But it was not suited to the free and independent character of the people of the Netherlands. Freedom of thought they claimed as their birthright; and the attempt to crush it by introducing the pernicious usages of Spain was everywhere received with execration. Such an institution was an accident, and could not become an integral part of the constitution. It was a vicious graft on a healthy stock. It could bear no fruit, and sooner or later it must perish.
Yet the Inquisition, such as it was, did its work while it lasted in the Netherlands. This is true, at least, if we are to receive the popular statement, that fifty thousand persons, in the reign of Charles the Fifth, suffered for their religious opinions by the hand of the executioner![392] This monstrous statement has been repeated by one historian after another, with apparently as little distrust as examination. It affords one among many examples of the facility with which men adopt the most startling results, especially when conveyed in the form of numerical estimates. There is something that strikes the imagination, in a numerical estimate, which settles a question so summarily, in a form so precise and so portable. Yet whoever has had occasion to make any researches into the past,--that land of uncertainty,--will agree that there is nothing less entitled to confidence.
In the present instance, such a statement might seem to carry its own refutation on the face of it. Llorente, the celebrated secretary of the Holy Office, whose estimates will never be accused of falling short of the amount, computes the whole number of victims sacrificed during the first eighteen years of the Inquisition in Castile, when it was in most active operation, at about ten thousand.[393] The storm of persecution there, it will be remembered, fell chiefly on the Jews,--that ill-omened race, from whom every pious Catholic would have rejoiced to see his land purified by fire and fagot. It will hardly be believed that five times the number of these victims perished in a country like the Netherlands, in a term of time not quite double that occupied for their extermination in Spain;--the Netherlands, where every instance of such persecution, instead of being hailed as a triumph of the Cross, was regarded as a fresh outrage on the liberties of the nation. It is not too much to say, that such a number of martyrs as that pretended would have produced an explosion that would have unsettled the authority of Charles himself, and left for his successor less territory in the Netherlands at the beginning of his reign, than he was destined to have at the end of it.
