however, they were confronted by the Seigneur de la Tour, who, at the
head of a small company of peasants, attacked the marauders and gained
a complete victory. Five or six hundred of them were slain, others were
drowned in the river and adjacent swamps, the rest were dispersed.
It was thus proved that a little more spirit upon the part of the orderly
portion of the inhabitants, might have brought about a different result
than the universal image-breaking.

In Valenciennes, "the tragedy," as an eye-witness calls it, was performed
upon Saint Bartholomew's day. It was, however, only a tragedy of
statues. Hardly as many senseless stones were victims as there were to
be living Huguenots sacrificed in a single city upon a Bartholomew which
was fast approaching. In the Valenciennes massacre, not a human being
was injured.

Such in general outline and in certain individual details, was the
celebrated iconomachy of the Netherlands. The movement was a sudden
explosion of popular revenge against the symbols of that Church from
which the Reformers had been enduring such terrible persecution. It was
also an expression of the general sympathy for the doctrines which had
taken possession of the national heart. It was the depravation of that
instinct which had in the beginning of the summer drawn Calvinists and
Lutherans forth in armed bodies, twenty thousand strong, to worship God
in the open fields. The difference between the two phenomena was, that
the field-preaching was a crime committed by the whole mass of the
Reformers; men, women, and children confronting the penalties of death,
by a general determination, while the imagebreaking was the act of a
small portion of the populace. A hundred persons belonging to the lowest
order of society sufficed for the desecration of the Antwerp churches.
It was, said Orange, "a mere handful of rabble" who did the deed. Sir