Duke Adolph of Gueldres, who fell in battle at the head of the
rebellious burghers of Ghent, and had been buried herein Tournay. This
Adolph had waged war against his father, and had dragged the vanquished
old man some miles barefoot to prison--an indignity which Charles the
Bold afterwards retaliated on him. And now, again, after more than half
a century fate avenged a crime against nature by another against
religion; fanaticism was to desecrate that which was holy in order to
expose once more to execration the bones of a parricide. Other
Iconoclasts from Valenciennes united themselves with those of Tournay to
despoil all the cloisters of the surrounding district, during which a
valuable library, the accumulation of centuries, was destroyed by fire.
The evil soon penetrated into Brabant, also Malines, Herzogenbusch,
Breda, and Bergen-op-Zoom experienced the same fate. The provinces,
Namur and Luxemburg, with a part of Artois and of Hainault, had alone
the good fortune to escape the contagion of those outrages. In the
short period of four or five days four hundred cloisters were plundered
in Brabant and Flanders alone.

The northern Netherlands were soon seized with the same mania which had
raged so violently through the southern. The Dutch towns, Amsterdam,
Leyden, and Gravenhaag, had the alternative of either voluntarily
stripping their churches of their ornaments, or of seeing them violently
torn from there; the determination of their magistrates saved Delft,
Haarlem, Gouda, and Rotterdam from the devastation. The same acts of
violence were practised also in the islands of Zealand; the town of
Utrecht and many places in Overyssel and Groningen suffered the same
storms. Friesland was protected by the Count of Aremberg, and Gueldres
by the Count of Megen from a like fate. An exaggerated report of these
disturbances which came in from the provinces spread the alarm to
Brussels, where the regent had just made preparations for an