persons to escape before the police came to arrest them; even to have given them facilities for escape after sentence had been delivered. Passive resistance on the part of the inferior authorities frequently interposed itself between the Emperor and the execution of his bloodthirsty proclamations. Yet the number of Protestant martyrs was large, and women as well as men suffered torture and death rather than deny their faith. The edicts against conventicles deterred neither preachers nor audience. The earliest missioners were priests and monks who had become convinced of the errors of Romanism. Later, preachers were trained in the south German cities and in Geneva, that nursery of daring agents of the Reformed propaganda. But if trained teachers were lacking, members of the congregation took their place at the peril of their lives. Brandt relates how numbers of people were accustomed to meet for service in a shipwright's yard at Antwerp to hear a monk who had been "proclaimed": "The teacher, by some chance or other, could not appear, and one of the company named Nicolas, a person well versed in Scripture, thought it a shame that such a congregation, hungering after the food of the Word, should depart without a little spiritual nourishment; wherefore, climbing the mast of a ship, he taught the people according to his capacity; and on that account, and for the sake of the reward that was set upon the preacher, he was seized by two butchers and delivered to the magistrates, who caused him to be put into a sack and thrown into the river, where he was drowned."[240] § 3. _The Anabaptists._ The severest persecutions, however, before the rule of Philip II., were reserved for those people who are called the Anabaptists.[241] We find several edicts directed against them solely. In February 1532 it was forbidden to harbour Anabaptists, and a price of 12 guilders was offered to informants. Later in the same year an edict was published which declared "that all who had been rebaptized, were sorry for their fault, and, in token of their repentance, had gone to confession, would be admitted to mercy for that time only, provided they brought a certificate from their confessor within twenty-four days of the date of the edict; those who continued obdurate were to be treated with the utmost rigour of the laws" (Feb. 1533). Anabaptists who had abjured were ordered to remain near their dwelling-places for the space of a year, "unless those who were engaged in the herring fishery" (June 1534). In 1535 the severest edict against the sect was published. All who had "seduced or perverted any to this sect, or had rebaptized them," were to suffer death by fire; all who had suffered themselves to be rebaptized, or who had harboured Anabaptists, and who recanted, were to be favoured by being put to death by the sword; women were "only to be buried alive."[242]