Vargas went to his task as cheerfully as if it had been murder. The act
of outlawry and beggary was fulminated against the city and province, and
a handsome amount of misery for others, and of plunder for himself, was
the result of his promptness. Many thousand citizens were ruined, many
millions of property confiscated.

Thus was Utrecht deprived of all its ancient liberties, as a punishment
for having dared to maintain them. The clergy, too, of the province,
having invoked the bull "in Coena Domini," by which clerical property was
declared exempt from taxation, had excited the wrath of the Duke. To
wield so slight a bulrush against the man who had just been girded with
the consecrated and jewelled sword of the Pope, was indeed but a feeble
attempt at defence. Alva treated the Coena Domini with contempt, but he
imprisoned the printer who had dared to-republish it at this juncture.
Finding, moreover, that it had been put in press by the orders of no less
a person than Secretary La Torre, he threw that officer also into prison,
besides suspending him from his functions for a year.

The estates of the province and the magistracy of the city appealed to
his Majesty from the decision of the Duke. The case did not directly
concern the interests of religion, for although the heretical troubles of
1566 furnished the nominal motives of the condemnation, the resistance to
the tenth and twentieth penny was the real crime for which they were
suffering. The King, therefore, although far from clement, was not
extremely rigorous. He refused the object of the appeal, but he did not
put the envoys to death by whom it was brought to Madrid. This would
have certainly been the case in matters strictly religious, or even had
the commissioners arrived two years before, but even Philip believed,
perhaps, that for the moment almost enough innocent blood had been shed.
At any rate he suffered the legates from Utrecht to return, not with