Page:Readings in European History Vol 2.djvu/214

 i ?6 Readings in European History Reward offered for the arrest or assassination of William the Silent. where he found it possible, persecuting all the good pastors, preachers, monks, and upright persons, and hunting many of them from the region. Then he had a number massa- cred ; or rather, he tried to avoid the responsibility for a massacre carried on by some of his adherents, until the estates, greatly incensed by this cruelty, demanded an account of the affair, when he pretended that it was displeasing to him. Then he introduced liberty of conscience, or to speak more correctly, confusion of all religion, which soon brought it about that the Catholics were openly persecuted and driven out, and the churches and monasteries, whether of men or women, broken up, ruined, and leveled with the ground. Although a married man, and although his second wife was still alive, he took to himself a nun, an abbess who had been solemnly sanctified by episcopal authority, and her he still keeps ; a most disreputable and infamous thing, not only according to the Christian religion, but the Roman law as well. Moreover he obtained such a hold upon our poor sub- jects of Holland and Zealand and brought affairs to such a pass that nearly all the towns, one after the other, have been besieged and taken, either by assault or by capitula- tion, so that more than once he was on the point of being brought to bay by our arms, when the commander who suc- ceeded the duke of Alva (whom we had recalled to please our subjects) died. Then the said Nassau induced the estates to demand the withdrawal of all the foreign troops in hope of peace, but Nassau continued his machinations and displayed all his craft in plunging our people into war with our brother, whom we had appointed lieutenant general. . . . Therefore, for all these just reasons, for his evil doings as chief disturber of the public peace and as a public pest, we outlaw him forever and forbid all our subjects to asso- ciate with him or communicate with him in public or in secret. We declare him an enemy of the human race, and in order the sooner to remove our people from his tyranny and oppression, we promise, on the word of a king and as