had been all confiscated or plundered by Noircarmes, Meghem, and their followers.
The great nobles had perished or were in exile, and the nation lay stunned and bleeding before her slaughterers.
In every town, in every village, new scaffolds were built, new fires lit; in every field and orchard the festering bodies hung; on every high road wandered destitute, half-crazed survivors, homeless and bereaved.
The death-bell was now the only music in a land once given to merriment, and the only dancing that of the dead swinging and shaking in their chains on gibbets, stakes, and trees; the great squares of the great cities, once worn smooth by the passing of thousands of busy feet, were now covered with rank grass and weeds, which were only disturbed by the tramp of the soldiery or the feeble steps of some half-starving wretches creeping into hiding.
Only the churches remained wealthy amid the poverty, only the priests and the Spaniards remained gorged and fat among the miserable and ruined; for while Netherland blood watered Netherland earth, Netherland gold streamed into Spanish pockets.
So had the Duke of Alva redeemed his boast that he would "tame these men of butter." So with the sword, the fire, the rope, the axe, he strove to uproot and destroy the seed Martin Luther had planted too deep for any man's uprooting and destroying.
The messenger who brought the news of the Artois disaster to Count John, and also dispatches from William, who was holding his position as well as was possible, was Francis Junius, the young minister who had preached in the now destroyed Culemburg palace on Parma's wedding day.
This man, who was absolutely without fear (on one occasion he had preached in a room lit by the flames of fellow-heretics perishing at the stake without), had been in Brussels, and had actually mingled with the crowd that had been a horrified witness of the death of Hoorne and Egmont.
Then, after wandering through the desolate country and administering such comfort as he was able to the persecuted people, he had joined William at Cleves and, by him, been sent to Dillenburg.