At its earlier sittings this terrible tribunal defined the crime of treason, and stated that its punishment was death. The definition extended to eighteen articles, and declared it to be treason--to have presented or signed any petition against the new bishoprics, the Inquisition, or the _Placards_; to have tolerated public preaching under any circumstances; to have omitted to resist iconoclasm, or field-preaching, or the presentation of the _Request_; to have asserted that the King had not the right to suspend the charters of the provinces; or to maintain that the Council of Tumults had not a right to override all the laws and privileges of the Netherlands. All these things were treason, and all of them were capital offences. Proof was not required; all that was needed was reasonable suspicion, or rather what the Duke of Alva believed to be so. The Council soon got to work. It sent commissioners through every part of the land--towns, villages, districts--to search for any who might be suspected of having committed any act which could be included within their definition of treason. Informers were invited, were bribed, to come forward; and soon shoals of denunciations and evidence flowed in to them. The accused were brought before the Council, tried (if the procedure could be called a trial), and condemned in batches. The records speak of ninety-five, eighty-four, forty-six, thirty-five at a time. Alva wrote to Philip that no fewer than fifteen hundred had been taken in their beds early on Ash-Wednesday morning, and later he announces another batch of eight hundred. In each case he adds, "I have ordered all of them to be executed." In view of these records, the language of a contemporary chronicler does not appeared exaggerated:
"The gallows, the wheel, stakes, trees along the highways, were laden with carcasses or limbs of those who had been hanged, beheaded, or roasted; so that the air which God made for the respiration of the living, was now become the common grave or habitation of the dead. Every day produced fresh objects of pity and of mourning, and the noise of the bloody passing-bell was continually heard, which by the martyrdom of this man's cousin, and the other's brother or friend, rang dismal peals in the hearts of the survivors."[261]